(Be aware, waterfall of words incoming)
omg I love love2d so much literally 8mb for the whole game plz unity is giving me nightmares.
First off, the game title is maybe a bit long. Shortening it down to just PUTRID SHOT would work (I did a lil google and noone else seems to use it). If there is a reason to have it so long then sure run with it :D
Actually starting the game now. Oof settings menu doesn't scale when you change to fullscreen. Music is such a bop! Maybe work a bit more with stereo, having just some elements hop in and be super stereo is a bit odd. (I think I've said it before) DDRKirby is really good at 9bit, so giving them a peek could be nice.
I love how the game evolved from pico8 to love, nicer aspect ration, better music and MORE PARTICLES!
SO FRICKIN POLISHED. The transitions and everything just look so incredibly smooth.
I think I talked about this on planet d4rk. Wait lemme just pull a new term straight out my ass. SO, let's call it information prioritization. Information which has more value to the player should be more prevalent to the player. I had a lot of problems with no really being able to see the enemy and what was going on, and Information Prioritization™ could solve that. Basically, make things more important stand out more, and things that are less important stand out less. This happens in art and animation as well (mostly 2d), more important elements get more details. This is so you don't overwhelm the viewer with information, but also so the information that matters gets seen. In the game, sooo many things are happening at once, and after stacking a few orbiting ice things the screen begins to get really cluttered. And with fireballs and such the effect is even stronger and therefore, the enemies get even harder to see. When you are playing and trying to keep track of 10 enemies at once, then having those vfx everywhere (even though they look really nice) makes it impossible to keep track of everything. This goes into something I think the celeste devs talked about (maybe on gmtk), the player should always feel like they are the ones responsible for messing up and taking damage, otherwise they feel powerless. So for example, when getting hit by a bullet that was covered in a huge blast just before it hit you feels a bit meh. This goes into the color scheme as well, stronger color for the things that need to be seen. This is how I think about it anyways.
Ok there is a thing with infinite stacking I will absolutely not exploit this at all (i exploited it and still died. Twice).
First death now, aaand I'm back at the start. I love rougelikes.
It's really nice that the first thing you do is to choose your active ability, it spices things up from the getgo. If you want to make it just a bit more interesting, being able to choose an upgrade as well would give you loads more combinations in the start, giving each run even more individual flare.
So I'm having a bit of problems with the flying enemies. It's hard to jump up to deal with them because they will slap you, since you can't really dodge well when you are shooting. Standing on the ground and then firing at them is also not that much fun, it's pretty slow and you only hit one or two shots before you have to reposition. Letting the run after and "track" the enemy could be more fun. Maybe something to experiment with?
There are a lot lot of buttons to press. I have about six braincells, and each keeps track of one or two buttons max. So using the active ability while rolling and hopping kind of overloads, and I usually just end up ignoring the jump or the active ability to keep myself alive. Maybe holding down the button to use the active ability could be a thing, or having just the jump / roll or combining them. Combining two things could be really cool, like jumping and firing to use active ability, or rolling and firing. It would add more complexity without having me fumble over my keyboard, and could lead to more interesting and complex ideas, since you'd be able to combine inputs. Having the gun being able to fire upwards is a good start, but I wonder what happens if you dig deeper.
I really like the box before you get an upgrade, it builds some anticipation.
After listening to the song a bunch of times I'm really impressed by how good the composition is! It switches itself up and keeps moving constantly, did you use anything as inspiration or did you just come up with it all from just bleeping things out in your daw?
Ono I think I'm at a boss. It is. And I'm dead. Maybe having some checkpoint would be nice, look into how you can make it work in a fun way that doesn't ruin the stakes though. Shovelknight can be something to look into.
Question, how authored are the upgrades? Do you just pick a bunch at random or are they decided by some algorithm?
I've started getting close to the shooting birds and it's a bit frustrating that they shoot straight at you no matter how fast you go. Making them a bit slow to target you would be interesting, since then it would be really fun to hop around them, dodging their aim.
Got to second phase of the bosssss. But I'm dead and I need a break so I'll take a break. Will probably attempt more later today / tomorrow.
be aware of overscore / adding too much stuff
A word of warning I guess, be aware of adding too much stuff. Especially be wary of adding new systems, use the ones you have but make them as interesting as possible. In music it's usually way better to make something which has fewer elements but they are all more interesting, than to add lots and lots but have them all be kinda meh. I think the same applies to game mechanics, try to add few, but make them really good. Just as an example, in 3hos I initially was going to add a selection menu for picking up new clothes. Which I tried. But it took a lot of time to get it sorta working (this was super early in dev) and it did feel a bit like you got ripped out of the game to select the clothing. So when I got further down the line with the combat system (the old picking system was gone) I tried to add the clothes in by having them be part of the game world. And (in my very humble and unbiased opinion) it works great! It's a lot more intuitive and it saved me a bunch of time. It also kept the codebase clean, which is a huge huge plus.
That's "all" I got for now at least. I really like this so far, the boss is really interesting, them music a bop and the gameplay is pretty fwooshy and fast. Great work!