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A jam submission

Duelling with a ShovelView game page

Fight three bosses with only a shovel. Comment your high scores.
Submitted by Grey Magic — 22 seconds before the deadline
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Duelling with a Shovel's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay#1043.2503.250
Authenticity (use of resolution)#1194.1674.167
Audio#1423.0003.000
Overall#1453.2293.229
Graphics#2082.5002.500

Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Lol fun game! Great job. 

Submitted(+1)

Ha, this one gets the adrenaline flowing! Very tough but enjoyable arcade gameplay. Love the music loop too :)

Submitted (1 edit)

If you wanted to create an incredibly hard game, then you succeeded for 200 %! The game concept is good, however, I think that you exaggerated it with the difficulty. I understand that you wanted to create a hard game, but this one was too hard. I also don't understand why the game's name is Duelling with a Shovel - for me, it didn't seem like I was holding a shovel! That's probably caused by that the graphics aren't very good. I'd recommend you to make better graphics next time. And the probably biggest problem is about the bugs - there are so many of them! When enemies can't damage me, then it's bearable, but when the enemy disappears... that's catastrophic! However, I liked the music - it goes well with the game!

I'd like to know one thing - how is the final score counted? My score was 118.

Developer

Final score is the time in seconds to beat the game.

Curious about what you mean when the enemy disappears, the enemy is not visible at all? Which boss did you experience this in?

Submitted

I experienced an enemy disappearance by the third boss. Yes, he absolutely disappeared, he wasn't visible at all.

Submitted(+1)

I was kinda confused when I started it, but it was neat once I figured it out.

Would benefit from a "game over screen" because I honestly thought it just crashed the first time I died. It took me too many tries to beat the second boss but it was fun.

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

I’m really impressed with this game. It looks really simple at first but it felt surprisingly deep after a few runs. The first boss has really simple but pretty threatening behavior. Predicting its jump or dive is tough, so I ended up always doing two down-shovels whenever I attacked it to ensure it would remain 1 level below me even if it jumped. This felt really satisfying to figure out because it was the main way I found to consistently no-damage the first boss.

The second boss felt a little simple, but the randomness of the spawn patterns was good to keep me on my toes.

The third boss was quite tough (I think I could beat it if I didn’t have to start from the beginning between runs). I found the bombs dealing damage to the player to be pretty punishing, but it was a really cool idea.

Overall, my only real feedback is:

  • It felt like I’d damage the boss and damage myself quite often for the first boss. Possibly increasing the player’s iframes when they down-shovel or disabling the boss’s hitbox for a tiny bit after damaging them might make this feel less punishing.
  • Starting from the beginning every time makes it a bit more frustrating to die to the third boss (at least in a gamejam setting).

Nice job! I really enjoyed this game.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, I had felt the first boss would be hard to predict so I put in two animations when the animation cycle had finished would have been when the action would occur, eg. Legs fully outstretched would jump up and the drill animation would go downwards. 


The third boss is tough, there is really only a fraction of time where the bomb's explosion can be placed in the path of the tank below and there wasn't enough direction of how to damage it beside from a little blurb I had in my description. I usually just waited until the bomb's spawned on the lower levels and stood in between two horizontal floor panels and dug so I wouldn't have to be in contact with the bomb itself. 


I put the third boss together in 40 minutes leading up to submission time and put the whole game together in a week, so a lot of rough edges and tinkering needed but thanks for still persevering. I kind of treat your playthrough as the litmus test, if you weren't able to beat the game, it must have been punishing. The game is beatable but certain strategies needed to be communicated to the player just starting out.


Submitted(+1)

Very simple but VERY fun game!

Submitted

Good job friend.

Submitted(+1)

The game was fun, it has some border cases where you feel you attacked first but you still receive damage that don't feel so fair. Also, first time I thought the game was stuck but then I understand that I lost and had to restart (maybe auto restart after some time or show a message here would've been better, I know, it is a jam). I liked the idea and mechanics of the game.

Developer (2 edits) (+1)

I experienced this too especially in the second boss, I didn't have much time to bug fix as I had hoped and I made the third boss in about 40 minutes, a bit rushed with jam this time round but thanks for playing.