itch.io

Thanks for the video! Glad you enjoyed!

you die

PURGATORY and Glass Cleaner were actually sort of branch projects from this one, we were already making Barback Blues and just used each one as an excuse to accelerate development by making new minigames in the form of jam games (obviously glass cleaner ended up just like that in the main game, so it's basically like a piece of Barback Blues taken off of it and put out standalone).

the money thing is pretty intentional, i think of the part where it shows the final number before draining it as some sort of hi-score screen, but you can also see it's connected to exactly how Gil would feel. though tbh money was indeed more of a last minute addition, and it was going to be even more of an afterthought, but i made sure you can "compete" for hi-scores so to speak, so there's no random element and if you're faster than other people you can get a higher one by the end of the game (even if everyone does end up at $0 story-wise). my hi-score is $318.38 by the way.

dialogue choices was definitely something i, me personally wanted to do but it ended up not becoming anything since we just wanted to release the game. i actually wanted to integrate purgatory as a choice at the beginning (unlockable post-game choice) where you can choose to kill yourself and end up in the purgatory game, then after it ends the story continues as normal/restarts without the choice.

all in all the tediousness and emptiness of a shitty job is one of the main things about this game, so arguably it worked, but maybe it could've been made more engaging in some way. i don't think we're gonna update this game ever again though (besides from bug fixes or something).

"a weird mash of love and rusty nails that try to give you tetanus every step of the way" is the funniest and most accurate thing i've read about this game, moreso about its development process. reviews like this make it worth it, thank you. might not update this but we're gonna make bigger and better shit that's for sure.

You just gotta press Space a lot! You're done once the juice container thing gets reset but you can keep juicing for more money.

That's strange, I'll definitely look into it; thank you for the report.

Make sure you clean all the stains! Sometimes they aren't quite visible, but you'll know it's still dirty if the SPACE prompt hasn't popped up. Otherwise, that would be a strange bug.

Thank you for the vid! Glad you restarted and got to the boss despite the bug.
I definitely have to tone down the boss HP.

was discussing with a friend whether you'd have been updating all the entities in reverse, then me wondering how you'd deal with entities being created and destroyed in that process, but to think it was just plain save states... suppose it makes sense with the relatively low rewind time.

interesting to know all the stuff you didn't manage to implement or had to rush, final product looks very polished so you wouldn't expect the original idea to be so different. looking forward to at the very least the boss update, it sounds like what would've been the most important part of the game.

cute girl btw

and funny

never

Patterns were fun at the beginning, I enjoyed the puzzle-like nature of the levels, though they started getting pretty hard. Then I started using dash and I realized its absolutely broken and you can just mash space and pretty much not get hit at all due to iframes (I think the black bullets are an exception to this). Besides from that, I think the dash doesn't serve any integral purpose for the gameplay other than being a safety measure/difficulty reducer, so if you were to balance the levels I'd say you'd rather just remove the dash altogether. You can see how that other game in the jam, Tower of Bullets, uses dash as pretty much the central thing in the whole game, but here it's just there because the game is hard and it's helpful to overcome the difficulty (or in its current state, completely trivialize it if you spam it).
Some music and SFX would've been good too, even royalty-free music is fine, as long as it matches the game. SFX for turrets shooting (not overdone or else it will be a cacophony) and for the player's dash would work well too.
Also I think the door on the last level doesn't do anything, but you probably already knew that.

Thank you for the reply. The distance checking might be important, I've only used simple collisions (Area2D on bullets and CollisionArea2Ds on the KinematicBodies that are the player and the enemies). Though I do wonder whether distance checking is actually more optimal, considering Godot's own collisions are probably optimized in a similar way.
I can't recall right now how it worked on itch. Playing the project from the editor into HTML5 works mostly fine, though it definitely has some FPS drops that I don't see in the Windows export version. I do remember that when uploaded on itch, it worked so much more terribly worse than how I had tested it locally that it just wasn't worth leaving it up since it would leave a bad impression of the game.
I don't think I hit even 1000 bullets at any point in the game right now, though the bullet deletion is definitely a very quickly put together hack with VisibilityNotifiers on the bullets + a bunch of rectangular collision boxes outside the play area just in case, so maybe there are times when bullets aren't getting deleted as quickly as they should; I should change that to be done manually as soon as they exit the visible area of the game.
I'll check those links and keep that info in mind for next time, thank you.

ばせｄ

It was fairly fun. I feel it'd be more interesting if as time progressed, instead of just spawning more enemies you spawned enemies with more complex bullet patterns... Though then you'd have to balance the reduced amount of enemies with how many of them you can "collect."

Some nice patterns, though the unrestrained screenspace and the wild movements sometimes makes bullets overlap in a way that makes them nearly impossible to macrododge (which you're able to for quite a long time), not sure if that's my lack of planning, or it's intentional in order to make you micrododge. Would be more fun if there was more stuff to do other than just dodging, getting hit doesn't feel like a big enough penalty either.
Props for getting this to work (mostly) fine on browser, my game worked terribly on it which is why I took down that version as soon as I tested it. Wondering if you used any special optimization techniques with that taken in mind or you just coded it right from the beginning and it just worked.

I appreciate that, glad you like the details! Saw the rotating player shot thingy in Stellavanity a while ago, and while doing the jam I saw it again on eXceed 3rd, and I just had to replicate it because it's so cool.

Wow, thank you so much! This means a lot coming from the dev of what I consider one of the best and most polished games of the jam!

rated!

nice

this is oozing with otaku energy! moefallchan reminds me of tsukumizu's art.
really curious for the complete version!

PS: as a fellow godot dev, thanks for the source!

amazing game

Very cool graphics/presentation. The integration with the music is really neat, though it doesn't seem like you have any agency over it, and if there is I can't feel it (i.e. it feels like it should have rhythm game-like elements but it's all done for you instead).
The music cuts out at the boss, don't know if that's a bug or you didn't get to implement it.

Very cool that you made basically an MMO for a gamejam, interesting concept and it's funny when you see everyone moving together. Right now there's not much to do or game-ness to it but it has potential for sure.

The pixel art is really good, and the clouds are also pretty nice, but the game itself is kind of lackluster. Everything feels sluggish (the player movement, the projectile speeds, the enemies' movement), there's never too much stuff going on, you just sit there holding space and move every once in a while, but are otherwise safe most of the time. The player projectiles clash with the pixel art, since they're like realistic/lighted up, they could all be done through pixel art as well.
As others have said, the SFX are pretty jarring, in particular the laser SFX. That's not one sound effect, you're overlaying the same effect multiple times until the volume reaches earrape levels, it should be only one looping sound.
The music is also rather odd. The menu has the same melody as the stage, but while the menu has a nice pleasant sound, the stage music is rough chiptune music. I don't see why you couldn't use the same track or something in a similar style for the game itself. And regardless of your resources, you CAN make pleasant sounding chiptune music (for free (or just, you know, acquire the necessary software for free)), it just requires learning how to do so (generally through stuff like Famitracker). The other option you have is using royalty free music of which there's a lot, just requires some searching.

They mean sticking to a set of colors that are known to mesh well together and create a cohesive aesthetic. 
https://lospec.com/palette-list
These are generally for pixel art, but you get the idea.

Very masochistic and frustrating but I managed to beat it. Pretty charming and varied art, like... the one sprite where you're cut in half and your leg is off in very graphic detail, very nice. It was fun.

Not sure if there's anything more to the game than those couple of enemies and that one boss, it could use a lot more varied gameplay.  The movement is rather awkward for a bullet hell, it's floaty while it should feel stiffer, though it's also pretty hard to see when something's hitting you, it's all kind of confusing (and the screen soon gets filled with bullets all of the same pattern that don't really seem dodgeable unless you just circle around the screen). The sound effects are pretty distracting and don't really match the gameplay, particularly the enemy shot sounds being... piano notes? or something like that. Also, I see what you wanted to do with the point item stuff getting pulled towards the player, but they should get pulled 100% all the way to the player once you get within range or hover over them, because as of now they stay there halfway if you pull out too much, and it's pretty unsatisfying (also they could use a graphic upgrade instead of just being spheres, but understandable if you couldn't do so due to time limits. Just adding a color and emission/light would make them look better though, I think)

I'm curious to know whether the 3D was made for the jam, because if so that's pretty impressive, I like the player and boss models, and the background is cool too. A bigger game with that aesthetic and that character design could be nice.

Very impressive for a jam game, incredible visuals and audio. The stage construction and patterns are really solid as well.
So difficult I couldn't manage to beat the boss on either mode, but it was frustrating/addicting enough that I tried for well over 10 (20?) times. Feel like I'm missing something in the relationship between the mechanics even though I'm pretty sure I understood all of them, including the healing.
Like they've said before, the swords coming from below and the tiny bullets feel very unfair and unpredictable. I have no idea what to do with the boss pattern that uses these bullets. A slow button would've been nice.

I see, right now the hurtbox and hitbox are the same thing, but that sounds like a logical recommendation, I'll apply it in the update, thanks.

I'm not very experienced at all, the game for this jam being the first real shmup I have made, so as far as tips go all I can say is what I've done for this jam: play a lot of shmups, write down their patterns, analyze them, try to recreate them, then put together a combination of what you like in what you think is an appropriate difficulty curve. Introducing individual patterns one by one then mixing them together once they've been introduced probably helps making a good curve. I got help from more shmup-savvy friends, even if they aren't devs their knowledge goes deep.

Best of luck.

Both are known bugs yeah, the first can apparently be solved by pressing pause (Esc key) when it gets frozen, the second has no fix other than playing again unfortunately. Thanks for playing!

Thank you for your comment!
I initially thought it out with a more interesting score system, with a timer mechanic where you had 10 seconds before you died, and you could pick items up to refill it, but you would have a score multiplier inversely proportional to the amount of time left, rewarding risky play. Was halfways implemented but I didn't have time to add the actual pickups so I just dropped the mechanic altogether. The score itself seems to be bugged too, with enemies giving out score multiple times after dying, so right now the score is little more than an afterthought.

Thank you for your very detailed comment! Definitely the deadline affected many of these elements.
There are actually player shot hit effects that exist but went unimplemented (also didn't get to make/get a handful of SFX, including player shot hit). Never planned for a bomb mechanic but I was going to add powerup pickups, and also considered having a special attack tied to the timer (which also went unimplemented), so it'd dry down the timer in exchange for big attacks.
I did get some complaints while devving about the enemies looking like they just magically disappear due to the way the explosion worked but we didn't consider just making it bigger, I'll take that in mind, maybe spawn several if making another or multiple explosion anims is too much.
As for the hitboxes not sure what to do. The player shot hitbox takes up a bit more than the whole sprite while the enemy bullet hitboxes tend to be a little circle in the center, felt fine to me but they're definitely not that well thought out.
The stage design and layout is the result of putting together ended some patterns I had + some new ones I had to make while dying of stress, all the day before the jam ended, so definitely some of it might feel pretty haphazard. I'm planning to rearrange it into something more sensible for the update. I would have liked the music to guide the stage design as well but didn't have enough time to properly think that out. I also need more time studying other games, had never done that before this jam.

Didn't sound very interesting at first but seeing how the patterns were made in order for you to sneak in and hit really showed what the idea was all about. I couldn't get past the pattern with the alternating orange and blue rings though, don't know if it's really hard or I'm missing something that should be obvious.
Bit of constructive feedback on the graphics, please don't upscale pixel art sprites. Was probably just due to time restraints and such, but yeah, it looks bad.

Nice to see a cool Japanese title that isn't just katakana by the way.

sleep is for the weak

Very impressive and polished. The whole aesthetic ended up looking really good even though at the base level it's probably not much more than programmer art. The sound effects work really well too.
It's also impressive how many levels, guns, etc, how much content in general there is, and (some of) the levels being cleverly designed at that.
The one complaint I have is that the difficulty on some (maybe like half) of the levels gets unreasonable. I ragequit at level 14.

Thanks so much for the video!
By the way, you can Focus (slow down and deal more damage) by holding down Shift. It's useful for dodging dense patterns!

You clearly have a very professional workflow for art and such. However, the game itself is very simplistic, there's really no more than 3 or 4 things going on, and while initially looking extremely difficult due to haphazardly placed patterns, you can actually cleanly dodge both of the patterns by slowly moving to the side to dodge the aimed bullets, and jumping across the other pattern of non-aimed bullets when you get close to their trajectory.
Also, given the thumbnail (is that allowed...?) you'd expect it to be a porn game but there's no porn inside, so that's a bit disappointing.

Feels more like a Patreon ad than anything else.

I read the thing on the store page but didn't understand whether keeping the score or losing it was the intention.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply, looking forwards to the writeup.