Your cover does not catch this gorgeous art style AT ALL - I'm not sure if anything but playing the game does though! It's a real jam's gem (rhymes!).
The hand-drawn everything + visibly slow "flipbook animation" style is one of my favorites for the whole jam.
The bosses are adorable too! And the shrink theme is covered :) The patterns are fun; I especially loved the arcade machine ones.
Thanks for the game!
This is not a game I expected it to be - where is my brainrot and why any therapy is involved? :D
Your game captures the SHRINKING theme in one of the best ways I'd say. Progression and short game loop kept me playing for longer than I anticipated!
I sometimes had random "spikes" of negative thoughts killing me; not sure if it's intended and I'm missing a clue to dodge it, or it's a bug.
Overall, a pretty solid entry.
This is something so well polished, I didn't expect this at all from the thumbnail - I agree with the other commenters that it could be affecting how much people missed the game at their loss!
The visuals are fun too, everything is consistent but simple, enemies are fun, particle and shooting effects make this better.
Finally, lots of attention to detail!
Thanks for the gem!
One of my favorite games style and music-wise for this jam! It felt really polished too: UI, backgrounds, sprites, cheesy dialogues, it's all in there.
Was hard to control the dash because of my expectation that I'll dash in the direction I'm moving now; on the other hand, in can give you more control when used smartly, so maybe it's just a skill issue.
The game wasn't hard at first because of the stage size and the limited bullet distance of the enemies, but got progressively harder later. The patterns and the enemies had enough variety and were fun to explore.
Thanks a lot!
P.S.: Oh, and I forgot to praise the progression!
Nice game! I liked the main mechanic (pick the bullets up or not); a small QoL improvement would be to autocollect when the room is empty. The MC is cute, and the story is too :)
For my taste is wasn't enough of a "bullet hell" until the last boss came up and more of a classic slasher/shoot-em-up game. The shrinking theme is well covered!
I think forcing the player to abandon the bullets more to be able to move faster/dodge would be an interesting direction. My strategy was mostly "shoot, pick em up while dodging, shoot some more".
I had some minor graphical/music glitches, but I played on Linux in a VM, so there is a lot that could go wrong there :D
A growing sword and a combo meter are both fun takes - both jam theme-wise and as game mechanics! I liked that as the combo meter went up, I actually became more cautious as I got more to lose.
This could be improved with some 2D physics: my best strategy was to hide inside the boss himself and keep hitting until it was time to dodge. It was also hard to understand the hitboxes and if the hit has connected - I expected some kind of sound feedback from it. I also had a funny lockup at first when the MC got completely hidden behind the boss and I kept pressing arrows instead of WASD so I thought the game was stuck :)
Like the theme a lot - presenting the struggles as in-game mechanics is so much fun! I had deja vu from your tutorial because we did something similar with trying to describe everything in-game :D Overthinking hits home a lot too, so there's that!
The style is consistent, unique, fitting and cool. The bullet patterns are a bit repeating - I'd say there's a lot to play with in this setting, but given the jam time constraints, you did a good job. Agreed with others that the best strategy seemed to be "rush and pacify everyone ASAP".
And the main menu background!
P.S.: Grasshoppers are nice! Why would one attack them? D:
Wizards and cowboys! That's a fun combination, liked the backstory :)
The game itself is pretty cool. the bosses have lots of variety, liked the minions a lot (cats are evil, I always knew that!). Small minions can be hidden by the bullets; making them and the character larger (while keeping the hitboxes the size they are now) would improve it in my opinion.
The music and SFX are fitting, the sprite designs are fun.
Because the game is about "cowboy-style strength proving", solely boss fights feel appropriate to me, with some dialogue and moving from one boss to the next there could be a short plot!
Thanks!
Honestly, the controls made it no-deal for me - I kept sliding away off-screen and it was generally just too hard to control. Maybe that's me coming from a classic bullet hell games standpoint so muscle memory makes it harder.
Maybe designing it less like a traditional bullet hell and more around the sliding physics... I have no idea how this would look like (and the controls may need to be changed to tank-style maybe), but it feels there's something to explore here.
The idea itself is a lot of fun though! I keep coming to this game and how the sliding can be played around with in my mind.
In my opinion, with a bit more work this could be a cool game! Thanks!
Absolute shitpost in a good sense, glad Rin teamed up with a T-Rex, not glad she's destroying books :D
Way above my skill level, this feels harder than Lunatic, but hey, skill issue! But I don't think it's fun like that to the majority of players, maybe having lower difficulty levels could help? Continues save the day.
Music is purrfect generally and as a reference!
Liked the animations and the overall style :) Epic! For me, UI-wise the biggest problem was lack of bullets colliding (visuals and sound), but once I got accustomed, it stopped being annoying.
On the other hand, missing hit sound or the enemy position hint (Touhou-style) forces you to unshrink to check where the enemy is, so it makes sense.
The enemy is engaging, has lots of patterns too, I had my share of dodging. Overall, fun!
Very clean and on-point style and design, the controls feel snappy, the enemies feel fun and engaging. For me, a Touhou fan, everything was straightforward and right-at-home :) I have a sweet spot for the old DOS-like UI feeling as well.
Others mentioned well-crafted patterns as well; I agree!
Thanks for the submission!
Loved the art style and the "keep the color removed" idea! The patterns are fun and diverse. Thanks a lot for the tutorial - especially for the explanation of the color removal part, I feel this made the game feel a lot more polished. And in general, polish shows!
Need to keep playing to beat the game :) Congratulations on the submission! And the leaderboard is a nice addition too.
Confronting past versions of yourself is something I didn't actually think of as a game design, very unique and cool! Something to explore would be to "improve" upon the past versions as well. The whole game loop actually reminded me of Reinforcement Learning techniques from ML (sorry for a nerdy reference!).
It was also a bit Synthetik-coded for me for some reason, which I'm not against at all (maybe due to equipment choosing? could this be explored as well?).
Props for implementing a global scoreboard, even though it may be broken now!
This was a lot of fun, and hard too! The game needs you to adapt to the visual noise when going to lots of reflections, but that's kinda its point. I'd say making laser warnings more obvious would make it less hard in a good way - it's hard to keep track of visually with all the other things going on. Music sync is very on point, and the overall style is nice too. A fun moment - I didn't initially get you are not supposed to shoot :)
Finally, patterns designed around reflections are genius, and overall I liked the variety and the flow of them a lot.
This is exactly the right kind of quirky and weird for me - I loved the style, visuals and theme a lot :)
I agree that shrinking was tricky - this is mostly because of me being hardwired to expect "focus"/"alt mode" in bullet hell games making you slower, Touhou-style, so there's nothing wrong with the game itself! Patterns were fun and hard, I kept retrying to improve.
Needless to say, the inflating/deflating economy and the balloon MC make perfect sense for the jam's theme.
Shrink the time! Makes a lot of sense for a bullet hell game, and a good fit for the theme.
The infinite field and variously sized enemies reminded me of agar.io (back when it wasn't thrash :) ) The screen effects were a bit too much IMO, but I liked them and HP being about "data corruption". Maybe exploring it a bit more would be fun, since I didn't get *what* I was playing as or against what (say, computer viruses?).
Thanks!
It felt fun that I needed to specifically *ignore* the enemies and aim for the turrets - my first reaction was the wrong one even though I read the description :) The visuals are nice and clean; I would like to see more variety of enemies and patterns. Agreed with another commenter that some music would be nice, but the sound design still felt appropriate for the overall style.
The visuals are fun! The game progression felt empty-ish to me - I didn't feel I was having progress in the game. Mostly I could just avoid the enemies. It felt polished, the only thing I noticed was the restarting music, but making a loop is not trivial. Small peeve - a spaceship shouldn't be able to "move" back and pick up an item while flying forward!!11 :D And the flight felt "slow" to me, but honestly I have no idea how to make it better without making the game needlessly hard when navigating tight spaces.
Btw, an impressive engineering feat! Extra thanks for sharing the source, it was great checking out a modern game written in C.
