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Thanks for all of the suggestions and for the comment! I really appreciate the kind words.

I’ve got some cool combat changes coming in the full version of the game; it sounds like we have similar ideas! The full version of the game actually has an MP gauge and a magic attack that you can upgrade / modify with “trinkets”. I might do an update post here in a few weeks with my progress on the full version and all of the new systems I’ve added.

Thanks for the other suggestions, the full version of this game definitely takes quite a bit from my past games, so you’ll probably recognize some familiar mechanics in the final version. Writing is definitely one of my weak points, but I’m excited by what I’ve got cooking!

I’m happy you’ve found inspiration from my games. Thanks for playing and for the kind message, good luck with your projects!

Thank you!

Thanks for playing! I’m still working on the full version, though I’ve been quite busy so it’s taking longer than I thought. Excited to share the full game once it’s done!

No plans on porting it to console as of now. Thanks for playing, glad you liked it!

Thank you!

Thanks!

Thanks for the clarification. In general, I’m supportive of mods as long as they don’t redistribute the original game (and as long as it’s very clear that they’re unofficial mods, with proper credit given to the original game’s creators).

In the case of Hollow Knight and Celeste: Mods for those games require a legal copy of the base game to play. Mods for these games don’t redistribute the original game.

So, your mod would need to require that people get the base game from me first, before they can use your mod. If you did that, and also made it clear that what you’re releasing is a mod, then I think that’s probably fine.

Fair warning though: People spend time writing “Mod loaders” for games like Celeste/Hollow Knight to solve this problem, and it takes time and effort to do that.

To answer your last question: I do have plans to release the full game on Steam eventually (and the final version may cost money).

Hey - thanks for reaching out. I’m glad you liked the game. I’m not really comfortable with someone remaking my game like that, especially since I’m still actively working on an expansion for this game. Sorry!

Thanks for playing! This game definitely stands on top of many of my past projects.

Thanks for the feedback, that’s something I’m considering in a future update. Glad you liked it!

Thanks for playing!

Holy hell this is so good, a well-deserved winners placement in the jam.

I love how your health constantly ticks down, forcing you to go for risky green parries, it’s genius. Forcing your players to play the game in the most exciting way possible is so clever. The final boss making you to parry in the middle of the 4-way explosions and waves of purple bullets is so goddamn sick.

That second boss was so creative too. Every time a different pattern of green and purple bars appeared on the spinner I lost my shit, really really cool.

Man the core design of “you slowly die unless you fight really hard” is gonna live rent-free in my head for a while, I’m 100% stealing it. Congrats on the jam placement, amazing game as always.

(I only died a lot cause I was limit testing, I’m a god gamer don’t you forget it (jk))

Amazing game, I absolutely loved it. Everything feels so good, especially the dodge counter - it was so satisfying to chain multiple dodge counters together. Loved the speedrun with the extra boss at the end too. All of the attack patterns were so fun to dodge too. Everything felt super fair and rewarding. Also the VFX were stellar, I gotta bookmark this game. Feels like there’s so much to learn from with respect to how you juiced everything up.

Really great work, I was surprised this was a jam game, it felt so complete!

Thanks a ton, glad you liked it. Currently working on an expansion for this game, so eventually there will be more content!

Ahh ok, so I think I ran into some kind of bug when I played the first time and left the map. The second and third crystal didn’t give me a range increase (except for the bridge) on my first playthrough, maybe because of the way I left the map:

When I left the map (I circled the exit in the attached image), I thought it was intentional, and the game was gonna break the 4th wall. I noticed that when I left the map, I could “pick up” the UI, including my own crystal from the Power UI. I thought “wow that’s so cool”, so I picked up my crystal “from the UI”, but perhaps that broke something because I never noticed my range on any of my tools going up (except for the ladder?) when I got new crystals. (To get back to the map, I had to repeatedly ‘pick up’ my crystal from the “Power” section of the UI all the way to the right side of the map, not sure if that makes sense but try exiting the map via the image I showed, and then go all the way to the left and pick up your own power UI).

When I played the second time, each crystal gave me massively increased range and I was able to pilot the EV through the final stretch. Finished it, that was great! I really liked all of the logs and the way the whole game was contained on one screen. The music was great for ambience too. I really liked how each crystal gave me increased range (at least on my second playthrough haha), it felt super good to pick up the second and third crystal and be able to scan so much of the map at once. The puzzles were all really satisfying to solve. Thanks for telling me about the full version, I’m glad I played this.

(My first playthrough took me a solid 45 minutes to get to the point where I got stuck.)

Thanks for the heads up! I played some more. I feel like I’m so close to the end, but I got stuck:

I got up to the part where I have all 5 tools, and I have picked up someone in the EV, but I can’t seem to figure out what to do from there. I’ve found three energy crystals, but the EV seems stuck in the bottom right area. I don’t have the range to traverse the uneven ground remotely, and I also can’t use my light in the EV since someone else is in there (and I can’t disturb them), so I can’t get past the crystals in remote mode. Any hints? I’m definitely just missing something simple, but I’ve run around the map a couple times trying to figure out what to do from here (scanning everything as well). (I also left the map briefly, thinking that that was the solution, but I came back into the map after realizing that I likely wasn’t intended to leave it?)

Glad you liked it. Yeah I agree, the upscaling thing was something I did for the game jam due to a lack of time. If I get time, in the full game I’d like to go back and remake those sprites (but it’s also not my top priority right now). Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you!!

Thanks a ton for the kind words. I saw that you’d been playing each of my games, I really appreciate all of your comments and I’m happy you’ve enjoyed my games so far. I’m planning on adding more this game, so hopefully it won’t be so short forever!

This game definitely stands on top of the shoulders of all of my past work, so I’m glad you noticed the little pieces of my older games in this one.

I hope one day you get ‘pumped up’ and make a game too! Gamedev is the most fun hobby I ever picked up, I think you’d have a lot of fun.

Thanks again for the kind words, I really appreciate it.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Damn, this is so fun, you knocked it out of the park. I love how the ball comes right back to you if you kill an enemy, it makes it so satisfying to build up a huge ball of enemies and just keep slamming the ball back and forth into the mob.

The bomb and tennis ball were crazy fun (the tennis ball in particular was really fun. Having more stuff to swing at felt really good, and having the tennis balls behave slightly differently than the baseball was really cool). Excited to see what else you come up with, feels like there’s a ton of design space here to explore. Wishlisted on Steam, good luck!

Thank you! I can’t remember where I first heard of that idea but it’s been stuck in my head for quite a while now, glad it resonated with you. Nice to hear from you! I gotta catch up on your new games since Skellies, you’ve been prolific!

Thanks a ton!

Thank you!

Thank you! I’m glad the game made you feel inspired. Thanks for playing and for the comment, it means a lot!

Thank you!

Glad you liked it! I’m gonna release a small update in a bit to make the platforming and combat feel a little better. I also feel like the combat is a little dry now, I might tweak it a little.

I had a lot of fun writing the dialogue for this game. Setting up a mystery is super fun (and really easy), so I’m happy you enjoyed the story so far. The hard part comes from making some kind of payoff to all the mystery that was set up.

Since the game is unfinished, the story’s in this weird ‘superposition’ where people get to imagine the best version of it, but if I finish it, that all collapses and that’s a little scary.

Either way, thanks for stopping by and for the comment!

Thanks! Particles / squash-stretch / flashing indicators are my usual shortcut for avoiding animating a ton of ‘anticipation’ frames for every attack. It’s also nice cause it’s easier to control the rhythm of the cues for attacks like this.

Thank you!

Thanks for playing, glad you liked it! I had a lot of fun with the music (it’s on my soundcloud if you wanted to listen to it outside of the game). I’m hoping to work on this more, but we’ll see. Thanks for the comment!

Thank you!

Thanks for stopping by! I actually used Unity for 4 years or so before I eventually switched to Love2D. If you’re primarily concerned with making 2D games, I highly recommend giving it a try - Love2D’s biggest strength is it ‘gets out of your way’, unlike Unity which I felt like I was constantly wrestling with.

I think I will do more devlogs with this game. I might do a technical blog post on how my engine-code is set up for stuff like what you’ve described, but I can try to give a quick summary:

• I use my own physics and collision, but it’s really simple: The physics is just “velocity = acceleration * dt + velocity” and “position = velocity * dt + position” with one exception (tile collision, which I’ll explain later).
• For collision, I just use AABB and circle collision
• For tile collision, I use a technique similar to the one described in this article by the celeste devs: https://maddythorson.medium.com/celeste-and-towerfall-physics-d24bd2ae0fc5
• Basically, for the player character, when I compute their position at the end of a frame, I do it by taking their target position and incrementing towards it 1 unit at a time until I hit a “solid tile” in my tile map (at which point I call the player’s onSolidCollision callback).

For enemy behaviors:

• Most enemies just use hard-coded coroutines for their behaviors. i.e the slug boss will always do 2 slams, dash across, 1 slam, and then shoot projectiles.
• The caretaker boss has a tiny bit of behavior-related decision-making that happens based on if you’re behind or in-front of him, but he’s largely hard-coded as well.

I really think Love2D has made me like 10x more productive in gamedev over the last 3 years. Having all of my own little tools and scripts and ‘engine code’ makes it really easy to quickly spin-up games. I also run into far fewer mysterious issues - all issues that I run into are caused by (and solved by) my own code.

Also it feels way easier to re-use stuff in-between games (I remember Unity had some notion of an ‘asset package’ for code re-use between games, but for Love2D my entire ‘Engine’ directory just gets copied wholesale between projects).

I highly recommend Love2D to anyone that likes making their own little tools/engines for gamedev. If you give it a try and run into issues or have questions, feel free to reach out.

Thanks for playing! Also thanks for the suggestion, sorry the UI was a bit tough to see for you. I think I can probably add a background to the UI to prevent it from blending in with the actual tiles, or perhaps add a higher-contrast option. I’m glad you liked the game!

Really nice work. I got to the part where you jump into the hole back to the starting platform (based on the other comments, it sounds like that’s the end?).

I’m sad this entry was so short, because the wall jump section where you get to use your platforms one-after-another was really cool. There’s a lot of potential to this idea.

It’s kind of funny: Metroidvanias have so much platforming in them but I basically never see ones that are centered around creating new platforms. Like I said, lots of potential here, I enjoyed myself with this one even though it was short-but-sweet. Nice work!

I had a little trouble getting far in this one: I got to the green enemy and attacked it for a while, but it was tough to tell if my attacks were doing anything. Some kind of particle burst or ‘hit VFX’ would help give some feedback on whether or not the player’s attacks are actually connecting. I like the way the wall jump works. The tighter vertical corridors felt good to wall jump in. The player’s design and attack animation are nice too!

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it! I’ll probably tweak fall speed or add a bit of hang time at the end of a star pierce to make that room a bit less tight, it’s currently a bit rough. Thanks for playing!

Wow, this feels like a huge game. I’m not super good at navigating games like this so I got pretty lost pretty quickly. I managed to get the wall kick, the super-wallkick (using it on green platforms) felt really good, but I was kinda lost after that. I explored a few more areas but it seemed like I was missing some other abilities that I couldn’t find. I came across a tall tower that required like 6-7 consecutive super-wallkicks and wasn’t able to get past that (perhaps it’s not on the critical path though? I couldn’t tell). That part in general was a little frustrating, I wonder if snapping the player to a nearby green surface during the wallkick would help. I got to a room with the moving platforms and the cube with the item inside, had trouble figuring out what to do from there.

I think the ‘resting in beds’ taking you to-and-from the two worlds is a really cool idea. I’m still pretty blown away by how big the game seems. I liked the animations and the enemy designs. It’s impressive that you had time to make different enemy types with different weapons. Fighting enemies felt pretty good too! Nice work!

Really cool idea, I’m sad it’s so short but as someone who submitted an unfinished game I totally understand. I love the concept, never thought of metroidvania elements in a genre like this but it works surprisingly well. I’m excited to see more, I’d definitely play the final version of this.

Thanks for the feedback! If I keep working on this, I’ll probably tweak the fall speed, a few people mentioned it being a little fast. Thanks for playing, glad you liked the bosses.