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Great post. I usually mainline all Rami Ismail content and yet I’ve never heard of the 4:44 rule. Really interesting, makes me want to spend a whole week making 4 hour prototypes.

I feel like I also have a hard time committing to a true ‘prototyping’ phase, similar to what you’ve described; I get carried away with the details too quickly.

I’m glad you’re trying out fantasy console dev. It’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while; crafting an engine built around my own personal restrictions sounds really fun.

Love the aesthetic of your fantasy console so far. Did you use fantasy-console-related restrictions while making the music as well? i.e did you limit the number of voices/plugins/etc you could use? One of my biggest love/hate things with pico 8 is the 4-track restriction.

Also, I’ve never seen that ‘50 games in 1 semester’ piece before, looks super interesting, thanks for sharing that.

A true vibe, love how warm the background track is. The pads fill the space in a really nice ‘big room’ way. The upper voice/main melody feels super expressive too, there’s one part of the track where it feels like if someone were playing the upper voice on piano, they’d be ‘leaning in’ all of a sudden, idk how to describe it.

Interesting, the third boss is definitely more of a ‘classic dark souls’ fight, whereas the 2nd boss is a bit more chaotic. If you’ve got lots of soulslike experience, that might explain it.

Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it.

Thank you!

Just gave Lightrigger a try, it’s sick! Super juicy, seems like it has a great foundation. Really cool to see you expand on the ideas from Shadow Shot. Thanks for the kind words, hope you stay inspired and keep making games too!

Revita and Downwell are great inspirations, I see the Revita influence a lot in Lightrigger and it’s really well-done.

Sorry to hear that. I’ve re-rated your game!

Wow, one of the best I’ve played so far for sure. The core controls feel so good to use; Feels like I can definitely see the hollow knight influence.

Each of the bosses felt really fun, but wow that final boss was spectacular. I don’t have any feedback other than this was a total blast to play. I love how the healing mechanic is basically infinite but difficult to use in the middle of a fight. It made landing ‘partial heals’ feel really useful and satisfying. I love games that force you to find different types of ‘windows’ of opportunity, like finding a full heal window during the final boss was really tough but really satisfying to finally do.

I really love the final boss’s attack patterns. Each attack felt like it required a slightly different dodging technique (like pogoing the boss’s melee slash). I’m super impressed by this game, awesome job!

I agree, I think the overhead to picking up an engine and learning all of the simple things is often way longer than I expect. Writing things from the ground up has felt more intuitive to me so far.

Glad you liked the post! I remember UI being something that always gave me a headache back when I used Unity (I haven’t tried Godot much), so I feel your pain.

thanks a ton, I spent a long time on the soundtrack for this game. It went through a few different iterations but I’m happy with how it came out, glad you liked it!

Nice job! Thanks for playing!

Thanks for giving the game a try. The dodge is a little long. Looking at games like Death’s Door, I think it probably should be quicker. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for playing and for the kind words! Nice job with a perfect on your first try.

Ooh nice, looking forward to it (no pressure though)

Thank you! I’m considering adding a hard mode later on, but we’ll see.

Thanks for playing! You’ve got this.

Thanks! I love bosses with multiple phases, so I’m glad you liked that.

Huh, I didn’t think I’d see a full-on city builder this jam. I’m not super familiar with this genre so I don’t have a ton of feedback. I ran into a few issues, like my soldiers mostly just stood around when the boss came in. I saw the tutorial mentioned to click on a soldier to assign them, but when I tried that nothing seemed to happen. It was pretty funny to have a bunch of barracks with spearmen just hanging out while the boss slowly walked past them (I think only one spearman fought for me) and then killed my king lol.

This is neat though! I’m not sure it fits my idea of a ‘boss rush’ in my mind. I haven’t played many city builders but I was pretty impressed by how many interconnected systems there were in this game.

Thank you!

Damn, I could not beat Corvette. Might come back to this later to try again. It’s pretty rough to have to start all the way from the beginning when you die.

I love the first and second boss’s attack patterns. The variety in the patterns is great, as well as how each pattern forces you to move in a slightly different way. The exchange powerup is also a really cool idea, I didn’t realize it swapped my bullets with the boss’s until I’d picked it up a few times. I initially thought it just gave me a powerup, but this is a cool application of the theme.

I like how the stage distorts and colors itself according to the positioning of the bullets and player. I had a hard time reading Corvette’s ‘missile rain’ attack; Consider adding some kind of indicator or shadows to the ground where the missiles are going to land. Without that, it was hard to tell where on the field a missile would land until it was a little too late.

Really nice work, the attack patterns were all really interesting and genuinely fun to dodge.

Thanks for playing! I agree, there isn’t much incentive to actually use the sword. Technically the sword does about 50% more damage per hit, but magic is so much easier I can see why it would feel a bit meaningless to use the sword. Thank you for the feedback and for playing!

This game has some great ideas. Like others have mentioned, it’s very difficult to control, but I was able to eventually beat the first boss. It’s hard to give feedback because it feels like it was hard to experience the game you intended to make due to some issues I had with the camera (like others mentioned). I like that each element has a different ability.

It’s genuinely cool that you have to swap between elements to mitigate certain attack patterns. I.e you need lightning to jump over the waves of projectiles, you need earth to block the laser, and fire for damage. The ideas are all really solid. There’s a good foundation here, all you have to do is build on it and make some small changes to the controls and you have a really solid game!

Thanks!

Damn, I suck at FPS games lol. I wasn’t able to get past the first boss unfortunately.

I think my biggest hurdle in this game is the literal hurdles in the boss room: I found it quite tough to navigate all the boxes and barrels in the room, which caused me to get stuck and get clobbered. Since the first boss seems to be all about kiting backwards, it feels like the boxes and barrels were meant to make the player more aware of their positioning. The problemfor me was, I couldn’t find a super legible pattern to the placement of the boxes/barrels, so it feels like either I’d have to memorize the positions of the items in the room so I could avoid them while running backwards, OR get kind of lucky by just spamming jump and moving backwards.

It’s neat that you can dash into the air, or reverse-dash when holding back and looking down. That tech helped me ALMOST beat the first boss a couple times.

Love the old-school FPS game feel and the art is awesome. The vibe of the game in general is great. Nice job!

Thank you, glad you liked it!

I wasn’t able to get past the first boss unfortunately. Dying and returning to the start of the platforming section was pretty rough, it’d be great if you could respawn the player at the start of the boss instead.

The controls are also a little rough around the edges. I think adding some forward momentum to the basic attack would go a long way to making the attacks feel less stiff. As others have mentioned, the jump feels a little off too, I think due to the lack of air-control.

I love the art and music in this game. The art style is very PS1 and the character portrait (I only saw the player character’s portrait) during the cutscene was super polished. The first boss music was really good too. The environment art is also stellar, you should be proud!

Thank you! Great to see other love2d users on here. Glad you liked the game!

Really solid twin-stick! Also glad to see other love2d users. The bosses were all cute and I appreciated how varied each of their attack patterns were. The up/down arrows of the final boss was a neat attack.

The use of the theme was also great, each weapon felt noticeably stronger than the default weapons so it felt good to actually exchange them. Nice work!

Thank you!

Really awesome boss design. All the attack patterns felt really rewarding to learn. I only played through each boss once (it looked like there was a ‘rematch’ for each boss afterwards?) but I’ll probably come back to this to beat all the rematches.

I didn’t really see the difference between punch and kick (I used kick most of the time). The controls were also a little strange: special on V was what threw me off (maybe it could have been HJKL instead of JKLV?).

Every attack pattern felt really thoughtful. For example, I love that the archer has the triple arrow attack which forces you to jump, while most of his other attacks can be dashed-through. It’s a really nice mixup and satisfying to recognize.

I really liked this game, nice job!

Thanks!

Throwing with your tail is super weird and creative, I like it. It took me a while to realize that the stone velocity relates to damage. Realizing this mechanic and then hitting birds with high-speed throws was pretty satisfying (I one-shot the falcon boss by accident because of this lol).

Like others have mentioned, the controls feel a little slippery and hard-to-use, but the throwing mechanic is pretty cool. Also the owl boss did some strange things on my screen; It would periodically lag the game during its teleport attack, which seemed tough to avoid due to the lag.

The sillhouettes are cool and landing throws is pretty satisfying. Nice!

Thanks for playing! The web fullscreen issue is a known issue. Did you run into any other bugs in the web version, or just the fullscreen thing?

The sword deals about 50% more damage than the staff, but yeah outside of that the exchange mechanic didn’t come out as meaningful as I wanted. Glad you had fun!

Damn, I’ll have to come back to this one. Really cool core mechanic. It’s really rewarding to completely absorb most of an attack pattern with careful dashing. I also love games with a big charge-attack. I love how the 3-stack charge attack deals way more damage than 3 1-stack attacks.

My only real frustration with the game is: It’s actually really hard to intentionally get hit by a bullet. Most of my frustrations came from just barely dodging a bullet while TRYING to get hit by it while dashing. It might be worth adding some kind of hidden assist where your hitbox grows a little when dashing (but only to same-color bullets nearby). Otherwise, when playing with a keyboard and thus only having access to cardinal-movement, it feels a little harder to intentionally get hit by stuff to charge up. That was my biggest difficulty with the ‘core’ fight, a lot of the bullets would just whiz right by me.

Really cool game though. The core mechanic of absorbing-through-dashing is genuinely really interesting and rewarding to learn.

I only fought 3 bosses so far (the first boss, the assassin, and the core), and they were all really fun. I’ll come back and beat the other 3 a little later. Awesome job!

Thank you, glad you finished it!

I really love the art style, I’ve never seen a game that looks like this. It’s so absurdist and strange, but in a really intriguing way. It gives me 2008 flash-game vibes.

I wasn’t able to kill the bird, I must be doing something wrong but it felt like it would take ages to chip it down with the goo cannon. The other two bosses were both really visually interesting, and the destructable terrain was cool too.

Also I love the intro cutscene. Everything about the art in this game is so cool and different. Nice job!

thanks! Death’s door was definitely one of my inspirations

I really like the way teh exchange mechanic was implemented. There were some fights that felt way too tough and then I’d pick the right combination of abilities in the contract (usually the muse) and the fight would get a lot easier, which felt good.

I also liked that some of the choices gave the bosses new attacks. I especially liked the ‘spin’ attack for the 3rd boss with some of the contract options.

Does the dash give iframes? I wasn’t able to avoid the heart attack on the 3rd boss with the dash; I had to just run away, which made me wonder if I’d been misinterpreting the dash.

I liked the visual novel-style dialogue in-between too! I got the ‘leave’ ending, it was cool that there was a choice there. Nice job!

Thanks a ton, I really appreciate it!

Thank you for playing and for the kind words!

Ah I get it, it’s a “Boss” rush, very clever! The game felt a little slippery, controls-wise. I think when repairing an item, you might want to set player velocity to zero. Otherwise, if you accidentally hold left/right for 0.1 seconds after pressing repair, your character just keeps sliding and eventually exists repair range.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening in the second boss; the first time I did it alone, but when I died I had an NPC helping me the second time and two music tracks were playing at once.

I think your take on the theme is really clever! The art is also quite solid. I love the shadowy foggy look, it’s really well-done. Nice!