itch.io

This Mosa Lina x Metroid kind of gameplay is absolutely wonderful, and I can't wait to see this game at its full potential. However, it definitely needs some tweaking before you can ham on adding new content.

First of all, the game's initial difficulty spike is immense. Sure, learning new enemies and mechanics comes with the territory of practically every roguelike, but having to learn about several new elements in every room without any tutorials or proper introductions is brutal. Just off the top of my head, several solutions come to mind, some better than others from a balancing/time investment standpoint.

First, I think moving Wyrm 1 to Wyrm 2, 2 to 3, etc, and then adding a new, much tamer starting level would help a lot. Each room of the new Wyrm 1 could keep things simple, having only a single enemy or mechanic for the player to be eased into, with maybe a set of switches that need to be flipped before the player can proceed. If you aren't keen on that, then taking out a significant portion of Wyrm 1's spikes would be another good option. If neither of those sound appealing, then spawning an extra, vertically-oriented movement item at the start of each run might be a good way to go. Heck, you could let the player choose between a handful of options, for even more replayability.

Speaking of items, the way that they work is downright confusing at times. Sure, the movement items you get have nice explanations to them, but nothing else really does, especially the ones in the shop. Half the time, I forgo buying health to save up, only to buy an item that has no explanation text to it, or even a perceivable benefit.

Also, assuming you don't plan on giving the player a starting item like I mentioned above, I feel like altering Wyrm 1's item pool to only have better, more vertically-oriented items is a must. Every time I get something like the dash or masochism items, I immediately restart the run, and I wouldn't be surprised if other players did that too. Given how punishing the player's base movement and physics are, the extra safety net is basically a requirement for a good run.

Despite all the tough love I just had for this, it all comes from a place of respect. I myself have toyed around with the idea of making a game just like this, so seeing it come to a reality is a dream come true. I don't know how open you are to idea of incorporating suggestions, or even bringing on an extra developer onto the project (I have experience with GMS:2, and I'm pretty decent at pixel art too), but I'd love to contribute to this either way.

Sorry buddy, but virtually everything I said beforehand is at least somewhat verified. Unfortunately, Grok is not available on itch.io, so you can't go running with your clanker-only dick in between your legs in the hopes that an AI can do basic research for you. Model Collapse is very much a real thing and people have reported a noticeable decrease in quality with certain models, most notably ChatGPT-5. Several lawsuits have already been launched by large corporations against AI companies, most notably the one Disney and Universal jointly filed against Midjourney. AI models are already consuming massive amounts of electricity, with most of the additional power plants being made to accommodate them being fossil fuel based, as well as massive amounts of water, with plans in the works by major AI companies to massively expand their operations. While numbers vary somewhat, most reliable sources state that significant amounts of U.S. GDP growth is dependent on AI slop not being slop. Meanwhile, the Russo-Ukrainian war is taking a significant toll on the Russian economy, and they just losing territory and various strategic points, and China's severe drop in fertility rates following the one-child policy of 1979 is absolutely coming back to bite them. Besides that, I have no idea what you define as "fine", but the cost of living being as bad as it is in the U.S., and it being significantly worse for most people in China, it absolutely isn't fine by reasonable standards. Anyways, as much as I'd want to advocate for the development of AI models, the fact that 99% of their current use cases are nothing more than for mind-numbing, soul-draining, pants-shitting, internet-killing, mass-propagandizing slop is nothing short of infuriating. Also, for fuck's sake. Cars, computers, and cell phones didn't require the entirety of human knowledge and creativity be stolen en-masse in order to be developed, nor were they only successful by being propped up with trillions of dollars of venture capital, nor did they have to have a legion of chronically-online losers defending them in order to justify their usefulness for society. Seriously, if AI slop was actually a boon for society, then arguments like this wouldn't even be happening. The amount of people pushing back against cars were relatively small, and horses as a transportation method were mostly phased out within decades. The amount of people pushing back against computers and cellphones (modern or otherwise) were even smaller, and their alternatives were phased out even quicker. The first chatbot was developed in 1966, and was developed to do little more than parrot whatever the end-user decided to talk about. Over 5 decades later, and LLM's, the grandchildren of chatbots, are basically the same thing, but on a much greater scale. Given all the time in the world relative to the speed of progression in the tech space, and yet the best we can get from the clanker space is a barely functioning OS and a couple of almost competent slop generators. Take your bullshit "AI is like computer guys, just get used to it" argument, and shove it right up your technically-illiterate dung hole.

First of all, there's an AI-generated tag, for people like you who WANT to delve into slop like this. Second, that's what I would say if 99.99% of devs who use AI slop, indie or otherwise, refuse to acknowledge it, this guy included. Third, I know people like you want nothing more than an endless conveyor belt of literal clanker shit to slurp up, but some of us out here actually have a sense of quality control. And last, but certainly not least, no; AI slop will not take over the world. Model collapse, aka clanker inbreeding, should be more than enough to collapse most AI models. If that doesn't do it, then the lawsuits from copyright titans (ie. Disney) will, and if THAT doesn't do it, then the massive amounts of waste on our energy grid and water supply will. Even if none of that manages to slow down AI production, the microsecond the AI bubble in the U.S. pops, development of clankers in the western world will mostly collapse, and the only ones who'll be left in the AI race will be Russia and China. Considering how both of those countries are likely going to economically collapse in the next 2 decades, their stake in the AI race will cease as well, assuming that the presence of ChatGPT in the U.S. military doesn't hallucinate its way into becoming a diet-AM and nuking us all in the meantime.

AI-generated title screen...ew.

This game very frequently puts you into impossible scenarios and the music gets annoying really fast. The game's presentation is pretty nice, I will admit.

Hey, just letting you know that it's possible to land on the edge of tiles with spikes on them. While I can't be 100% sure if it's unintended or not, I can only assume it is.

After beating Mega Plum on my second time through the blue room in a single run, something happened where some enemies spawned after all of the enemies were supposed to die. I think this has to do with Mom spawning enemies during the fight, and not only did the enemies remain even during the shop menu, they killed me while I was in the shop, forcing me to restart once I bought my items.

The portals make the levels that feature them ridiculously easy, but other than that this game is alright.

The game is made trivially easy by just spamming A, S, and D mindlessly, but apart from that it looks good.

I'm not sure why all of the "playable" characters look like tim lockwood from cloudly with a chance of meatballs, as well as why the "playable" characters don't do the action I gave even with no apparent curses, but other than that this is pretty good.

None of the buttons apart from the quit button are working?

I could not for the life of me figure out the solution to what I believe if the fourth room (The one with the red block that needs to be activated first, and then the two blue blocks), but other than that this game is spectacular!

The game is kind of aimless as of the objectives, but other than that it's a total blast!

Try rereading over the book at the title screen.

The game kind of becomes unplayable after a certain amount of time, but apart from that it's kind of fun and it looks pretty alright.

If Space Funeral was a Shoot Em Up.

Nice presentation, but I find it to be way too hard. Perhaps either lowering the difficulty, or making adding ever increasing goals, or something would make this more of a difficulty, rather then just having a rather ambitious goal at the beginning, and having random difficulty spikes with each request.