itch.io

a simple and charming game with a weird unique activity. it feels like a mix of an idle/incremental game (where you click a lot to boost your currency) and a bullet hell. it works because it has a rotation of the gameplay and the shop, which paces things well and makes the game addictive. well done.

this is an impressively deep game, i like the battle system/bullet dodging, the theme and art  is great (though pretty stable), but it’s very difficult to get into without a tutorial. I read the manual so that helped, but even still it could be difficult to constantly try and figure out what elements the enemies are (not always easy at a glance), what types are good against them (not easy to tell which one you’re switching to using with the current UI) all while  dodging bullets. But, the fact that you explain how the enemies split up shows me that there is intuitive logic to how the battles go, and being able to start the battle after strategizing is good. A tutorial that starts with just one element and enemy type, then slowly building from there would be the way to go.

Personally, I don’t like scrolling to each element, I just wished I could’ve had the elements mapped to different keys (say, 1-5), so if I wanted water at a moments notice I could just mash 1.  I was fumbling about trying to find the right weapon too much during battle, which made it harder to engage and get my hands dirty with the combat system you built.

overall, great work, could just use a bit more handholding to get the player comfortable with all that’s going on.

this was really great offering. such a cool game. great progression, use of the assets and theme, and polished. 

thanks for your detailed review, i see and agree with all you say, you hit the nail on all the issues. sorry about the loading and firefox issue, i really appreciate that you waited and played. hoping to improve my coding and exporting abilities for the next jam, i honestly feel really bad for wasting people's time. i was a little in over my head. the opening cutscene could be skipped with space but i should've put it in the description. 

i agree the shooting is off, what with the bullets shooting backwards sometimes. something to do with the spawn points which change based on the individual sprite, to make it look like its coming from his hand. that would be my first thing to fix as i want the character to handle well. 

however i kind of liked the bullet speed change based on the length of the aim (which was an accident, from the non normalized direction as you say), so i kept that in. 

i don't really have a defense for using AI here, i tried to figure out what i needed to early on and got frustrated and caved to just asking GPT, which i felt bad about and didn't use after. in this case actually needed the specific degree from the player since i wasn't rotating the player sprite, just detecting where the mouse was relative and in which 45degree section, to swap the sprites accordingly. but there was probably a better solution anyway.

this was really well done and polished, made me want to keep playing. i think the shooting is almost there, it felt like enemies had to take just a liiiiiiiiiiiiittle too many hits and made the game not flow as well as it should.  maybe seeing them stumble or react to hits (before death) would be nice. but i liked being able to use cover and i thought the bullet speeds were really nicely timed, so that i could strategize and properly dodge.

overall, really enjoyed it, nice job!

this was really great! i liked the concept and i liked the neighborhood setting. personally i would've liked it zoomed out more, as i died quite a few times from a very fast bullet coming from some direction where i had no idea there was an enemy, and thats exponentially worse when the bullets dont collide with the buildings. 

but then again, having it zoomed in does play into the dulled perception thing i guess. and the falling mechanic does give the player a chance and is funny.

i was vibing with this game hard. love it! things to polish here and there but i was digging the aesthetic a lot, and the shield was honestly a cool mechanic for this kind of game that i haven't seen much at all. it makes it approachable for people like me who suck at bullet hell games.

i started laughing when the song ended and it was just silence occasionally broken by two guitar notes ad infinitum.

 it's a solid game, nice work. i think with more visual and auditory feedback when both the player and the enemy are hit would draw the player in more. it is cool that it gets unstable as you die, but if the boss doesn't have a health bar, seeing it react in some way to taking damage might be satisfying. the bullet patterns felt consistently overwhelming, hella trippy, but hard to get immersed into. dig the music.

I was thinking that the virus mechanic could be cool for a short horror/apocalyptic type game. Almost like the telltale walking dead (but not necessarily a long wordy narrative experience); character must stave off virus as to save a child or someone else or many others. either way you die at the end but you have a chance to be a hero. Unrelated to the pop up window “computer virus” aspect, more of a real virus but still erasing your vision or something . A lot of thematic potential with the mechanic I think. Just my two cents I thought I’d share. 

this game has a lot going for it. i think if the difficulty was incremented slowly and if the gun instability was taken out it would be more engaging. love the sprites though and it's visually very cohesive. nice work.

the progression was great, the bullet patterns especially well done. they didn't feel overwhelming and impossible to dodge to make me throw up my hands and say screw it, but just difficult enough to make me concentrate. def some cuphead flashbacks for me with this one.

the virus mechanic was unique, i really liked how there was a sense of dread that the viruses would screw you over time. that's a pretty psychologically horrifying game concept, that you can't go back. i really admire game mechanics that have that kind of cerebral component. however, i think it is a mechanic that would maybe work better thematically in a game that isn't as cartoonish, unless the clashing of tones between the "game" and the "computer going haywire" stuff is aesthetically accentuated, if that makes sense. the cartoon fish/underwater stuff being hand drawn works on it's own, but i think the "critical error" message windows would have worked better if they were not hand drawn and looked like regular popup error messages. more "3rd wall breaking". that's all just a matter of taste though. and some of the sound effects were too loud for me.

very impressed with what you pulled off.

this was well done, nice use of the theme with the visual aspect. i would have liked to fight other enemies besides the boss, but the attack patterns made the gameplay interesting so that's alright. a nitpick is i would have liked some sort of immediate feedback when the player is hit.

dang this is really good. too bad i suck, i haven't gotten to god yet, but it has a good balance of difficulty with replayability. nice work.

sorry, that’s a known issue. If it’s stuck at 90% with the Unity loading bar you’ll have to wait a minute but it will load.

very polished, the progression felt good. some satisfying gameplay. i got to the boss and i couldn't dodge anything, skill issue i guess.

thank you! I spent most of the time getting the player right so I appreciate the compliment there

I think it’s a browser issue, crashes for me after intro on Firefox but works on chrome and safari. I’m a noob sry

I think it doesn’t work with Firefox. But I’m not sure. Try chrome or safari or something? Still figuring out

thanks! i've heard from a few people different clothes would've been better. my idea was for getting lost in the crowd to be a hazard but i don't think it was a good idea.

oh weird. i wasn't able to reproduce that issue on the computers and browsers i tried so i don't know why it would do that for you, but normally it doesn't do that.

been a while since i updated this... a lot of work has gone into this project since, i promise! it is still in development and i plan on finishing this year.

im sorry for the loading screen but i appreciate you waiting and enjoying it!

¯_(ツ)_/¯ i figured i was the unstable one in this scenario...but your game nailed that concept way harder so kudos. hopefully next time i can get around the loading screen issue.

thanks for playing and the feedback!!

you saying that has greatly improved my day! each direction had 7 photos (3 for run, 2 for idle, 2 for shoot) so 8x7. more were planned but you know how it goes. 

thanks! i can't draw but i can take and edit pictures so i just kind of went this route. the player should face the direction of where the mouse is, rather than the direction he is walking, if that's what youre referring to.

thank you!!

i see. the problem is that i quickly saw no reason to dodge the bullets and it broke the immersion. a player health bar and game over potential would be the traditional route, but by no means the only one.

thanks, i debated having different clothes and was going to originally, but thought it might play into the theme to have the player threatening to get lost in the crowd of himself. good to hear thoughts on it.

what the hell

cool style and art. im all about the gross body horror stuff.

i was confused because it didn't seem like there was a drawback to the player getting hit? no player health bar, lives, etc. seemed like there was no incentive to dodge attacks or block them. i also would've liked the player movement to be snappier, considering how tight the bullet formations were. 

nice, i fun playing this. had some rhythm heaven and advance wars flashbacks.

i dig it!

Thank you!!!!

i have been notified that players get stuck on the loading screen. i did too on my first play (90ish%) but after a minute it worked. after that first play it loaded quickly. so i assumed the game would work. apologies for the frustration.

i think its because im using unity 2021 but im not sure yet.

i swear it works! the first time it took a minute stuck at 90% but every time after it loads for me quick, though im not sure why. i can't expect anyone to wait that long though. it may be an old version of unity.

for whatever reason it runs for me without loading after that first play so i assumed the game was good to go last night...sorry. i am unexperienced in these matters.

thank you all for checking out my game anyway, it means a lot to me!

-aidan

sneek peek of the flowchart for the story

he is a person