itch.io

Maybe I could've understood the game if the first bomb had no countdown. Even after reading your instructions here in the comments, I did not manage to clear a single row in time. It's sad because the idea felt novel enough to me that maybe there was something interesting there. I liked the style, but the default SFX volume is way too loud. Very impressive for a first entry!

I played 3 times, and legit felt nauseous on the last try. I couldn't get more than 8 glasses and the controls felt far too sensitive at that point. Maybe I did it wrong, but I was tapping strafes to stay upright. It didn't really make sense to me that turning didn't change the tilt, maybe that's part of why I felt so nauseous from the constant tilt taps. Wish you had put in some music at least.

It was a bit hard understanding what was going on. I did not find out how to increase the multiplier, nor did I figure out whether I was winning or not. Especially after I was no longer hitting the threshold in time. It also didn't seem ideal that not moving the mouse at all was a pretty good strategy. But I did enjoy the style and the atmosphere, and perhaps the timed ball injections has something to it, but it didn't feel like you hit it unfortunately. Maybe the targets should be moving to not make every shot feel identical and/or some active abilities like real pinball.

I don't mean reuse of menus. Menus are not gameplay to me, they're accessibility polish which I think is always welcome. I meant the talent trees that every idle game has and gameplay that is virtually identical to similar games like Ball x PIT which your name also seems inspired from. You can make the game you want to make for the jam, and I can rate the game how I'd like. Don't take it so personally.

But I'm sorry if I phrased it in a way that feels unconstructive. It may help to know it's mostly because I feel awkward how to rate and comment the game that is both kinda good but also pretty disappointing to me. Here's a retry:

1. I felt very weak at the start, and it immediately felt grindy to get upgrades. Progress became okay after being able to clear the first wave, but it felt weird not being able to control which wave I wanted to enter.
2. After getting one of the last cooldown upgrades the game suddenly became so easy that I didn't even get to see the enemies or bosses which didn't feel very rewarding. I don't think the effective attack speed should be exponential to such a strong degree.
3. I tried challenging myself to use the health and health regen upgrades to kite the monsters, but it didn't seem like it made any difference and even fully upgraded I got basically one shot by normal knight enemies in the second level (after first boss), so there was seemingly no point to those stats, and thus it felt like filler.
4. It was really laggy when the first waves of bouncing AoE balls hit enemies, it would've been ideal to profile them or do some quick calculations of how many ball bounces can be done per frame to not exceed the 16ms budget. I expect there was some bugs in it, or the engine is doing a lot of unnecessary work to make them happen.
5. I had enemies running outside the arena several times, probably due to knockback. It was a confusing bug, and at first I thought the game had glitched out and wouldn't proceed, but the enemy counter said 1 which helped me think of spraying at the walls.
6. I would've hoped that there had been a lot more focus on balancing the game to a fun state than for CRT shaders or space backgrounds. To me it felt like it was more of a project for the developers, not the player. Generally it was pretty unclear to me what was made for the jam and what was imported.
7. I would've loved to see original ideas from an experienced developer, and I'm sad that I had difficulty spotting any. The way I see it, indies' advantage is that they have the opportunity to innovate, unlike bigger studios which have to do what's tried and true to justify the huge investments.
   
8. I played until the end, and I did enjoy some of it. Good luck going forward!

1. I couldn't get past the "a little lad whispered in my ear" area, so I don't know how it ends.
2. Controls were a bit weird and underexplained, but reading the description helped a ton.
3. It felt tedious filling the balloons every time, and I don't see any point to not fill up completely, so I'd prefer it was instant or a lot quicker to refill after respawn.
4. It doesn't make any sense that you can die from filling up a balloon: A) there's no danger otherwise and you can just wait a bit longer and refill further; B) if you're exhaling into a balloon, that means it's CO2 in them, which is worse than useless for diving.
5. I loved the art style and the signs.

Very bad loading times for me, and I waited for a minute after clicking Exit game by the end without anything happening. But most of all I really liked the concept of getting a different weapon every few seconds. That could be a really fun game.

Tbh it felt lazy, like most of it was copied from an existing game without much effort to fit the theme. Even though it was buggy and completely unbalanced, it was still as addictive as all the other games like this, but I judged it a bit harsher than I otherwise would due most of the enjoyment seemingly coming from using preexisting assets, and a resulting game that is virtually identical to games I've previously played. My disappointment mostly stems from wanting to see more originality from experienced devs. But I'm sure my opinion will balance out with all the people who will undoubtedly rate it as they see it.

One of the most weird things to me was that many of the upgrades had no point to them. The only things that mattered were dmg, money gain, cd reduction, specials and maybe range.

It was confusing to figure out at first. First I thought it just cloned me, or that I would have to jump on my ghost or something and kept dying very quickly. For a puzzle game, that was a bit too much to learn for the first level. Even after figuring it out, the levels after that were hard to think about, I did best with trial and error, which isn't ideal for a puzzle game. But the art was cute. I couldn't decide whether it was teeth with funky hats or mushrooms with stubby legs, and I settled on the latter. 

If it was your first entry, great job! The level selection was confusing, I accidentally started on the last level and thought that was it. Also, the extremely floaty character wasn't very fun to steer. I liked the idea of having limited powers and selecting which ones to use (which I assume was the idea for the Theme), but obviously this one was completely unbalanced.

There's a full screen button interfering with Unity's full screen button. I believe you need to untick the 'Fullscreen button' in the itch.io game's settings.

For mouse-only players, I'd guess it's about minimizing precise movement and number of clicks. Since you plan on tweaking the gameplay as well, it's hard to give suggestions. Right now the issue is that you have to constantly alter between two clicks at different positions to make what's effectively only a timing decision. E.g. with current gameplay and balance it'd be optimal to have a default unit and just clicking the customers to equip/send them with the current default - and then for the rarer non-default send, either have a button to configure a specific type for that unit (with that button being a single click for both "select equipment type" and "send them with it") or having small radio-like buttons over every customer visual at all times.

But with different incentives and balancing and features that'll change. The fact that you ideally want one click with minimal "precise"/strained movement for every single player decision never changes though

I like the idea and the art is fun. When I first played the game I had very little idea what to do - and reading the initial description only helped over so slightly. I had to go read the full description to figure out that the number under the people in the bottom was their wallets, and that they were the customers that you'd send down the road to destroy the towers - and that turning those customers into knights and rangers etc. gave you their money (and if they're short you pay the rest).

After I learned that, the game became very easy. So easy that I could probably never lose because there didn't seem to be an increase in difficulty over time.

And without reading the game description I'd probably never have guessed that the lose condition was getting too many towers present.

There were some conflicting mechanics though. The passive sales seemed to work against you - it cost me time and at best it'd get me slightly more money than just buying the weapon that was currently closest to their wallet's contents - and at worst it'd make me break even but with a "loan" from the customer while delaying their aid with tower-weeding and keeping new customers from coming in.

Also, constantly clicking back and forth was a bit hard on my wrists and seemed unnecessary. I'd have appreciated if we could at least press 1 through 7 to select customers.

Screenshots from my playthrough: https://imgur.com/a/GrmuiD3

Neat little game. Strongly reminds me of RoboRally, Lightbot and similar games. The levels were decent and the art style was coherent and polished. I don't see any novel idea (beside flip perhaps) but I enjoyed it.

Alright thanks for the follow up. Lastly I'm curious if you can link me to one of the games that are like that

Don't worry you're good. This is what it reads:

"In my mind, the original Peggle/pinball had the sword/ball be a destructive oppressor/predator happily destroying whatever he pleases for their amusement, and then now you're shown the other side, that the pins actually care what happens to them. With my assets, time and lack of experience, I had difficulty illustrating that storyline in time though, and had to focus on functionality and basic gameplay."

In other words, instead of being the destroyer of pins, you now have to protect the pins - and it's now (thought to be) revealed to you that the pins that the pin-destroyer originally targets for big points is actually your life and you're trying to protect those from being destroyed.

I'm curious what you have in your mind when you think of "role reversal" and what you expect in a game for it to live up to that.

Thanks for the feedback and positive rating. It's much appreciated.

I'm curious, did you read the "How does your game fit the theme?" and if so, did you disagree that it's a role reversal in that sense? Or do you just mean that it wasn't obvious from the gameplay itself?

As for the multiple comments, I have have had the same issue, and for me it was because I had an unsaved rating while posting the comment, and then it prompted if I wanted to discard changes when posting the comment, but if you click cancel it still posts the comment without refreshing the page to show it. It's just a webdesign flaw with itch.io

Yeah I'm sorry for the lacking and confusing info. Especially that the income gains weren't at all displayed (except in the screenshots).

I'm surprised to hear you call out luck though. Could you elaborate?

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with it. There's basically only three pin features:

1. Attract the shot

2. increase your income (which incentivizes maximizing airtime without getting hearts destroyed)

3. Diamond collision box (rather than circles for all the rest), which didn't add much but I just left it in there.

In the end, I decided that the levels had to be designed as puzzles instead - which you probably can guess from the first two levels, but the third and fourth level were impacted by the bug that placed pins persist through levels. The third level was meant to be fairly easy and give a little taste of being able to experiment with placing many pins, while the fourth level was meant to be much harder and about creating enough income to sustain making pins without losing. With the bug though, you could build up a lot of extra pins in level 3 and then use those to make level 4 much easier.

I agree that there's so much more I could've done. I wanted to explore different levels of bounciness for pins, different "balls"/attacks, different pins with growth stages and elements and many other things. But as this was my first jam and I'm too inexperienced, I didn't have time to explore any of that.

Ah, looking up the vaporware meme I see the strong inspiration - and the enemies make even more sense now. I still don't get the 87 joke, but that's okay xD

Good luck on the jam!

Thanks! Did you manage to figure it out in time then? I.e. apples give 10 gold / sec, slime gives 1 gold / sec?

Many great ideas here. Directing shots by being the target is a really fun idea, and creates an interesting dynamic with how to kill the enemies indeed. The visuals, sounds, UI and UX were all very well polished for such a short jam - even for a team of 6. I played it several times. Feels like you're shooting for a top 100 spot, and I think it's deserved - I gave it a max rating.

Switching gears to be way more nitpicky:

1. The control tutorial could've been better. The first time I played I didn't manage to pay attention to all the controls. Ideally, you shouldn't assume the player knows the controls before they've passed a very basic test where that control is needed. But it's a only minor complaint, since I got it after 2 or 3 tries.
2. The title screen was slightly off, aesthetically. I get that it's retro/neon/Tron computer style graphics but it still gave me a way lower first impression than the actual game did. Even the settings looked smoother.
3. The audio feedback for losing health is good, but it'd been nice with a slightly more apparent visual feedback as well. I know there's a screen-shake but late game there were many other screen-shakes, so perhaps some color along the edges or something
4. The XP bar blended in a little too much with the hearts indicator to me - I didn't notice the hearts as well as I wish I did. Perhaps also because the game generally has lots of "thematic graphics" like the background grid of similar width, which has no functional utility and confused me ever so slightly. In a bullet hell / arena shooter with decreasing breathing room, it doesn't seem very useful to me to have so many uniformly colored elements display the information I need. Perhaps you could've altered the looks/color of the player for the 3 different heart "states" or something.
5. For the first while I didn't realize that you could go on the top side of the tank too - perhaps you could've started zoomed out to the entire arena and then do a quick zoom animation into the normal camera.
6. I didn't like the chromatic aberration effect on the enemies. It's a bit distracting for an action-packed game, in my opinion.
7. My hitbox was not incredibly intuitive , especially for the player's odd shape - but fortunately it wasn't too big to feel very unfair.
8. Minor bug: The music stopped after a while and didn't come back. WebGL version, Chrome, and having it in an unfocused tab for a few minutes.
9. Very minor thing - in the settings, there were tick marks but you could also set the volume to half between the tick marks, which seemed a bit odd (but the granularity is much appreciated)

I'm also curious if there's more to the slightly odd name EB-87 than the meme, and what I presume is 1987. And also the Michelangelo head as a player?

Here's a few screenshots from my playthrough: https://imgur.com/a/dyS9Z0C

Another Peggle fan, huh? xD

Very pretty visuals, especially the level completion. I like the idea of managing dashes, but it was pretty hard to time them while also finding a strategy for where to go.

The win condition was also a little hard to figure out at first - I eventually realized that there was a target score, and that hitting a few pegs gave me more dashes - but I still don't know if the green pegs did anything special.

I also must admit that "instead of controlling the cannon" isn't quite true, since we also aim the first shot. Personally, I would've preferred if every level had a premade shot angle and after hitting the first peg, you could start dashing. Or something of that nature. That way, you'd stay true to what you said.

Great job nonetheless!

There's a full screen button interfering with Unity's full screen button. I believe you need to untick the 'Fullscreen button' in the itch.io game's settings.

It's an interesting idea, and decent graphics and animation for such a simple game. The way I see it, it's essentially a 2D goalkeeper game where you're not allowed to be hit - but other than to stick with the theme, what's the reason to have other pins or rotate the camera with the current gameplay? I wish the other pins had a purpose, and that there was more to do than simply running from side to side and pressing spacebar at the right time.

Congrats on making a working game though, that's a big accomplishment on its own!

This idea is exactly the kind of perspective transformation or paradigm shift I was hoping to see a lot of from this theme: questioning the practices in popular games when you think about it more than you should. Pokémon is full of that questionable stuff indeed.

Your story/cutscene made it work to the theme, otherwise I'd just say it's a good remix of vampire survivors. I really like this type of game, but I'd have strongly preferred if you had also explored new (combinations of) mechanics to fit that story, when it's a game jam. It felt a little too much like a standard upgrade-based shoot 'em up game (i.e. playing it safe), and I'm going to subtract some points for that reason (for all I know, you've already done a vampire survivors adaptation in the past, and then you just copy-pasted it, added a basic story and added new graphics - that shouldn't give big rewards in a game jam that's about coming up with new interesting ideas imo).

On the flipside, this game is a very well-made adaption, the sounds work very well and the game is balanced enough to be very fun to play - and I can't lie that I was addicted for a bit. Here's some of my playthrough: https://imgur.com/a/8B1296v

Great job, very impressive - especially if most of the code was done during the jam. Thanks for sharing it!

I really loved the art style. Especially the little cloud shadows and the wind animation. The sound effects were decent too, but music would've made it even better of course. Sometimes it was a bit frustrating that going to the sides gave you a high risk of getting trapped by a wall of enemies on your side and a few in front of you. The controls were pretty smooth too. I really enjoyed it, even though it was a little short on gameplay.

Also, judging by your screenshots, the font wasn't properly included in my playthrough (Windows): https://imgur.com/a/UNqUpG7

I had high hopes for this when I saw the title and your screenshots. And wow, I was not disappointed. Really fun game you made. Great game feel and color palette. The music was fitting too. I'm impressed by all the different mechanics you managed to include and made some pretty good levels, all things considered. The fish were a little easy to avoid and the star shooters could sometimes be timed in a way where you won before they made a shot, but that's okay - the timing and navigation challenges in themselves were fun enough that too difficult enemies would've made me enjoy the game less.

Giving you high praise for this one!

Here's from my playthrough: https://imgur.com/a/8bY4sgn

I'm curious, what's the third ability supposed to do? To me, it seemed like I could only activate it by putting it on the placed goat or yeti, and it made a rumble sound. So I thought it was some kind of earthquake speed boost to my units, but it was really hard to tell. At first I had no clue what was going on but after losing once and then reading that you could move the camera, I figured out that my job was simply to kill all hikers. I then noticed that the goat and yeti were auto-attacking and using it again would just move them. Lastly I figured out that the icicle killed units even before it dropped, which made the game a lot easier:

https://imgur.com/a/f5Y5J6s

I enjoyed it, and well done on the pathing and the art style was fun. I particularly think the cover image is very well done. I would've liked a way to restart the game when you lose though.

Sounds like such a fun idea! A puzzle game where you're the shadow. Too bad it didn't make it through, I'd have loved to check it out. Would you care to give some feedback on my puzzle game?

Alright cool. This was my first jam and I also had difficulty judging what could be done in time and cut so many ideas for this reason. And was I the only one who felt this year's theme was a bit limiting? Many ideas I got were either heavy on AI or had boring game mechanics. My favorite subset of ideas were "behind the scenes" stuff, like with Toy Story but for games, but I couldn't find one I thought I could pull off in time, so I just settled on Peggle. I'm curious which ideas you sacrificed, that you'd do if you had more time

Cool concept and the art is cute!

I didn't pick up that the rabbits spawned differently than vegetables before I read it in your description, and I wasn't so satisfied with the fact that your score was reset when you lost. It was less of a problem when I got good at the game but I kept getting in a situation where there was literally only bunny cards on the table, and that seemed silly to me. Maybe I was wrong, but I was pretty sure and I still took the risk of guessing and I always got bunnies when I tried.

Before posting this comment, I just realized that what I can do to play forever is that when there's only bunnies and new vegetables, I can match two vegetables each with one bunny, and then match the other vegetable pair, and just repeat that every deal round, since 4 cards are dealt and 6 cards are needed to draw new cards

Fun game, well done!

Some of my playthrough: https://imgur.com/a/ul5epZh

I thought the idea was decent and great job on the AI, it looks like it took a lot of work. But the controls were a bit finicky, would've been ideal with a grid like the original.

I also had a lot of trouble figuring out what I controlled and what my goal was. When the mouse was caught, the sound FX made me think I lost, so I spent a few rounds trying to figure out of I could influence other cats or if I was actually controlling the mouse etc. By the end, I figured I controlled one of the cats (the blinking one), but I still wasn't sure. Judging by the fact that I lost at the same time as a cat was eaten, I think that's right.

I'm curious, was this also your first jam? Congrats on making it!

Interesting take - I'm not sure what the difference is intended to be, other than swapping the sprites? I tried resetting a lot of times until one of them survived and I learned that you had programmed that you can collect the anti-ghost pickups and apparently you try to kill the Pac 'Men', as if he's a ghost.

When I first played I expected to chase the Pac 'Men' until they picked up those anti-ghost stuff and then being chased.

Even with the bugs, congrats on making a game for the jam. Hope you enjoyed yourself! This was my first jam, so I imagine I can relate.

Too bad you cut out everything, even if it wasn't satisfactory. Don't be too hard on yourself - congrats on making it through! A nice little Easter egg I found is that you can push the "king pawn" and kinda scare it away from you. I think there's a funny idea hidden in there somewhere.

Even if your build was buggy, I'd encourage you to submit it next time. It was my first jam too and I had some bugs in my build too, even though I was more lucky than you. There's always more opportunities in the future!

Thanks for playing and giving feedback! I agree, I'd do it differently if I had more time and experience. But would you care to elaborate on what you first thought and where you got stuck/frustrated before figuring it out? If not, that's okay - I'm just curious how different people approach this.

I love the idea of "what happens when the player sleeps". It kinda plays on the old Toy Story idea, and I think there's a lot of potential in the game genre for that stuff too. That's what made most of the game fun. The art is also good, and the music is cool (I appreciate the volume slider in the title screen very much!) but albeit seemed unclear how it fit thematically. I think it helped make it seem more action packed for sure - it instantly made me aware of the rush timer.

I also appreciated that you could revive infinitely until sunrise - that made it less punishing to explore.

Unfortunately the collision system was a little frustrating sometimes (especially the rocks behind the plants), the difficulty curve was a bit out of order (except the start). And I didn't figure out exactly why the birds sometimes died when they touched me, and what the star did other than make creatures run away from me for a few seconds (my mind instantly went to Pacman where ghosts become vulnerable and run away). My biggest complaint was the second last level though - it seemed to just be long to add playtime but there was no challenge or things to do but wait until you got to the end. I would've quit if it wasn't because I really want to do my best to give feedback to other developers who might thirst for feedback as much as I do.

Here's some shots from my playthrough: https://imgur.com/a/jGS6PnN

Would definitely be interesting to continue working on it. I think I'd prioritize very differently (and both visuals and audio would change a lot) if it wasn't a 48 hour game jam. One of my biggest reasons to do the jam was to try to finish a small game with a guaranteed chance to get feedback from different players - and without that, I haven't found enough good reasons to do it, unfortunately. But thanks a lot for the encouragement. If more people feel this way, then I'd be way more interested.

I can very much relate. This was also my first jam and there was so much UX that I wish I had gotten around to but I didn't even have my levels planned before the last 2 hours, and I was still unsatisfied with some functionality stuff! Haha, the panic is definitely an experience, but it was fun as well.