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Axial Studios

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A member registered Apr 26, 2020 · View creator page →

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Pretty fun. Could see it becoming a roguelite with some additional mechanics to expand the gameplay. Music, art, and gameplay work well together.

Game gets pretty easy quickly if you know which upgrades to prioritize and can get boring after you get the walking and standing upgrades.

Good entry. Good length of gameplay.

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Very neat idea and very intuitive once you look at the tablet screen. Moving the gems around feels a little clumsy, but it's very tactile and feels deliberate. Would have appreciated some feedback for when I hit an enemy. Was hard to tell if I was missing my shots or if they just had more health.

Being able to assign gems to a default location on pickup like health or ammo would have been really helpful.

Also cool that you can straight up remove elements like sfx and music. Unsure if I would like it in a fully released game since it gives an advantage to removing music, but it got a chuckle out of me that I could get an extra bullet if I didn't mind silence.

Quite a fun gameplay loop. Each different enemy has a cool gameplay mechanic, and I like how your chain length is tied to the hits you take and the bullets you shoot.

A couple nitpicks.

  • The chain looks way longer than it is, so I'm often trying to move outward, and the chain visually looks long enough for me to do this, but I'm actually at the limit.
  • It's possible to bank up distance and blow through several circles in a row without really having to deal with the different enemy types. In fact, unless you're constantly testing the chain length, it can happen by accident (I went straight from circle 3 to circle 7). A way to prevent this would help pacing and make sure your different enemy types get the screentime they deserve.
  • I realized taking hits reduced chain length almost immediately, but it took a while to understand shooting also reduced the chain length. An easy way to fix that would be to have the projectiles actually be chain links to indicate they come from your chain.
  • Magnet powerup was cool - did not understand what the other powerup(s?) did.

This was quite fun to play - well done!

It's fun and snappy, but I couldn't find any specific strategy to make it to the end. You kinda just wander through doors until you find things. There also appears to be no reason to fight the enemies - they're just spicy obstacles to avoid.

Maybe instead, the player could know roughly where they need to go (north, east, etc.), but there would not be enough time to escape normally, so they would need to engage with the content in different rooms and venture off the path to make gain extra time and make it to the end.

Thanks for playing!

I'm glad someone used the camera settings, so it wasn't a waste of time adding them lol.

Co-op seems to be a common feature people would like. Adding it will be an interesting challenge, but I'm committed now.

I'm realizing the camera motion is similar to skid steering (left side fwd and right side back makes you turn right), which I'm pretty accustomed to, so it seemed like a perfectly reasonable control scheme (although it is much easier on controller).

Cool concept and fairly relaxing to play (until you fail a few times in a row lol).

A couple non-gameplay related issues.

  • Level animations replay when I restart the level - I would rather just get back to playing immediately with no animations.
  • The letter configuration resets - I would rather it keep what I had last placed, so I can easily tweak what I had.

Good throwback to old text-based dungeon crawlers. I like how each enemy has a unique challenge. The pressure to hit all three weak points get really high as your health gets lower.

However, stamina did not feel like a limitation since there were so many fountains around. Maybe instead of health, taking hits would consume stamina, so you'd have to stop at more fountains (which would result in more monster encounters).

A truly strange one. Cool idea to increase the number of dimensions as the player progresses - it does mean that you end up playing 3 different games, and I definitely preferred the 1-D game the most.

Genuinely one of the coolest concepts in this jam, and one that has a lot of potential for a full release.

The overall feel is very claustrophobic. The only issue is there are too many probes and they regen too quickly, so it never feels like you're running low.

Very neat how it systematically narrows down what you value most. Reminds me of those automated '20 Questions' guessing games.

Fun concept. Took a minute to understand that fuel and health are the same thing. Aiming felt a little cumbersome at times.

I like the slowly parallaxing background to show velocity when nothing else is around.

Nicely polished. Art/music/sfx are all very coherent. Good mix of puzzle and platformer.

Just some nitpicks - character movement feels a little stiff - having some accel/decel in the movement or maybe just some intermediate animations for running/jumping would have made it feel better (for me at least). Jumps are also a touch floaty (although this may be required to make the moving platform mechanic more accessible).

Really excellent entry. Quite impressive.

Fun incremental game. Mechanically, a bit wonky - doesn't seem to be much consistency with the attack speed. Can also be hard to tell if your upgrades are adding much value without knowing how much health the enemies have.

The progression is decent (but maybe a bit slow at the start).

Good entry - lots of potential.

The simplistic art style works for this. Some sound effects would have been nice.

Gameplay-wise, some of the collision shapes feel a bit off - I would bump into a rock when I was sure I was far enough away to clear it.

It feels a bit strange to have the snow cleared on a grid, but not have the player confined to the same grid.

Also, some feedback when you clear a driveway - a score change or sound effect maybe - would go a long way.

Good entry - gameplay just needs a bit of polish.

Fun retro idea. I like the doom-esque 2d/3d mix. Figured there would be more sailing and less dungeon crawling given the name.

Solid mechanics. Gameplay is nice and juicy. Timers are a bit too tough. Longer timers with a rating system (S, A, B, C) might have been better 

Super neat idea. Really liked the tactile feel of everything. It wasn't immediately intuitive how the bag worked - would have been nice for the bag to hold your cards and remove them from the play area until you retrieved them.

Concept is good. It's unclear at first which direction the bugs come from. It would have been nice to have a set path they travel on like a conventional tower defense. Maybe different bugs could require you to move or reconfigure towers since you have a limited number of them.

Good concept. Could do with some sound and music.

Also I managed to get a second bullet in the 1st wave and then lost it somehow in the 8th wave. Unsure why that happened or if it was intentional.

Fun idea where it takes multiple playthroughs to get out. However, the challenge is more about having enough patience to stumble upon the correct route through process of elimination rather than gaining skill as a player.

Would benefit from some more instruction. I was not able to figure out how to build the larger assemblies built out of other assemblies.

Neat idea and fits well with the limitation. On the third level, the rope seemed to get shorter while I was playing and I wasn't able to get anywhere.

Loved this! Surprisingly deep for a game jam. Different factions requiring different resources to survive was a nice touch.

Feels like the google dino run game mixed with a vampire survivors aesthetic.

I'll admit I'm a bit too smooth-brained to understand this one. Messed around for a bit, but made little progress and gave up after a while.


Aesthetically, everything blends together nicely, but it would benefit from a bit more explanation.

Very well polished and pretty fun to play. Use of limitation is good in theory (especially with utility classes like the thief), but the game is easy enough that it rarely mattered since taking damage was uncommon.

Art, music, and sfx all work together nicely.

The only downside is the low resolution art, while very aesthetically pleasing, makes the game difficult to read, which is problematic since there is so much information on screen.

Conceptually this is really neat -a roguelite where there's a tradeoff to powering up between runs. It would have been nice to see some other negative effects as you traded pieces of your soul other than just game over at the end.

Enjoyed playing this. Some of the mechanics encourage the player to stop between tough sections for health/stamina to recharge, so it's easy to bore yourself waiting, but it feels like the only option. I think health should have been handled similarly to ammo where it replenishes at checkpoints. Tough to balance though since you can collect lost arrows but not missing health.


The simple tutorial boxes were neat and mostly helpful. The one showing how to defeat the cannons took me too long to figure out.

Art and sound were simple and cohesive. Very good retro feel, and the platforming itself was fun.

I like the idea of tying bullets to health, and using your actions in one run to influence the next is cool - very rogue-lite-esque, but it's pretty easy to run by the enemies without shooting them. The real issue is time. I tried 4 or 5 different paths but ran out of time on each run. Don't know if I'm missing some secret to escaping, or if I just need to be faster.

Glad you enjoyed it. The rotating 2D camera is certainly a polarizing feature - playtesters either loved it or hated it. I also had an implementation with no rotating camera (which you can try out in the settings) - I find that even harder to play with though. I definitely prefer playing with a gamepad.

Yeah avoiding the ball in certain situations is definitely intentional. There is an exploit here that I never got around to fixing where you get the ball trapped in the I-beam and let it bounce forever, accruing points.

Thank you for the feedback!

Thank you!

Yeah the on-screen indicator for where the ball is got cut due to time constraints (talk about finite quantity). It will for sure be added in any future versions.

Gotcha. Hadn't thought about the importance of predictable and consistent bullet paths. Excited to see where you take this.

This is a tough one. Art, music, sfx, and gameplay are all very polished - especially for a game jam. As an absolute Factorio degenerate, this seemed like an easy win to me.

But I didn't have fun playing it. It felt really tedious to move all the belts around and manually change recipes. Having some way to automate away the tedium would have helped a lot and wouldn't have compromised the use of the limitation.

Overall very technically impressive - I just wish I had more fun playing it.

Very engaging. More of an interactive story than a game, but very enjoyable.

I was quite amused when I lifted up one of the aliens? speakers? and it kept talking to me for a bit as we traveled through space together.

The ship physics were good, but I wish the ship rotation matched your input direction instead of your velocity vector.

Bonus points for controller support!

Top-tier art and atmosphere - very subtle messaging. The loss condition is a little ambiguous, and I couldn't quite figure out why it kept happening. I'm guessing it had something to do with me letting garbage through the tubes (and missing most of my shots).

Although in my defense, the garbage is still flowing just fine, so mission accomplished!

Good conceptually, but this game is at war with itself. I want to get more bullets in the air, but they move quite fast and are hard to dodge, so I'm making my own life much harder.

I would prefer if either the bullets moved slower or didn't hurt the player. There may be balance changes required for that to work.

I initially thought aiming with the arrow keys would be unplayable, but it doesn't really matter if you hit. This game tests your dodging skills much more than your aiming skills. Still, I think mouse aiming would be better simply to get more variety in the bullet paths on the screen.

Good entry - for all my criticism, I did have fun playing it!

Love the stun effect on the spider bots.

Getting Impossible Game vibes from this. Pretty fun and appropriately rage inducing.

The red text that shows up after each level kinda gets in the way.

Also, the game warned me about the red boxes on the level after they were introduced. This was amusing, intentional or not.

Not the strongest tie to the limitation, but a fun entry nonetheless.

Fun box-moving puzzle game. Some of the levels were pretty challenging. I noticed some also allowed way more moves than required to beat the level.

Nice to see well-polished menus in a game jam submission. I wish music played during the levels like it does in the start menu.