itch.io

This is... a bit of a mess, I can't lie. It was sort of fun for a bit, but there are a number of issues I had:

- The upgrades felt pretty underwhelming. I barely felt the effect of some of them, and some of them were the only ones worth buying for some time. Notably, the very first upgrade is good for a while, and some of the others that only give you 1% buffs each purchase are mid, and only barely make a difference later in the game once you can afford to sink a bunch of money into them (and I really don't see any reason for bullet size upgrades at all). Generally, I always prefer more expensive upgrades that have a greater effect, though maybe that's just me.

- The upgrade from the pistol to the SMG was crazy. Using the pistol at wave ~11 felt like a peashooter (and was boring, as there was basically 0 threat). Then using the SMG from that point forward felt like win-mode. There was 0 way to possibly die with it.

- The upgrades are unclear in their effect. Some of the numbers go up, such as the +n damage for the first upgrade. For example, say it was at +20. This would make it look like you should get 20 more damage from buying the upgrade, but when you do the number just goes up to +22 and you only really got 2 more damage. This is made extra confusing by the fact that in the VERY SAME upgrade, there is a +2 to your health, and it always stays at +2 and always increases your health by 2. Basically, these 2 effects work exactly the same way, but are shown differently. Not the end of the world or anything, but far more confusing than it really should be.

- There are a lot of random elements that seem "taped onto" this game that don't really fit. The P2W slot machine is kind of fun, but really doesn't seem necessary to the game, it could've just been more upgrades. Not to mention how out of the way it is, I could easily see a player missing it for their whole run, which would really suck since having the +200% damage and +100% coins plus the other buffs was huge. But I thought whatever was going on with the cards was a much bigger offender. It made little sense, there was very little for the player to actually interact with, and they rarely made much difference. Not to mention that there was no way to see what cards had already been drawn and were currently in effect.

- The shooting was mostly fine, and I appreciated the attention to detail with the gun swapping sides of the character, but this becomes problematic when the bullet comes out exactly from the gun. It introduces a bit of imprecision (which wasn't THAT big of a deal), but it also means that it is impossible to shoot a small enemy directly under you, which caused me a small issue once or twice.

- I would've appreciated more dangerous enemies - they were all slower than you, and the only ones that might've posed a threat (the shooting zombies) didn't appear until wave 50+. It might be cool to have some of the zombies be a bit faster than you to put some pressure on the player, and it could also incentivize buying the player speed upgrade, which I thought was rather underwhelming as is.

I might've had more feedback, but unfortunately the game froze for me at wave 58, only shortly after encountering the guys who shoot bullets. I suspect it might have been since I killed one of the shooting zombies on the exact frame the other ones shot, and it may have tried to spawn a bullet on a zombie that doesn't exist, but I could be totally wrong.

Either way, I really did enjoy the game. I always feel the need to apologize for levying so much criticism, but I'm sure you can understand I just want to give helpful feedback. Hope this helps!

Update: Was able to get the stuff back, the grave was hard to see since it was layered behind these blocks but I was still bale to grab it. Also, I JUST found and bought the teleportation upgrade the run after lmao. Would've been nice to have like 2 minutes ago but oh well.

Very fun game! The balance was great, going to new levels was a difficulty spike but never felt like it set you back too far. The upgrades basically all felt meaningful, and every input was responsive and punchy. I also really appreciate how if special blocks are lucky, they have an extra effect, it was a really nice touch. My only issue is this bug I ran into. Ive seen these blocks pop up before, but im still not sure what causes it. This time, they generated inside me. I can move around in here, but cannot escape this prison of blocks lol. Hoping I can recover the items from my grave once oxygen depletes.

Yup, that seems to have fixed it 👍

Pretty fun. Would be nice if it actually encouraged you to explore, I was stuck wondering why it was so grindy until I wandered out further haha. Also, the audio keeps glitching, it seems to hate playing both the footstep and the coin pickup sound simultaneously. I wouldn't mind normally, but its such a disgusting, crunchy sound when it happens. I noticed it happens more the further out you go.

Cool but why do I do it? What do I get if I win many coins or if I win little coins? Should say "good job" for 10 coins maybe and "bad" if only 3. Also score numbers and timer numbers also need to be bigger too.

Not bad. The endgame was a bit stale, and I'm not sure how I feel about the prestige upgrades making it harder to earn prestige currency (I opted to postpone buying said upgrades, which I believe worked out very well in my favor, but I think not buying upgrades in a game like this is not a fun mechanic). But overall I did enjoy it. Finding the synergy (even though its very clearly laid out for you) was very rewarding, and even though there is minimal user input the game felt punchy and alive. A great way to kill an hour or two.

LMAO this is peak. I think the pixelated effect was a bit strong, but everything else was fucking amazing. The story comedy was on-point, the game was actually kind of fun (after the first level anyways, once you get a few upgrades and start to understand how to play). The bossfight did NOT disappoint as I feared it may. Soundtrack was kickass. Whoever voiced the walls of text put their heart and soul into it. My only complaint was that there were not more levels. Also, once I was on new game +++, the final boss had way too much HP, I think he scales too much. The game also started to become unplayable - strangely, the game could handle firing 100000000 pellets per frame, but the damage numbers were too much for it. I could fire into the void all I wanted but once I started magdumping the boss, it became a slideshow. The sounds also broke a bit before this point.

Truly one of the best games ever made, and my second favorite on this platform - only bested by Stephen Hawking: Ultimate Wheelchair.

lmao no kidding. I kinda wanna look up the odds for that now

Edit: I couldn't find a good source to answer this exact question (people are more interested in the odds when you DONT know what the next cards are, and not what the odds of an unwinnable game state are, go figure) so I asked chatgpt, and it gave me an answer of "15%-25%". This means at worst, it was a 0.000000224% chance to get this unlucky, or at best, a 0.000182% chance. Crazy. Guess this is a good opportunity for me to learn why you shouldn't gamble XD

You HAVE to have done something with the luck. I actually started keeping track of the runs after how fucking awful the luck has been. Out of 30 draws, I had NINETEEN unwinnable hands (kept drawing until bust to make sure that at no point could've I stood and won). The dealer was consistently getting 20s and I was consistently getting 14-16s. If this isn't intentional, I really feel like you should add something safeguard against this. I got behind on the debt, and lost most of the skim, and the game basically became unplayable unless I really wanted to do an extremely slow and tedious grind.

And honestly, this wouldn't matter as much if the debt quota thing didn't keep increasing. I really feel like that mechanic made the game less fun, as I was forced to take more risk than I'd've liked, and wasn't allowed to play at my own pace, and wasn't able to take full advantage of the upgrades just so I could focus on the debt.

Really cool idea, and was SO close to being super fun, but was absolutely ruined for me, and I had a miserable time.

Woah, super fun! I've played so many games of this style but this one has to be one of if not the best one yet. There were only a few things  I would've like to see changed:

- Having to play the first couple levels every time gets super tedious and boring once you start getting to room 7 and higher. They are completely free and trivial, and it becomes a waiting game just waiting for everything to spawn. There are a few ways to combat this - you could add more upgrades that makes spawns faster, or upgrades that make the first stages harder and more rewarding. But what I would personally do is add an upgrade that lets you skip more rooms as you further buy the upgrade. There are plenty of details to work out with this, like how it would work lore-wise (I think something intimidation-related could be funny) or whether you still get the currency even though you never fought the enemies, and if so, how to prevent people from abusing it. I imagine that if you allow the player to collect the currency from the room they skipped, but ONLY if their previous run made it maybe 5 rooms past the room you skip to, it would work nicely and be tough to abuse, and would make the game much less grindy near the end. But ofc that's just my take. And maybe it works out better with some other systems and upgrade you have in the full game, and it becomes a non-issue. But yeah, the first few levels are annoying to have to play every time in the demo version.

- The bossfight was kind of underwhelming. It would've been cool if the boss was moving around at least a little, and I think it'd've been cool to have bro join the fight and we have to protect him from the boss' attacks or something. I also wish it was a bit more tactical than pure dps (my wrist was starting to get sore XD), like maybe he has a weak point he periodically reveals.

- The knives have HORRIBLE synergy with the frenzy upgrade. I was hoping "undamaged" just meant undamaged by the cursor, but nope, the knives that go everywhere and deal pitiful damage while also preventing me from doing the extra damage I rely on. This didn't end up being too big a deal, and by the end it was completely remedied, but it kind of hurt in the beginning. It would be nice if you could refund upgrades, or at least manually disable the knife ability until it makes sense to bring it back.

- I would've appreciated more upgrades that use the currency gained from leveling up. I thought the knife upgrades were really underwhelming, as they did little damage and tended to not hit any targets unless I really tried to aim them, but it took time that was better spent just frantically swiping everything. If the knife upgrades had more impact or something then maybe it'd be fine, but as it is I would've liked to be able to put the level points into something I actually thought useful (though the frenzy upgrade with the level currency in the end was super appreciated).

Well that was a lot of criticism lol, but there really was so much about this I enjoyed too. The art was great, the story was funny but not over-the-top, and it didn't linger any longer than it needed to. The gameplay feels smooth and crisp, and actions feel punchy and rewarding. Things were intuitive and made sense (except at the very beginning, I was making far too small strokes and wondering why it often didn't deal damage, but that was quickly figured out lol).

Can't wait for the full release!

Pretty fun! Though there are a couple things I noticed:

- There is a bug for the dominoes that stand themselves back up. If you buy a new one while some dominoes are already "falling", it will visually fall when the one before it falls, but will not award points. It only awards points once a push that happened AFTER it has been bought has reached it. Kind of annoying when you have a full board, as newly bought dominoes won't start generating for some time. Can cost minutes over a full DOOM.

- This game has a handful of idle features (after the second prestige layer anyways lol) but I never really get to use them. If you change tabs or otherwise unfocus the site, the game pauses. This is really annoying as I can't go do something else while I wait for enlightenment points (I'm currently at that point in the game where I cant make it go any faster by actively doing stuff). I can't even watch youtube and refocus the site because having the game running causes video players to HEAVILY lag for some reason. Would be nice to see some sort of fix, and make this actually idleable.

- I have been muting the site, but I would appreciate a way to just mute the music like the other guy said lol. It's not even bad or anything, just wayyy too loud.

- Maybe this is intentional, but the asceticism challenges are not ordered easiest to hardest as one might expect. I can see they are ordered in same way as the upgrades they affect, but when I tried the no refinement one and failed, I didn't attempt the no prayer one until later, even though that one is significantly easier. Plus, I imagine skip and chain are ordered in order of difficulty, so it is only these 2 that are out of order. But maybe thats intentional, and this bit isn't meant to be handhold-y.

But yeah, have been enjoying it so far. I really appreciate how the game gets progressively more QOL as you go, which really makes progress feel rewarding. All of the little animations and effects and flair for everything are also nice :)

Not bad. Like the other commenter suggested, some more hints at the beginning would be nice, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. I really appreciate the depth of strategy present! Deciding what to attack and when is pretty rewarding when you get it right.

Though I do wish the fight screen was larger. This kind of ties into the whole non-beginner friendly thing too, as the buttons (the '?' button that tells you about monsters and the other 3) are easy to miss the first few times, and I don't think I would've been able to beat the enemies that are stronger when other enemies are nearby if I hadn't happened to use the '?' button to see what it does at that exact moment.

But yeah, pretty fun!

Pretty fun! I had some issues with the UI, like the button for scrolling the inventory having such a small hitbox I almost thought it just didn't work and that I was softlocked, and needing the mouse wheel for dialogue options is not ideal (mine is broken, and I need to do hacky stuff for things like that, buttons would be appreciated).

I also thought it was sort of annoying that holding an item makes you unable to leave the fusebox ui, and that clicking an item in your inventory while already holding it doesn't put it back like you might expect, but causes the character to say the generic "doesn't mix" line.

Also, some of the interactable objects really should be more visible. The toy lever in the first room specifically was tough to spot, I was clicking around in there for a few minutes. The flower-shaped metal piece also was pretty hidden, though I did fortunately find it when I needed it really quick, but I think I was just lucky, I could see others struggling on that for a while.

But all that said, I enjoyed this! It was pretty charming, especially with all the voice lines being properly recorded and not text on the screen like is often the case. Really brings you back to old flash game point-and-clicks.

Very fun! Though I do wish expert posed more of a challenge. I'm only OK at rhythm games, and expert was a bit of a snooze fest for the majority of the time, until the last 3 opponents, and even then it was only interesting for a small part of the song.

I'm also not sure whether the incremental style made it more fun or not, as it only really served to force me to play the first few songs multiple times. It probably does help newer players not get stuck though.

Overall, very neat idea, and was still fun, but could do with some more challenge.

Yup, works a lot better now! Had a lot more fun this time :)

Kind of fun, but lacks variety once the shooter guys show up. An extra threat or 2 would be nice. Also, HOW do you fuck up so bad that a basic sprite game drops to 20 fps??? Especially in the way it gets worse as time goes on, indicating you must not be cleaning up enemies as they die or something. It's probably an easy fix once you actually look into it - which PLEASE do, the FPS drop makes the game basically unplayable. This is on browser btw

I am running into a bug near the beginning where when waiting for the main computer to load in the laboratory, I keep dying even though I have batteries in reserve. It happens when my energy reserves run out (still have 3-4 batteries at this point) and the main computer loads. They happen at the exact same time, so I couldn't tell which is the issue. If you are supposed to die when in the room with the computer as it loads, it is NOT communicated well. This is on the web version.

EDIT: I played longer and the computer does not kill you. I don't know why this circumstance specifically caused the game to ignore the reserve batteries. they seem to work now that I found a way around this seemingly one-off issue (I had to grind a mastery to make the timings line up differently).

Pretty fun! Though I will say the prestige upgrade was kind of underwhelming. I feel like x10 or even x5 would be more fitting than x2, given the exponential nature of this game, though maybe it balances out if later resources produce double without costing double (out of time to do another run tonight and find out). I do really appreciate the automation though.

I also do wish there was a way to export/import a file. Both so I could download the game and keep playing, and also in case my save gets cleared (seems to happen very often on itch games for some reason).

One final thing is that the research says there are 51 researches to complete, but I ran out at 42 done, and the tree looked complete. Maybe this is another thing I will find later after more prestiges, but in case it is a real issue I'll add it here too.

But yeah, very fun!

This seems fun, but there are a handful of things I've noticed:

• The way you move the camera and lock input for a second EVERY time an upgrade is unlocked is very annoying. There is no reason to do anything other than the little particle flair you have, which on it's own is probably perfect and all you need.
• I don't hate the idea of the bullet inaccuracy, but having an upgrade to reduce it would be SUPER nice, and I was shocked there wasn't one.
• The ricochet, as well as most of the other bullet upgrades other than the normal +damage and +speed felt kind of underwhelming. The explosion doesn't feel powerful, the damage over time is a joke, and the ricochet tends to be unwieldy and come straight back towards you more often than not, even when I'm trying to take advantage of it and aim for the sides of blocks.
• The gold blocks aren't clearly gold until you hit them and they happen to have 3x hp. Would be nice if they were visibly gold, plus I think that'd just be cool anyways.
• What is "Proc Probability"? It is mentioned in a few upgrades, but is very unclear what that is.
• What are the coins upgrades actually doing? They claim "Increase maximum coins quantity" but what does that imply? That a given block can have more coins? Does this imply coin gain is from 0-30 or whatever when you buy the $30 upgrade for instance? And another upgrade, "% chance to gain coins from block destruction" is also super unclear. Don't you already get coins from breaking blocks? Or is it based on something else? Some clarity would be super helpful.
• Blocks take some time to actually lose HP once you hit them. This is fine on its own, but they only award coins and count towards completion if they finish visibly draining their health. If the level timer runs out while a block is draining HP, it will not award coins or completion. Would be nice to fix this by either forcing blocks to finish this animation once the level ends, or letting the game run for a tiny bit longer (and presumably deleting/freezing bullets at this time) to let the animation run it's course.
• Some sort of bonus for level completion could be cool. It probably shouldn't be too good or else people will just never upgrade for more blocks, but maybe something like "x1.1 coins gained" could be cool, and would provide an actual incentive for buying extra time (which is currently pointless, there is no reason you would want to spend more time in a run, you get about the same money from doing 1 long run as 2 short runs of the same length for example).
• This one is much more minor, but having the timer bar fill up as time runs out isn't stylistically ideal. Would be better for the red bar to drain instead of fill up. Or if you wanted the red to be the negative space and the blue to look like it drains with the time, you could make the red darker and make the blue more saturated. Would be better to make the red the background and make the bar blue and start on the right if you go that way.
• Another clarity thing: the critical damage upgrade just says "damage bullet is 110%" instead of something about crit damage. I think it's supposed to be crit damage anyways, as that is what the symbol would suggest.
• The 10% chance to explode upgrade appears to be broken, and can't be bought. I bought the 5% chance to explode and the 10% upgrade stayed gray even though the explosion damage upgrade became buyable.
• After buying the bullet split upgrade, I noticed sometimes the split bullet would sort of get dragged to the middle of the screen and start spazzing out. Don't know what that was about, and I couldn't consistently recreate it, but it happened very frequently.
• What is even the point of upgrading block HP (or "block size" as it's called in game)? I can't tell if it awards more money, or if there is some other effect other than the HP increase.

Jeez, sorry for the essay haha. I just kept finding more stuff to add. Even if there was a lot of criticism, this was still pretty fun.

HA! That's nice liberal. I see they got you workin' the easy shift. Not me! I'm going in for my 36 hour shift at the BALL CRUSHING FACTORY! Where they CRUSH my BALLS! That's right - every day I slap these puppies on a hydraulic press hand have 7 trillion newtons of force exerted DIRECTLY onto my BALLS! In fact, I'm going for the company record: 7.1 trillion newtons of force exerted directly onto my balls! I'm hoping to win the prize: a $25 gift card for Macy's so I can buy a nice pair of earphones for my wife so she can stop listening to me whine about my CRUSHED BALLS! I don't even know what's going on down there anymore. I'm scared to look!

Actually forget everything I just said in the replies lol. Just tried the latest version, and the lag is fixed AND I can properly close the game now, so thats really cool!

And with the addition of "buy max", none of what I said applies anymore lol. the "buy max" button just effectively acts as "get infinite of this currency" lol, and the way you have to unlock it makes sense for this.

I think the basic cycle is good for now, and I look forward to seeing how you deal with prestige and stuff!

Also, the numbers get stupid big and flow off the screen (image upload is not working rn but I'm sure you can recreate). Might want to switch to scientific notation after a quintillion or so.

Pretty fun. The inventory system could use some work though, it felt a bit clunky.

Also, the "blink" bossfight could use some adjustment too, since sometimes he teleports on top of you on accident. It seems that this is sometimes intentional when he does the growing sphere attack, but when he is just jumping like crazy he sometimes teleports onto you and shoots a fireball on the same frame, making it undodgeable.

I did appreciate the scaling of the upgrades, it felt very reasonable and not grindy, I took my time a little and did the quests and had plenty of currency to buy the necessary things plus some QOL.

The only other thing I'd mention is that some of the upgrades were VERY cheap and only gave tiny rewards. This might just be a point of preference, but I prefer when upgrades are bigger and feel like they have more of an impact. The biggest offenders were the heath and passive income one (I forgot what it was called). upgrading for only 1hp when you start with 50 is super underwhelming, especially when boss attacks can deal ~10 hp. Just making it into +10hp or +5hp and having the same effective cost of buying 5 or 10 of the upgrade normally would be better imo, and would make it easier to make decisions on what is worth sending currency on.

But yeah, was fun!

Yeah, if there were no generators it would be quite a pain lol. they work nice (I think anyways, I didn't get the chance to see how it is for the high tiers in my playthrough)

Unfortunately I'm not exactly the creative type, and I am not great at game balance, so I don't have many ideas about what to add lol.

I guess the thing I might do would be to make all the tiers more expensive (i.e. twos cost 10x ones, but threes cost 20x twos, fours cost 30x threes, etc) but have an extra upgrade menu with specific purchases, like for 50 twos you can double all generator gains, and for 100 fours you can cut generator costs for tiers 1-3 by a factor of 100, or something. Just stuff like that.

But like I said, im not great at balance, so this would probably require a lot of tweaking to get right lol

Kinda mid. I don't hate the idea, but it was a little stale. Not that I had time to get bored though, shortly after getting 10 "three" I had some crazy performance issues, would not pass 2 fps, and UI became unresponsive. All on a mid-end machine, too. Additionally, while I appreciate the fullscreen, there was no pause menu (that I could find) to close the game, so I was forced to win+d to even get out of the now near-unresponsive app.

Like I said, game idea isnt awful or anything, but the app has some serious issues.

Nice game! 13 days :)

Kinda fun, but those green circles that spawn on you and are guaranteed a hit on you kinda suck. I keep taking basically no damage otherwise, but still dying in the end from getting chipped down from these, especially when they spawn so often in later levels

Pretty fun! One thing that may be a bug though: returning to a previous level and beating the boss again will reward an additional yellow orb. Doesn't seem intentional but I could be wrong

Oh dang, yeah mine only froze for about 3 seconds. I wonder if its even the same issue then or 2 separate issues from the same action lol

After a few hours of reverse-engineering I can confirm that this game is just unfinished. I poked around in the code and found the check for the M- unlock, which specifically checks if the amount of spent points goes from 1 to 0. Without cheats, this is only possible through M-, or another button which has no unlock.

And the "go backwards" one is not as simple as multiply by 0 exactly. Something like 1 * 0 = seems like it should work, but behind the scenes there's a tracker called the "roll" (a list of numbers) which gets set and reset at strange times. What I can figure is that generally, pressing a green button (notably ++, --, and =) will add a value to the roll, and pressing most other buttons will clear it. The roll is what actually gets checked for some checklist items like this one. So to get this one you have to do * 0 ++ = so you queue the "*0" operation which clears the roll, THEN press ++ to get 1 and put it on the roll, and finally = to apply the queued operation to get 0 and put it on the roll, leaving [1, 0] on the roll and passing the check. I can't tell if this is the intentional way to get --, but it is heavily obfuscated if so.

It was a fun game though, and I hope we may get to see some improvements! 

I'd like to add to this - the game freezes the FIRST time you shoot. After a few seconds it comes back and the problem disappears after. Still very worth looking into

Very fun, but would be nice if there was some sort of proper ending instead of just more ships forever. Plus, the extra ships dont really feel like they help very much until endgame, which already flies by in a blink. But still, was very enjoyable. And what a kickass soundtrack!

4.35 mins for no loss.

~15 mins for javascript infinity (10^308)

(the shapes still work, the conveyor is just so fast the shapes get collected the instant they spawn)

Its had to say, but I would've personally bound the ability/interaction keys to q and e. Though thinking about the bot switching, it may make more sense to make q and e cycle between bots, and have f and r be interaction / ability or something. I have also considered having only one button (like c) to cycle the bots, freeing up the f, e, and q keys to be whatever you want. But I really don't know for sure. Plus, it depends what you want the other hand to be doing, as I dont recall needing the mouse in this game for anything other than menuing. Hopefully someone else with more experience in game dev can provide more insight into this than I can haha

Cool idea, but the control scheme really needs some work. io for ability/interaction as well as jkl for character switching is all just kinda janky. So was the strange controls when holding an object as the strong robot. Definitely a neat idea, but needs polish.

Nice, fun concept, but a few notes:

1) would be nice to see currency at all times, not just when looking to buy upgrades

2) some kind of reward for finishing a level would be cool

3) I don't understand why there needs to be an efficiency upgrade for not moving, it is optimal to be always moving afaik

4) it wasn't immediately obvious that the colored currency comes from the puddles, that took some trial and error to find out

Not bad, but theres a lack of incentive to buy fuel. Theres no gain to staying out longer, and no penalty for fuel running out. Plus, its almost better to have it shorter so the shop comes more often. Would be neat if maybe the longer you were out, the more rocks came per cycle or smth like that

Alivest Internet Theory

Very fun! Fairly easy to cheese in a handful of places, but that certainly did not ruin it by any means. Would totally play a full game of this!