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One way is to take a look at how tower defense games do it. Most have the next wave start after a few seconds or the option to start early. The pressure to get all the resources and get to the shop seems like it could be fun to me. Play testing is king though obviously.

Another option is to do something like brotato by auto collecting all the resources and open the shop automatically to buy stuff if you don’t want the time constraint.

Super fun gameplay! The weapons are really run to use, sniping drones out of the air from a far was really satisfying. Switching weapons quickly to deal with different threats was also really fun. The gameplay is also really smooth and didn’t feel too floaty while moving around.

Opening the shop during the round to quickly buy ammo and health felt a little cheesy, maybe only allow it at the end of rounds. Also a countdown timer to the next wave would be better than letting the player start it I think. A boost bar would be helpful with maybe limited boost.

This was the first game of the jam that I played that I felt like it was too short! More guns, enemies, bosses, and an endless mode please!

Great entry! You really nailed the outrun aesthetic. The radio waves corresponding to the colors used to kill enemies was a really smart idea!

The theme interpretation is probably the best I’ve seen in the jam. Using the mouse wheel to quickly change the gun tune during combat was tricky at first but satisfying to get down once I knew where the colors where.

The difficulty spiked during the last two waves and took a few tries to beat, but overall the curve was pretty nice. I had to pull out some advanced tactics at the end by memorizing which colors mapped to which number key to quickly switch back and forth. It felt satisfying once I got it down and was able to roll and dodge while firing off two shots at an enemy once I knew it would kill it.

The game is also really well polished. I also appreciate the tutorial, arrow pointing to objectives, camera movement, and checkpoint system. Somethings that I know takes time and effort to implement that not a lot of people notice while playing. I also enjoyed the story.

I spent most of the game just spamming the fire button, which had no downsides with infinite range. Adding an ammo or upgrade system would fix that. I also wish that there was a way to heal between waves, currently I just died at the beginning to spawn at the previous checkpoint if I needed to heal.

The trees got in the way during gameplay and I feel didn’t add anything besides aesthetic. They made the fights much more cramped and I kept getting stuck on them. A bigger arena would have been nice or a way to clear out some of the trees. I also had a couple of times that enemies spawned right on top of me, which was frustrating.

The Seagulls added some intense moments to the game, especially during the final wave. I’d wish that there was an animation to let you know when they were invulnerable, I just kept spamming the fire button until they died!

Overall a really solid entry and I had a lot of fun playing it, good job!

Thank you for the feedback!

The controls are probably the thing we got the most feedback on, and overall I wish we had more time to tweak it. I had to add a lot of edge cases to get it to work correctly and there are a ton more that needed to be addressed. The biggest issue was maintaining momentum when you enter a zone but not maintaining it in other parts of the game which added a lot of player states that turned the code into a big hacky mess.

I appreciate that you noticed some of the finer nuance to the mechanics to the game, it took a bit of work to get the mechanics to work together ‘smoothly’ and a lot of players gloss over it.

The booster zones also where just reverse gravity zones, you are correct that you have to stay in them for as long as possible in order to get the full boost. I realize that in other games with boosters they just add one single impulse to the players velocity which fixes this issue.

Making the game made me realize how hard metroidvanias plus platformers are to balance. Give the player too much and it just trivializes some platforming sections. We had a ton of cool upgrades but during testing players would miss them, which made the following sections harder. We had to limit just how much the player could get upgraded overall because of this.

Again thank you for the great detailed feedback!

Great game! I love using the gun to jet pack around.

The art feels very crisp, it’s easy to see what’s going on with the background being the right shades of the same color so it’s not clashing with the foreground, a small detail I appreciate. I also like the parallax effect that background objects have, along with the character, particle effects, and enemy animations. It makes the game feel polished and I can tell you spent a lot of time on it. Also I appreciate that you have a save system in place, which is impressive for a game jam game!

I agree with some of the other posts on the controls and bosses. Some feel too punishing, the attacks need to be a bit more telegraphed to give more time to dodge.

Also I think you run into the same issue that I did when making my metroidvania submission, which is to say that they are really hard to balance. I spent too long on your spider boss not knowing that you can get health upgrades later, which makes the fight much easier.

Overall, I can tell you spent a lot of work in the game. Good job!

Thank you for the feedback! Yeah I’m not really happy with some of the level design choices that I added in the game, you can pretty much tell exactly where and when we ran out of time and rushed to finish (the last level). I also wanted to put in the key/door mechanic somewhere since we spent time implementing it but that spot wasn’t the best place for it and we have gotten a bunch of feedback on it.

The wave initially was only going to exist in just one level but we decided to expand it to the entire game to fit better with the theme but yeah it needs tweaking for some of the levels where it’s just an annoyance. We had an idea for a level where you only get the wave to traverse but it was too frustrating waiting during play testing and if I sped up the wave it would go to fast and couldn’t be used for traversal.

For a final challenge we were going to have the player run all the way back to the beginning in an escape sequence and wanted the existing challenge levels to prepare for that. It wasn’t that interesting in play testing so it was scraped.

As for the spikes the collision is definitely an issue because it just checks if the player enters the tile to kill, which isn’t very forgiving. Initially it was more precise with each spike having it’s own collision box and processing, but the game started lagging with the hundreds of spikes that could exist on screen so I moved the check to be on the player position instead.

I’m most proud of the boss level and I really like how it turned out overall so I’m glad you liked it!

It would break using the booster zones then, you would launch and then immediately slow down instead of maintaining momentum.

One idea I had was to add a flag that turns off momentum when you leave a booster zone which reverts when you touch the ground or pulse. I’ve been trying to find other games that cleanly solves this issue but as far as I can tell they don’t really use gravity to propel the player but use a single force impulse.

Yeah there is dampening to horizontal movement but only when you press A/D. The reason for this is because I didn’t want to dampen movement after you are launched from a gravity zone. Looking back I should have added a “launched from grav zone” player state to account for this, but it was too late in the games development to go back and refactor and the player code was already turning into a hacky mess anyway. It’s something I’d like to go back and fix if we were to do a full release of the game.

Thank you for the feedback!

Yeah I spent a lot of time trying to get the controls to feel good. The main issue is that we decided to support both mouse and keyboard earlier on and this was the best compromise we could come up with. One solution I tried was to completely kill horizontal movement if you pulsed in the opposite direction but it made it feel more clunky. I definitely have more respect for smooth feeling controls in other platformers now!

Thank you! We spent a lot of work on it over the course of the month for the Game off game jam. I’m stoked you enjoyed it!

I like the take on theme in this game, plus the voice audio was really good!

The game was zoomed way far out on my mac though, and I had to bring the screen to my face and squint to see the screen.

Also I see that you are updating the game after submission. Per the game jam faq you should only update for critical bugs! https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2025/topic/5489423/frequently-asked-questions-faq#:~:text=Can%20I%20edit%20my%20game%20after%20submission

What a fun concept! As others have mentioned, the rounds are too long. I hope you keep developing the game with more items, it was fun knocking the customers around.

Also the performance was pretty good in the browser, I was expecting it to stutter with the colliding physics but it was pretty smooth.

I like the style, I wish I could just use the mouse to rotate the package instead of using the sliders on the sides.

I also wish that the times on the labels remained the same instead of being random so that I could memorize them and go faster.

The game isn’t working for me until I turned off my ad blocker FYI.

Nice visuals, but I wish there were more cases!

Super innovative game! I like the inspiration from slay the spire and others. Bullet themed deck builder is a super cool idea. Keep it up, I think you got something here.

Also the UI and character animations are great!

Love the music! It was confusing at first to have 3 different interact buttons.

Also how did you git the sprites to wiggle like that? I assume some sort of sin function/animation?

I like the music! Also pretty interesting mechanic of having to trap the crabs before you can eat them.

I love the exploding particle effects, very well done!

It was hard to know when to stop playing, is it endless? Some indicator of when the game would end and how long it would take would be nice!

Thank you for the feedback!

I spent a lot of time getting the colors right, it turns out that players can get easily confused so having it explicitly helped a lot during playtesting.

Thanks for the feedback. We initially had the wave only on one level but decided to add it to every level to keep with the game jam theme. It also led nicely into a small narrative of finding the source. We had ideas for levels that were specifically for using just the wave to platform but it proved to be too difficult during playtesting and we ran out of time to further refine it.

Level design was one of the last things to get done during the jam, in the future I plan to prioritize it earlier.

I like the wave effects that you added, it felt very ‘fluid’ when interacting with the surface.

Thanks for the feedback! We had an idea where you had to juggle a crab around to different buttons to unlock the exit but we ran out of time to implement it. Maybe in the future though!

I've been thinking of adding it for PC users. When I created it I wanted people to play it on mobile which doesn't easily allow that controlling both the player and shots like that.

Hi Mary, we have a game developer and music composer on our team. We are looking for an artist!

Lets connect on discord: @rygil