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Hi :) Thanks SO much for taking the time to play and give feedback. It's truly invaluable and I really appreciate it. I apologise for not making that clear, I can imagine it's quite frustrating not knowing why it's uploaded in this state lol - I'm actually working on it day and night (as much as I can) and the new version, which I can upload in abut 14 days (after the game jam voting has ended) is loads better already. The art reads much much better as I've spent hours studying Monkey Island (first two) and the LucasFilm Indiana Jones games in much more detail and realised how far off this current art style is. The characters and dungeon look much better now. So, now thanks to your advice, I know exactly what to work on next - making the dialogue sections clickable to remove (can't believe I didn't do that, it's annoying me now just having to keep testing it so it has been on my mind lol)  and be much more readable. Also, what you say about the verbs interacting with the items and inventory REALLY needs to be fixed so they're not glitching - that's definitely a priority now - thanks so much for pointing this stuff out. Sorry for going on, lol, but I really appreciate your feedback ;) 

Cheers,

Davy

Hey, thanks for taking the time to play. Yeah man I ran out of time to refine the controls. I get it feels actually quite bad and the enemies hitting Squeaky doesn't have the feedback I wanted. I'm not sure why but the left mouse button sensitivity is garbage compared to if you just use the SPACE key to fire. I think I just need to refine all that stuff a bit, and it will be more fun. Thanks so much anyway - yeah, it's totally supposed to be based on MSX/NES/microcomputer games from the mid/late 80s :D 

Hey man - if you fancy a fun old skool 8 bit style (Indiana Jones influenced) run n gun check this out :D

https://itch.io/jam/jamsepticeye/rate/3937916

Thanks so much for the positive feedback, it means a lot :D Yeah, it's nothing like what I planned but I'm pleased how the art assets turned out, as well as some handy components I made that can be used in the future ;) 

Yeah I ran out of time, unfortunately. It's not in any way, shape, or form a finished game, so I'd argue it isn't "broken", it's just about 35 hours into development, if that, and is not even close to being finished. I built the pixel art assets myself, I animated them, drew them, coloured them according to a strict palette. I built the entire project from nothing with my own components, as a challenge, I could have used one of various assets to make it easier in 35 hours, but I wanted to challenge myself and improve my coding, which I did, even though half of it wasn't implemented in this build. I set up the room mechanics, I made guns, including a shooter that moves in the direction the player is facing, I made a player controllernd movement logic, Enemy pathfinding routes, and various other components. I made enemy spawners and three tilesets. The Unity build took over 2 and a half hours, which I didn't expect, and that meant I couldn't get my final entry in - this is just a placeholder build, because I wanted to enter into the spirit of things and get a game in the jam anyway, regardless of its quality. Obviously, the version I have now is way better and will get better and better the more I iterate on it. It's not broken, it's hardly even been started.

Thanks for taking the time to play, anyway, I appreciate it.

Awesome little game. Fantastic effort in 72 hours, seriously. Getting the dice mechanic to work so well makes this entire experience work, and the graphics are funny, loved the different characters and enemies. Music also made me laugh, it's great and feels over the top. I think you should carry on with this theme, and so make the level design way more over the top to match the music. Like crazy maps, with, say, volcanoes erupting, or buildings collapsing or something. Just carnage everywhere as your little duck guy blasts away :D  

Main criticism is the bullets and gun fire. The blue is way too hard to see against the green. Like I say, I'd have maybe a grey, cityscape type background, or rocks and stone, and use maybe red gun sights and orangey red bullets etc etc
Just a suggestion, but a great effort - very well done :D

Hey :D thought this was a great effort for the time we had. Cool concept, the dice roll at the start was a cool addition. Funny enemies, but hard to tell if I was hitting them or not haha :D Great effort though, and definitely has the making of a fun little arena game!

Hey :D Great effort, I really like the dice mechanic, which has a load of potential for a game like this. I think you definitely need to speed everything up. The lasers I think should be a lot quicker, and same for the enemies - just ramp up that a bit and it will be a fun little shooter with a nice new mechanic.

One thing i think you need to address - make the scoring go in much higher increments. Only getting 1 point, for example, is kind of deflating. Maybe make a minimum score for a small ship like 50, and then pile on a 100 or 150 for different types, then a juicy bonus for the bosses. That way, when the high scores are achieved it feels much better to have 9000 points than 90, for example :D  Just my opinion, but hopefully it helps haha

Nice work ;)

Thanks so much :D Glad you enjoyed what I managed to get finshed, I have some cool ideas for this which I'm looking forward to trying ;)

yep no worries will check your game out now :)

Thanks for playing and taking the time. Yeh I badly ran out of time, and the unity 6 WebGL build took waaaaaaay longer than I expected lol, so I couldn't get my final build uploaded in time!  Anyway, thanks, and yeah no problem will check it out ;) 

Hey :D Thanks so much for the time and feedback. Yeah, haha, I'm sorry I couldn't get a better build up in time. I just wanted to get an entry in - but the Golden Dice, which were supposed to be something you collect and give you a random bonus depending on the roll, just didn't get in this version. It's a crappy version of what it should have been, but that's gamejams for you :D  Thanks so much, I'm glad there was something there, I'm excited to work on it a bit more and polish it up, just for fun ;)
 I will check out your game and rate it asap - thanks again ;) 

Hey :) Thanks for playing I really appreciate it! Haha yeah, unfortunately I ran out of time, and just could not get the level finished, and the build took ages, and then I saw that this level had kind of fallen apart tilemap wise, and yeah, just didn't have time to finish cos that room is quite a complicated puzzle involving pots, and pebbles and cunning deathtraps. But am working on it now, so hopefully will have updated version for the end of the month, after the jam voting period is over ;) 

Thanks man :D Yeah, it was a bit confusing and definitely wasted a lot of very valuable time - when you only have 72 hours the last thing you need is a distraction like that tbh. Yeah, defo, I'm always looking to enter them, just for the learning experience ;)

Thanks man :D yeah, I ran out of time, had a load of SFX lined up but the build took way too long in the end!

Thanks, much appreciate the feedback  :D Glad you like him - it's a shame I completely ran out of time to finish the game - but when I do, hopefully he'll really shine ;)

Haha thanks :D Yeah I quite like him, I have to say. Cheers for taking the time and appreciate the feedback. I will check your game out now ;)

Thanks for the feedback, though it's not compulsory. However, I'll definitely try and learn to make games in 72 hours better.

Hey man - Thanks so much for the feedback and taking the time to give it a go. Yeah, unfortunately this is just the placeholder build I put in to make sure the game was in the jam, but it lacks sound, and now I see the spawning doesn't work properly, so the enemies just run out after a few lol. Couldn't get the build with effects, completed tilemaps and the actual Golden Dice in it (that gives you bonus scores and stuff) finished in time, which also had the Playgama SDK attached. So all in all, I probably should just not entered haha :D

Yeh I made all the art and coded it all, it's supposed to be like an MSX game or something (I used the MSX palette) ;)

  thanks, I'll make sure I play and rate your game asap ;) 

Thanks :D Ah okay, may be a bug, but if you push the sword, then it should work - if you can pick up two swords with the cursor before that's happened, that's probably a bug ;) 

I'm working on it over the next month and will upload the latest version when the jam deadline is done, hopefully will be much improved, thanks for the interest and support, much appreciated :D

Hey :D Thank you so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it!  Ah yeah, unfortunately, I ran out of time, so it should be obvious through clues in the dialogue that you need to do the opposite to pulling it out ;) Like there's a really bad last mionute clue to that if you look at the sword n the stone (or maybe it's USE haha I'll have to double check, one of them triggers a dialogue clue) 

I had so much dialogue, though, it all got a bit rushed and playing it back through a few times, I see how confusing that is! So I've been working on the start ever since, and hopefully it's much easier to follow now.

Thanks for the note about dialogue font size, that's really helpful ;) I'll make sure to change that. 

Again, thanks so much, I really appreciate your feedback ;) 

Amazing fun game, just absolutely nails pretty much everything, including the ridiculously overpowered mechanic :'D In the end I just spammed the gym and got a lot of fun until pressing Q got just a bit too much tbh, but in a GOOD way ;) 

Awesome art and the sound was perfect, -would love to see more special moves for the player, I'm sure you could do some really funny stuff. More elaborate control system might be worth looking at as this could definitely fly commercially, I think, with jusssst a little scope added. Great idea, amazingly well executed, especially in the time!

Brilliantly executed as far as sound and art go, and really awesome concept. The gun was brilliant, loved the overpowered feel of it, and was a lot of fun to play around with.

However, had a bit of an issue with sprites rotating on the Z axis - whenever I used the gun and got that super cool effect of being thrown back and blowing everything up, my character would end up facing in a weird direction, diagonally up or facing the other way diagonally. If you freeze their rotation on the Z axis, i.e. the axis going away into the screen and stop any rotating around, then the sprite will always stay on its feet facing forward. I think that would improve the gameplay experience quite a lot, as I often got stuck facing a bad way :D

Got a bit stuck behind obstacles after they've been blown away as well, so maybe you could make them not interact with the physics anymore once they've been blown up, or if you want them as new obstacles, maybe just design the level so the player can't get stuck behind them.

Great effort though, only reason I'm going on about the stuff above is cos I really enjoyed this and can see a lot of potential here, so definitely keep going with it ;)

This was an amazing effort, I think, and really is impressive in the time - the dialogue, the characters etc are great, gameplay loop is pretty cool and the audio is also amazing. Top effort. I mean, it was difficult, but then so it should be. Love the time mechanic, it works great, and also really cool artwork. For 9 days, this is genuinely very impressive to me - I salute your effort and I'm sure it's going to do pretty well :D 

Hey :D I don't know what exactly you have got here, but you DEFINITELY have something. It's super cool how the physics work, I really think you need to work on a theme and try and implement it with this idea of the smiley ball going CRAZY - you need more enemies, I think - you should look at classic Breakout clones (Arkanoid for instance) and maye implement some blocks to smash with enemies behind? Or make more enemies that just fly around into the ball and stuff.
I think you could introduce a funny theme - like the ball could be a spider, with a web thing that bounces around, or, if you use your imagination, maybe it could be a thief, trying to steal jewels from the museum...or how about a SPIDER THIEF???  :D There are so many possibilities, I think you should work on refining the awesome physics idea and also work up a funny, fun theme that people will enjoy spending 20 minutes playing on the way to work on their phone, or when they are looking for some light relief on Steam after a session on Stelleris or something like that.

Awesome idea and great effort though!

Hey - haha thanks, yeah I had ALOT of fun making those sprites - was so satisfying when it all started to work (took a while - spent hourssss making the fire animations lol, but it was defo worth it). I hope to make most of the village destructible and flammable in the near future :D Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it and the feedback ;) 

Hey - wow thanks so much, that's really cool of you to say, and I really appreciate the feedback :D  yeah if can get the stuff I have written (scribbled...) on various bits of paper onto screen (and into code haha) then I hope I can take this to another level - we'll see but thanks for your time, I will check out your game this evening ;) 

Hey - thanks for trying anyway, I really appreciate your time and the feedback. Glad you got some enjoyment out of it, and thanks for the inspiring encouragement ;D Hopefully I can make this a better and more finished game over the next few months ;) 

haha thanks glad you enjoyed the destruction - the plan was always to have much much more of it, so hopefully will develop that over next few months 😁👍

Cheers, really appreciate the time and will check your game out as soon as can 🙌

Hey - thanks so much for the feedback and taking the time to try it out. Haha yeah I really wish I had a few more days and I would have had quite a cool loop I reckon, but just ran out of time quite dramatically in the last couple of days 😆😅 

Thanks, really appreciate the comment and will play yours asap and let ya know 👍

Okay so this is pretty cool. I'm still trying to work out what exactly to do to get the keycard, but it's a great concept and I'm having a lot of fun trying it out. Also, great work with the sound - that's awesome. Maybe you could explain the whole concept, and what is going on, a bit more at the start within some of those story cut scene dialogue bits. You could maybe do with a spell check on some of those as well, but they look great and add to the whole atmosphere. Super cool effort, and I'll have another go and see if I can work it out ;) 

Great effort, and cool idea! I love to see a side-scrolling shmup with cool Robocop/Turrican vibes, and I enjoyed it a lot. Would be super cool with old school 8-bit or 16-bit artwork, but I love that stuff, so probably biased ;) It was proper hard though, didn't end up surviving that long but will defo give it a few more goes for sure!

Thanks - just to clarify though, I made the sprites and all that (I already had a Frankie I did a few months back so just touched him up, if you forgive the expression ;D)  in the preceding days and did a fair bit of the main programming then as well, and THEN I tried implementing sound and particles etc with a day and a half left and that sucked all the 36 hrs away, so I can't claim to have made all that pixel art in 36 hours, more like 5 - 7  days ;)  

Hey - thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it ;) Yeah, same lol -  I ran out of time unfortunately (didn't we all haha?) but basically if you survive long enough to knock down all the houses etc then that would be pretty amazing, as you do actually die I the game - everytime the mob gets close they hit you with their pitchforks and the fire from torches and general flmes hurts you as well, so it's just survive as long as you can :D

Also, thanks for the note on sound - yeah, coming from Unity, I found mixing sounds etc basically impossible in the time I had - only got into it by the last 36 hours. Definitely going to learn all about that and improve the game over next few weeks.

Thanks for playing, and I will definitely check your game out asap ;) 

Hey :D Thanks for the feedback. Yeah I wish I had a couple more days to make it much clearer on what to do - the original plan was to have a definite end level point where he gets to but I  just ran out of time so had to make the decision on Friday to just make it survive as long as you can in this demo ;) Thanks so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it - will check your game out now!

Hey man :D First, I'm so sorry it took me so long to reply! I've been fully engaged in a new project for the past 3 weeks, something a bit different aimed at mobile but it's teaching me a lot and I'm even considering making this into a mob game - not sure if it would work at all tbh but it'd be something a bit different at least haha ;) 

Thanks for the crits - they are super helpful :D Yeah I actually sandwiched a couple of projects I had made a while back - a wordle tutorial I made when I was learning C# for unity being one of them, which I melded into Codsworths Machine :D I do like how it came together. I've been trying to refine and add more features and see if I can visualise this as a game worthy of Steam.

Yeah man the shadows I stupidly made as part of the actual sprites above them, which caused my tilemaps to clash and make it so the characters go behind the shadow - proper annoying but I'm pretty sure that's an easy fix, just need to make the shadows separate and on a lower grid layer!

Thanks for the tips, they are spot on. I've made Alex quite a bit faster, and have pretty much sorted the colliders now. That's annoying he wonders off the screen lol, thought I'd sorted that. Think I've confined the cinecamera too much on the sides as there are colliders there somewhere haha.

Thanks SO much for your time, and really sorry it took me so long to answer, tbh I hadn't checked Itch for a while cos I've been working on this mobile app. It's incredibly helpful and I really appreciate your time and expertise - thanks, man :D   

Hope Tyrants Tower is coming on okay - you should defo look to get that on Steam, it's definitely up to that standard I think ;)  If you ever want any playtesting done or brainstorming help definitely let me know in the Discord and I'd be well up for helping out!

Hey man, as I said in the Discord, I love how much this has come on. Graphics are looking really cool now, and the loop is great. Can't wait to see what features you add over next few iterations :D

I was thinking, maybe you should make some other method where Card Shop Kid gets his cards from? Not that it's a big deal, but it seems the shop being there is a slight immersion breaker in that any of them could get there. Could he maybe have an Animon contact? Like, going off on one, could he maybe even have an actual Animon card that has come to life, that can get him rare cards in exchange for completing a task or something,  and then, I dunno, some kind of mysterious Animon card dealer that gives behind the shop or something. Just a thought, I mean it's great as it is, but it just occurred to me you could have a whole row of shops at the top that maybe link into other little sub-taks, or sub levels even.

Again, just throwing random shit out there haha, you know I love this, and totally impressed with how far it's come on graphics wise. I really do think you should make some idle anims as well though, like I know a lot of 90s games (especially on GB and stuff) didn't go for them so much, but I do think it would add to the vibe of the characters.

Anyway, amazing work, keep going cos I think you're defo onto something ;) 

Hey man :D  Wow this has come on a lot - I love the main character sprite, really cool. It opens up the question of the theme plot, characters etc. I'm curious to know now, cos the main sprite is so cool. I really want to see some more animations on him though. Enemies are cool, but I think you can come up with loads more to add variation.

Personally, I love the idea of a bullet hell like this, I was tempted to do one myself back in Bootcamp 00, and playing this has restored my appetite a bit.

If you are going commercial, I think you need to work on these things as a priority:

a) game surface - it's already looking good, but you need story, plot, character and a reason for the enemy invasion to tie it all together. Have some fun, kick back with a drink (or whatever :D) and think about all that stuff.  Then you can add lore, and maybe that will inform you/your artist of the kind of animations etc that will match the personality of your hero. And the same applies to enemies. On which note:

b) enemy variations, especially in the patterns they use. Go more towards bullet hells like Mushihimesama, and maybe amp it up to those levels as you progress and perhaps have more single enemies that fire out bullet hell variation patterns. I think that way it adds more challenge and also elements of interest. Like If those owls are at different levels, and maybe produce different but incredibly cunning bullet patterns, I feel like that would give the enemies more personality. It'll be like "oh no, it's the RED owl" or whatever :D 

Anyway, I really enjoyed playing and love how far it has come on. The game has more personality and direction now, and I think it could be a cool little bullet hell, with the right elements added.

Great work, man, I look forward to seeing where it goes :D 

Hey :D First of all, great effort in finishing in the time you did. It's fun to play, and I especially like the bow mechanic. you've really executed that well. I'd be tempted to remove his two attacks at the start so you have to find the bow to be able to beat the orcs. Definitely needs more enemies, but I see this is a prototype for another project so I'm guessing that's just something you don't really need to implement/test in this version, but I think it'd make it more fun with archer orcs, or maybe wizard orcs would be better, firing firebolts and stuff ;)

Graphics are great, love the pixel art, and the music is spot on, and also love how you've implemented the sound FX. It's not easy coordinating all that with jumping, attacking etc etc

It's super cool how you've done the treasure chests - it's quite satisfying Mario-ing them into a reward :D 

My only real criticism is the jumps. They feel unnatural, he goes way too high too quickly (IMHO of course) and it does seem that it's the one thing you haven't spent as much time on - I totally get that, I made a platformer before in the last camp and my jumps need quite a bit of work to sort out - not sure if you had the same experience, but it is a real rabbit hole - in mine I had ledges, which were basically triggers, which then boosted the jump, and that took ages and I still haven't really got it down properly. So I'm not saying your jumps are bad, they're good, but they just make it way too easy to complete. I think it comes with the sparse level design. Like, if you were making this as a game, I think you'd need to pad out the levels, improve the platforms and work out more precise jumps and sort places where the player may land, and possible hazards around the spots where he'll end up.

I'm just thinking out loud, no expert or anything, and you've obviously done a great job with this, but if you were looking for areas to improve, those would be my suggestions ;)

But, yeah, amazing effort in the time - you produced a fun and readable 2D pixel art platformer in a very quick time, and it's really cool how you've been updating it cos you got the prototype done so quickly - I should take a few tips haha :D

Great work, man, look forward to seeing how it progresses!

Thanks so much for the feedback, man, I really appreciate it :D Those are all great points and I think will definitely improve it a lot - I will work on implementing the suggestions. Thanks for the compliments as well, I do enjoy making the pixel art and I'm glad it comes across okay :D Cheers, I'll make sure I get playing your game as soon as possible