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Dr. Mel says the satisfaction is strong in this game

EDIT: Aight this game is among my personal favorites of what I've played so far in this jam, it deserves more than a throwaway vaguely positive comment lol

In terms of presentation and creativity, this game absolutely knocks it out of the park. Everything feels really original and well thought-out. Honestly, it looks like something you'd see on Steam Greenlight a couple of years ago, not something made for a Game Jam.

Weirdly, though, I think that's my main criticism of this game: it really doesn't a game jam game in terms of scope. That's not me saying the game is bad, that's me saying the potential for this game is well beyond what a game jam is made for, at least in my opinion. For example, I think the connections to the theme of "falling" are somewhat questionable since the words don't quite "fall into place" and the pachinko part seems like a supplementary part of the game, not the main mechanic the game is built around (that would be the sentence completion). In addition, I think certain mechanics just need more time in the oven to work as well as they could. In particular, it feels bad when a player ends up with no words to complete the second sentence due to bad luck, and even some of the finished sentences at the end of the game feel really confusing rather than funny. I'm not sure there's a way to really fix these problems other than just more dev time than a game jam normally allows.

But yeah, all in all this was really cool to see, and I really hope you continue development on it. This absolutely has the potential to become a "full" game and may even work as a physical board game. I'll definitely be following this in the future!

Absolutely STELLAR presentation and creativity! Played to the end and enjoyed it a lot!

My only gripes have to do with the gameplay. There's a nice, peaceful feel to the game especially with the slow fall, but that means it can take a lot of time to get back to a missed crystal. I also kinda wish there was more direction in terms of where the crystals were especially since the enemies were distracting enough to get me off the path I planned a couple times.  An ultimately minor annoyance, yes, but one that was noticeable.

Finally, I'm curious why there's both a health and shield bar? There seemed to be plentiful crystals for both and I never saw a reason to not use the shield every time I was in the air. Except on the final level, where the shield seemed to have no use.

Really neat! I loved the main menu and its transition into the game but the UI was broken and the background visuals kinda hurt my eyes when they were moving too fast so I had to stop playing a bit earlier than I would have liked. Still, I think this game shows that a simple concept can still feel really complete and fun!

I might just be bad at platformers but man, I got infuriated with this game. But strangely enough, it...kinda worked out? Like, I'd be thinking of just quitting the game after not making a jump for the umpteenth time, and then accidentally find one of the secrets (which were awesome, btw) and decide to keep going. Reminds me of Cat Mario a bit.

From a mechanics perspective though, this was interesting. The design was really thoughtful in terms of cheese placement which added a neat planning element to the game. My main criticism is just to give the player time to use it by cutting out the leaps of faith where you essentially had to jump into a seemingly empty pit. I'd also replace the grey gradient-cloud-rectangle thing that acts as a death zone with spikes. Early on I kept either mistaking those things for platforms and then dying, which was a bit frustrating.

I like the main mechanic but I think the game needs to be a bit faster to support it. Right now the controls feel really floaty and there's typically enough time to jump around floating platforms that are blocking your path such that I only needed to use pickaxes in emergency situations. Once I got to around 30k it started getting frantic and enjoyable, but it takes a pretty long time to get there.

Pretty neat concept but yeah, it seems there was a lot left out. For example, it's pretty easy to just skip over enemies by falling to the final platform immediately. That said, the combat was really fun once I got the hang of it, and I think it'd be really cool to see a more complete version of this.

Also at one point one of the enemies fell on top of me and started teleporting in and out of the screen, that was legit terrifying lol

Thanks for playing! To beat the levels you need to shoot the meteors in the right place to counteract their motion and then send them to the top of the screen. You can also perform a melee attack once it is charged by aiming your cursor and pressing space bar, which barely affects large meteors but sends smaller ones flying. Sorry about the audio, I would recommend muting it if the lasers are too loud because it gets a LOT worse later in the game lol (to the point that I almost included a headphone warning due to the final level). Hope you try it again!

Thanks! I am really curious to see what levels will be considered the hardest. For me, I still have difficulty with Level 5 even after playtesting it a whole bunch.

Thanks! The controls are currently something of an acquired taste it seems. I found that I got used to them while playtesting, but I think the game’s not long enough to allow other people to do the same. If I do change them then I imagine I’ll give more control over jump height since height can be a problem with the levels that have those horizontal meteors.

Thank you! There actually is a tiny bit of invincibility when touching a meteor, just not a whole lot of it. The reason it’s not higher is to encourage using bullets to stop the meteors before punching them. I can look into making the window of invincibility higher if I continue this game though!

Hi! Thanks for your response. 

Trying to balance creating more timelines was definitely one of the harder things here, since I didn’t want players to spam the button every time it was available, but I also didn’t want them to avoid it completely. I definitely agree I balanced it too much towards the latter, but there are some features that discourage camping the crystal. 

If I remember correctly, camping the crystal actually makes it impossible or at least very hard to hit some enemies once their spawn rate caps out, as the spaceship can only fire at certain angles. This might not be obvious in motion, but it’s easier to see if you head towards the center of the screen and then fire towards one of the screen corners. 

The idea is that you then need to keep moving and spreading your experience gain across timelines, which then allows you to have more lasers on screen during the end game. It’s possible that the firing rate you have late game circumvents this measure when the enemies get closer to the crystal due to the width of the lasers, though.

I think a 5 minute coding fix to this problem would just be capping the firing rate buff earlier, as right now the firing rate literally caps out at how fast Scratch can run a three block loop. Oh well. Too late for that I suppose. That’s what I get for only having the menu screen complete 6 hours before the deadline! (I did set up a roadmap and mechanics list much earlier in the week, which is what allowed me to still have a working submission at all!)

Also, I’m absolutely interested in exploring this concept more! This game was originally supposed to be closer to something like Bloons Tower Defense, complete with enemy variants and graphics more complex than literal blue ovals representing enemies, but I had to give up on this once I realized I needed more coding experience. I also want to make a Roguelike that could somehow implement mechanics similar to what I have here, but again, I definitely need more coding experience first.

Thanks again for playing!