itch.io

I actually didn't even see the furthest reticle the first couple of times playing, somehow, but seeing it did make the game much easier. I like the upbeat artstyle, and I love the crash-dump game over frame a lot with the ball-pen balls adding insult to injury. It helped with having to see it so many times 🥹 I'm not sure if you modelled everything yourself; really impressive if so. It all fit well together.

I agree that stopping at the boss kind of felt like I was running into a wall; and also that a little hit confirm animation against the boss would help it feel like shots were connecting aside from just the HP bar moving down. Also, I kept trying to grab the heart above the little boat right before the boss, but somehow I kept jumping through the boat, missing the heart and nearly (or fully lol) killing myself. That might have just been me. This is one of the first jam games I played - I meant to comment much earlier and realized I never did. It's memorable - nice job on this submission!

Nobody's said this yet but it must be said: the mech looks really good. It grabs your eye when looking at the submission thumbnails, and continues to look good upon further inspection. The wings, the weapon, shield, helmet, breastplate and posture, there are so many good things happening on there. 

And the trees done with that same ornamented style you use along the game page borders is a crazy idea, which actually looks good. No other trees look like that, it's a bold choice, but I think it looks really interesting and puts you in place in the game.

This is a completely different artistic direction, but look at the ground textures... In the game setting, they look like interesting ground with variably compacted dirt and bedrock. But it also kind of looks like distant parallax forest:

The same can be said for each of the ground textures, they all kind of take you to a place. Just something I noticed. Anyway, I like your pixel art. The mech is fantastic and the trees are so interesting!

Using the level design is a pretty clean choice, yeah. UI can be useful but it has its own problems like you mentioned (and to make it feel 'in character'). 

I'm curious how the camera would have moved - like third-person-shooter style, where your aim becomes closer to the player character perspective? That would be a huge change, but it could also look good - I'm not sure how else the camera would move around after having played the top-down version. TPS-style would probably by itself make identifying where to go next a lot easier even without having to change the level design, if that's what you're talking about, since you could just look around for any remaining objectives in a room at that point. That's a pretty big shift from where things are currently so I'm not sure if that's what you mean.

Also, on the levels - not so much the level design, but the environmental art lol: I did notice you did have actual rooms with creatures in them, which stuck out as a good detail for establishing 'this is a lab', alongside the tubes along the walls. Maybe having some more of the immersion-tubes in some arrays on the floor might help provide some visual anchoring? I liked the rooms though, their inclusion made a big difference in the atmosphere, to me. If you kept developing this, I imagine some interactivity with the rooms would open up a lot of opportunities.

In my initial comment, I said that the colored circles were more helpful than the stacked cards for indicating which finishers/damage types to use - this was sort of true and sort of not true. The useful part of the circles is that it was easy to if multiple enemies had the same damage condition; the useful part of the cards was seeing what damage condition came next, to quickly chain them together. That's part of what actually made this game fun for me was successfully chaining damage types, and especially if I could do it to multiple enemies. If there were a way of unifying those displays, like... a circle with a prominent (current) damage type vulnerability on top, and a secondary vulnerability on bottom (more than 2 might quickly become visually overwhelming?), it might give the player the best of both worlds? But any way to encourage the player to be able to read any potentially good sequences effectively - it might open the door to stuff like "there are 2 mobs with damage type A then C, 2 with type B then C, and 4 with type C; if I quickly hit A and B, I can then wipe out all 7 with C" which would feel good. The mechanic regardless of implementation is kind of like cycling antibiotics. Or... bejewled? I wonder how a wildcard damage type would do, on either a lengthy cooldown or use-once item or something. That kind of thing would probably make more sense the longer your game got.

Sorry this got long. To wrap it up, I think this was a total success especially for a solo developer. I agree audio would be great, maybe next time you'll be able to get some in without having to sacrifice too much somewhere else. It can be hard to get "right enough" so it's useful or cool, but also not annoying, especially for stuff that happens constantly like the primary fire. That in particular would have taken some time to get right. Not right can definitely be worse than silent. As it stands I think you got a ton accomplished. TWO bosses! Nice job again, and thanks for reading (sorry; brevity is a muscle)

I smiled at the deliberate wording of "That'll be 100 cents" .

In terms of lore, as a bastion of his community, it's good the shopkeeper holds a standard. Everyone pays. Our hero needs to learn about responsibility. And I need to learn about not crashing into a wall at 50 coins. 😖

Nice job on the map generation and the wallriding mechanic!

This is funny! I've smiled or laughed way more times than I expected going into this. 

It's interesting to see peoples' strengths manifest in the games they make. A game made by a lone sound designer will probably be a closed room where all of the action is happening right on the other side of the door; from a lone composer, probably a great soundtrack to hear while the player wanders along a simple but suitable setting; and yours, by an obvious writer, is an exuberant story following a lot of *very different* characters thrown into a tense situation with some thick world-building. I think this is good and enjoyable work - it's also the only VN I've played/read/experienced. For whatever it's worth, I think it does a great job of entertaining.

Also, it seems you really committed with those socks lol. At first it was just the one sock, and I was ready for that - but then there was another -- makes sense -- and then we were onto the 6th sock... if what happened to these socks is non-reversible, hopefully someone will be around to appreciate your walks from bed to the coffee machine in the mornings, now that the jam has concluded.

Nice work, and all the best!

The art style and movement animations I thought were great - some of the most kinetically-satisfying animations I've seen from the submissions I've played so far. I also really like the concept of a genuine one-on-one melee engagement with with strategic mechanics like blocking, rolling, and evidently some combo attacks that asked for some rhythm from the player.

I struggled with this one, but I like the concept a lot. Props to you for taking it on, as I can only imagine this type of combat is difficult to develop (and to animate - again, very nice job there) - I'm not sure if the gameplay feels the way you want it to feel, but as it is I definitely struggled a lot.

I came back to this entry tonight just to hear the opening music again. It does such a good job of capturing that cathartic but tense "there's something in the air / something bigger is happening" feeling, and wonder, nature, and power. Really, really beautiful work. I'm taking notes, and not just on this project! Thanks for sharing your work!

Did you *procedurally* animate those legs? If so, holy cow, nice work. Nice work either way. Climbing up stairs was slower, but was also really satisfying to see. I agree with an earlier comment - if you have some kind of combat scenario that took place on a hillside in a forest-y setting, this thing would shine visually so much. 

The explosions from the 85mm rounds looked great - I think the autocannon would do really well with a more subtle tracer round VFX and a punchier (and louder) SFX. I'll also second that I found the autocannon more difficult to aim with - not sure why; it might be because the reticle was a little floaty, or sensitivity was high, or the bullets are actual projectiles - not sure which it was. I also noticed that if you initiated a slide, you could slide indefinitely by holding that movement direction - it'd be interesting to try this as it gets more and more dialed-in, as I think these kinds of movement mechanics + animations are super juicy. 

Very strong start, nice work! The tutorial worked just fine as a game loop for submission purposes IMO. I had a good time just running around and clearing the vehicles. Of course, a real scenario would go hard. Best of luck, and great submission!

I really like some of the aesthetic choices here. Enemy models and movements, the menu navigation camera focus and the aesthetic of the hub area in general, all were cool. The colors are definitely "hot". The gameplay loop is actually pretty fun, the main challenge of course being the controls - I definitely found them a little weird, I walked off the edge first-thing (and so did an enemy :D) and gradually found my bearings over a few minutes. Also, I noticed all of the SFX were bitcrushed - I agree that some more/more-matched sound design would add a lot to the game feel. The opener piano jingle + SFX stab as the game loads was really good, imo.

I noticed the mouse cursor position and the aim of the ranged weapon don't appear to be totally aligned - I had to aim above targets to hit them, but I'm aware dialing in player character aim vs. mouse placement is usually a lot less clear than it seems. I'm also not sure if I was receiving upgrades, or if I needed to select them, somehow.... I didn't find a way to interact with the upgrade icons/the monitors,  or anything nearby except for "Next-->", so I hope I was doing that correctly? Lastly, the UI does feel like it's blocking the upper-right of the player FOV.

Random note, I think if the player has 2 instances of the game open, the death screen is blank, so alt+F4ing was the only way to retry (until I realized I had an instance open already).

All in all, I think this is a good entry - not even taking into consideration this is the first game jam for both of you. Congratulations! The animations, modelling and overall stylistic choices I think reflect very positively on you. Looking forward to seeing more!

Man, if you're motivated enough you totally should IMO. This was really solo? Damn!

Nice selection of music & SFX -- but also well-implemented to behave properly. Also, the VFX work on weapon #2.... I only ever used that during the boss fight for the finisher, basically, but it looked and sounded really good. I love the cel shading, and the weapons swaying with the mouse movements was clean and good-looking and -feeling. As soon as I tried the movement and different weapons out in your tutorial zone, I had a good feeling the game would be a good one lol.

The movement feel is in a good state - I think a little more consistency on how the drill launches (or else a communication about any internal cooldown that might exist, or if there's a charge threshold) would help out a bit with predictability. The player is a bit floaty, which sometimes helps a lot with drilling those airborne drones down, but sometimes leaves the player feeling a little bit vulnerable (drill dashing pretty much lets you dodge everything though - it's really powerful, although dashing around does mean doing little else if you're e.g. fighting the boss). If you could land on drones, it'd be really satisfying to take them down while riding them. Not the exploding ones of course.

Oh yeah, and the weapon balance... Balancing is rare during jams, but weapon 2 definitely felt underpowered for a charged projectile. Minigun running out of ammo quickly was a bit problematic as well, but I ended up just embracing drill-only after a point and found that pretty fun. This is always an interesting problem to solve, because how your weapons are balanced depends on what circumstances you want them to work well in, and how your enemy encounter & somewhat level or character (progression) design facilitate those circumstances arising, so there might be a mechanical justification for choices presented. And then it's up to whether you want a clear-cut player decision-making tree based on those circumstances, or if you'd rather open up the player to play with whatever strategy they want using, using builds, upgrades, or something else.

The boss whacked me a good number of times, but sprinting around him clockwise holding W and A lets you drill the whole first 66% of his HP away in a couiple of seconds without taking any damage. The rest is definitely better handled from range - at least, with how I was moving. I'm sure there's a way. There's always a way for a melee-only run.

This might be my TF2 influence, but holding right click to spin up the minigun pre-emptively without firing would also be pretty sweet. Naturally, jam games have tighter scopes - with a more developed map(s), and maybe some more movement mechanics to make use of well-placed props/walls/platforms etc., this would only get even better. Same with enemy diversity. And, for some people of course, plot lol. The mechanics are going in a very fine direction so far.

All in all, GREAT submission! Seriously good work, keep it up - looking forward to seeing what you do.

I liked the artstyle, especially the boss and his shop. The movements and bull speed were fast-paced enough to give this game a little bit of challenge lol. I failed twice out of I think 5 runs, and totally forgot to use the dash at all for the first four, which did help. No bugs, though! 

I liked the SFX selection. The shotgun was maybe a bit roomy, instead of as boomy as it might have been; I think the pistol was actually my favorite sound. The music was also good for each setting it appeared in. In between encounters, the 'at rest' music sort of adds to the grunginess of the boss lol. Also, is he bobbing his head with the beat of the music? Fun submission!

Even in the opening dialogue one must exercise discipline with the spacebar!

Well, I went straight for the worms making the breathing sounds, and when I read that right click was saw, I decided to find out whether I could kill them. No, but you could send them back into their hole for a short time. Some distance attenuation on the worms would help gauge whether the player has time to continue drilling a rock or not; the fact that the entire map can hear a worm on the opposite end can make gathering vs. repositioning more confusing than I think it needs to be. Sometimes tunnels would give you directinoal cues which gave a clear indicator of the worm's ETA, but some audio focus on that area specifically could really change the atmosphere for the better and open up more opportunities.

It'd be nice to get some reward for the end of an expedition that extends beyond a single run; currently it seems every expedition exists in a vacuum and has no impact on anything that comes after. Plot progression, mech progression, or at the most basic, keeping a running tally of total income earned (and maybe adding a simple win condition like "get $50,000 to bring your family and become citizens") would all add some depth and incentive to the game loop.

The atmosphere was good in terms of both visual aesthetic and aural ambience. The worm sounds worked even if the distance attenuation was absent. I like the cockpit, it was flavorful and unobtrusive. Not sure if the levels were procedural, but this is a nice start to a bigger game, and as it is, is a technically functioning game loop - tying runs together with a running tally or something would definitely bring it home. I'd almost prefer lore progression over tech, at least to start, especially given the possible unwillingness of the mining operation to invest anything into their equipment should one of their pilots (the player) start to make headway. 

Well done on a good submission. I enjoyed the darker theme, as well as the plot outlined in the game page provided. If you continue at all after the jam period, hopefully you tie more of that plot into the gameplay, as I think it would go a long way. 

Wow, interesting concept for combat. The colorful indicators on the mob heads themselves, rather than the icons stacked above them, proved really useful when dealing with groups of enemies. The idea that you need to create your window to aggress by disabling a shield is an idea you usually see reserved for boss encounters (and it worked well when that actually manifested in your game, too). Here are some of the things I noticed:

- it wasn't clear if I should be hitting enemies with either of the two projectiles, or..... center them in the middle. It wasn't until I fought the shieldless enemies that unlocked each door that I saw that centering them between the two lasers was technically correct. This was a bit visually confusing.
- Especially in the second room, I had to hunt for enemies back and forth a few times before I could get the door to unlock. An ability to zoom out, or a minimap, or having key enemies whose defeat is required for progression make their way toward you, or some type of indicator, would help a lot to reduce 'wandering' that didn't add to the game, in my experience.
- I agree that use of number keys wasn't very ergonomic, but at the same time, it was clear. The concept was neat. The fact that it seemed like a fairly significant investment was required to terminate mobs was offset by the fact that there was HP regeneration. It took a few tries before I understood the attack ranges for the specialty attacks.

You had two bosses. Two bosses! The first one felt very boss-like, what a fake-out to then find another - and this time without the shield mechanic, but with a lot more projectiles. I almost died fighting the second boss, until I realized if I just circled around it at a decent range, rather than move back and forth, it was easy to avoid most attacks and let the HP regen tick everything back up until it died. 

Overall, interesting game idea. Traversal and ergonomics could use some love, in my opinion -- and of course, SFX and ambience (music optionally) would do a whole lot! -- but this was worth the playthrough. Because every jam game is a compromise on scope, I wonder what other ideas you might have had on gameplay tuning, visuals/audio, or features, if implementation time weren't a consideration? Nice work, and congratulations on your submission!

Really notably good storytelling at the beginning. The plot, dialogue, art and music selection/timing were not only not cringe, but each aspect of it was well-done and believable. Unfortunately, I don't own a controller, so.... that's the degree to which I was able to participate. I can say the flashy, blue, warping VFX looked interesting, though. Also, it seemed like the player gets dropped into... outer space, once combat starts? For some reason I figured this was a ground-level thing, but given my inability to progress any further, I can't establish any further context. 

Sorry I wasn't able to do more. Congratulations on your submission, either way! The execution on setting up a story that the player immediately wants to participate in was actually impressive.

Interesting ideas for upgrade pacing. I didn't realize on my first playthrough that I could use V, Q and E. While I didn't actually need any of those to complete the game without hitting a critical failure/upgrade point, it did make the game feel even easier. I wasn't able to get the secondary fire to work.

Interestingly, WASD moved my reticle while I held the button, and reset the reticle after releasing - not sure if this was intended behavior. I also ran into an issue where the game played itself to the end without stopping at each group of enemies; that happened after alt-tabbing during a playthrough.

Some camera slowly bobbing and weaving while stationary, and having a bit of inertia when starting to move or stopping, would make the gameplay feel more natural, I think - rather than GO | STOP, it'd probably feel a bit more like the player was flying.

Neat project, nice job on your submission!

Man, the pixel art is amazing. I recognize this is a start and not as complete as you'd hoped, so aside the content/battle variety, I'll just say on the directional input with keyboard - it did seem a little stiff. I recognize it's based on a grid; perhaps banking a keyboard input within a certain window, to execute upon reaching the next block in the existing movement path, could go a ways to make it feel snappier? It's interesting that you can play with a mouse, too, though - I actually haven't seen that before in this style of game.

All in all, very comfy-looking RPG-style game. With your hub area, the artstyle (definitely), functional battle system and the lore, you've got a very interesting project on your hands. I'm curious what you'd do with the battles to encourage more consideration by the player? I was also curious about the crystals - I think your answer there is a good one. Looking forward to seeing what you do. Cool submission!

This is your first project in Godot, and first game jam? Really nicely done. In my opinion you did really well coming up with a concept and considering different gameplay mechanics, and then consolidating all of your ideas into something playable at the end of the development period - one that people are clearly enjoying, even if it doesn't capture all of the brainstorming you did earlier on. As it stands, of course it would be even better with more content - but it very much is a game, and it'd be interesting to see how you would change it up with some more development time. I will spare you my own brainstorm that I was going to write out lol. I'll just say, congratulations on your first jam submission, and on your first Godot project - I think this turned out really well, and however you may think about the game loop, I actually thought it was pretty satisfying to play as one scours lots of different submissions. Really good job, again. Looking forward to seeing what else you come up with in the future!

Solid submission. With more progression, and more enemy types, it would just get even better. Nice work!

Some notes - the game got waaaay easier once I found out the mouse aims the attacks. I agree that even a very inconspicuous compass-like pointer on the player character indicating attack orientation would be a huge help for a new player. On the boss - can it actually die? I'm 7 minutes in and I've been swiping at it for some time, now. I'm assuming just getting to the boss constitutes the win? It's good you managed to get a second enemy type in the game in addition to the boss, and it's also cool the boss actually has a special attack. The parallax effect with the building background is nice - actually the sprites in general are well-done, the player character looks good - as I was running around in circles swiping, for some reason I took a special liking to the way the boundary buildings are presented. The ground also looks like something bad happened here... 

Nice work - everything appeared to work as intended and I ran into no bugs (I guess someone else found one lol). I agree with the idea that the premise and the provided scenarios work well as a tutorial for something more if you wanted to push for it. You differentiated the different player mechs well visually and mechanically; good job on the sprites, and for a first pass on balance, I feel like this is pretty good if a little bit easy. With more time, you could have death animations for each model, and maybe some more SFX (I see those weren't credited - did you make them? Just asking - good job if so, I know a lot of people shy away from it if it isn't their thing).

Initially I felt like the pacing was a little slow when the enemy was making its moves; like I wanted a button to be able to speed up the AI portion, but that might be a modern brain problem and actually the pacing is something to be relaxed into, since eventually I feel like I kind of did. I'm not sure if this makes sense in the genre, but I could see a little unit-specific progression system or options for different player units per-scenario being interesting ways to increase player expression in the game. Nice work on a fun submission! This type of game seems like an interesting platform for different ways to challenge the player at a different pace than a lot of other games do.

Wow, I actually beat the first level... It took me quite a few tries; those enemies are tough. I ended up having to keep them on the edge of my screen or just off-screen and catch them with the rocket launcher. My aim and the required uptime with the MG made that method more challenging, and my performance with the shotgun was positively dismal lol. Part of the challenge with was that discovering an enemy often started off with taking a few shots before they were on my screen.

I'm super impressed that you created an online version of this within a jam timeframe. That takes some know-how you don't often see in this context. On the SFX - the frequency distribution seemed a little harsh on my ears, so I turned my volume down a bit. Overall, nicely done!

Fun game type, and fun power scaling, although maybe... a little broken in a few ways. 

After a certain weapons upgrade it seemed like I was no longer actually firing any projectiles, so the map began to fill with all manner of enemies. Despite also nerfing myself to nearly 0 movement speed, my HP regen (with only 30 max HP) was so high that I was able to tank everything, and pickup + graze radius were so large that I actually was no longer able to play the game because the moment I selected an upgrade, another upgrade presented itself, in an endless loop. So the run basically concluded there (that was my second one) as there was no ability to actually play with the upgrades any more lol. And I couldn't shoot anyway, but I felt like I had stumbled upon some type of win condition haha.

Also, I ran into the same problem as someone else, where even when I would hold the fire button down to reduce the likelihood that I'd accidentally select an upgrade, it still happened a few times. Other jam entries with quick upgrades like this had a similar problem; maybe a short grace period for clicks, or a button-based input method for upgrades (e.g. "1, 2, 3") could keep that from happening.

The vent and dash mechanics are pretty cool; it would be helpful for me if there was some communication about their cooldown/status on the UI so I knew when either were available.  Overall, nice submission - I haven't played bullet hell games before, but I can see how with an upgrade economy like this they're pretty fun. Nice work.

With the way the van-headed mech waddles around with the music in the background (specifically when the synth lead is playing), the floppy-legged enemies, and the LORE blurb, the humor element was a success for me lol. I agree that some more upgrade diversity would be good and maybe some enemy diversity too, but I recognize that getting even more creative with builds and enemies is a lot to achieve on top of building a base game within a jam period. The difficulty also does ramp up quite a bit if you keep playing, and as it stands the upgrades are pretty good - there's synergy between the heat, firerate, pierce, damage and bounce upgrades. If you build enough into bouncing, you can start covering the whole map in projectiles and kill a lot of stuff by accident, but that does add the visual overwhelm after a certain point once enough enemies are spawning. 

I thought the blur honestly softened the edges kind of nicely. The text was probably the part that really suffered in the web build.

My run got snubbed when I got stuck on a pillar at an inopportune moment, which seems to happen pretty much any time you come in contact with one of them. It only ever took walking the opposite direction to get unstuck (was never permastuck), but I was met with 3 large projectiles simultaneously and a small army of little meatballs.

Nice submission, I had a good time with it!

I'm glad you drew some inspiration from SSB, which I love. I see other comments talking about dash attacks and stuff -- maybe it's that I didn't use a controller or just fought AI the whole time, but in terms of attack variety I was only able to get J and K to fire off and wasn't able to modify them with movements. I assume this was just up to me not knowing the right way to play. Also, my only successful strategy was to a) not get hit lest I get perma hitstunned (seemed to happen a lot if I tried to block), and then b) walk at the enemy and press J repeatedly, and that seemed to be the ticket to victory for me lol. I appreciated the SSB jump mechanics - if you had more time to add aerials, I would probably have played for quite a lot longer!

I thought your short lore blurb on the game page was engaging on its own. It doesn't really tie in with the gameplay, but, you know.... maybe it doesn't have to. And it's a jam. But it was cool for its own sake!

I forgot to mention the premise and game loop too - despite the tense atmosphere, it was also a relaxing, simple but engaging game loop nested in good storytelling. I can easily recall how I felt playing it 24 hours later, and I'm sure the feeling will stick with me for awhile. Impressive for a jam game. And it also seems to set itself up well for expansion - not just due to the ending but the atmosphere and game loop, too. (And I never mentioned the model of the vehicle either - I thought this, as well as the vfx? that accompanied its locomotion, and as well as its texture (and the great textures in general) was all very well-done)

Thank you very much! Patrik's VFX work was definitely really good - both he and chaos-1001 were on fire for the whole 2 weeks, especially as we were initially going to be 4 people but lost one due to schedule - they adapted amazingly and were able to split the work in order to make the submission possible. As far as how the map got made, the building placement was procedural - chaos-1001 made a small collection of buildings that the engine uses to populate around the streets, with a little "type" mapping for where certain things should or shouldn't be able to spawn. That saved a huge amount of time. 

The missions I agree take longer to complete than expected. We were initially going to have some more mission diversity by building mission templates, but the workload was already pretty heavy, so we stuck with a lot of drone-spawning templates which also saved some time there. If we do any updates beyond some tidying up post-jam, the missions overall might be something that gets worked on, meaning balance, length, diversity etc., which would also add some depth to the economy element, too. Thanks again for the comment, very glad you played our game!

Thank you tremendously! Really appreciated reading your comment.

Nice and strong atmosphere between the art, audio and movement. The controls took some getting used to lol, but they did a good job of conveying the setting as well. 

Nice work on the SFX, it seems like it seems like all of the bases were covered and the actual sounds were satisfying, especially pressing E I found. The ambience definitely put me on edge. The music in the hub area provided just enough grounding to break up the game loop well, without taking the player out of the same world. Great job!

I know the game was only supposed to be a 30 minute playthrough, but I took some time just wandering around admiring the dead industrial towers floating against the backdrop of space. I freaked out the first time I fell by accident but realized that was actually the intended traversal method lol. I was a little confused once I found out that space/shift were used to move vertically, but that you could fall... of course, it made it way simpler trying to go around gathering items without them floating around in midair. I'm not sure what other solution there would have been, so I'm going to assume it was the singularity core pulling me down. I never played Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but I understand the employer has similar policies... Nice work on this game!

Pretty sweet that you got a full cutscene in at the start, and after completing the first objective. I couldn't progress past that first objective since I started getting attacked during the cutscene and then died while unable to move my character lol. It was actually super funny, since it looks like there was about to be some sweet exposition, and the very moment the reveal was about to take place, I died and the menu popped up. Maybe the game ended there anyway because I later tried skipping that cutscene and it just took me to the in-game menu, still unable to move my cursor - but holding LMB and tabbing across the buttons to 'play' it then took me back to the opener, so I'm guessing that was the end. 

I like the look of the GoW-like ADS mechanic, although I didn't get to use it since every encounter happened at pretty close range and there didn't appear to be any improvements to gunfire when aiming down sights; also anything that made me feel like I was slowing my movement speed, especially during the flag-plant objective, was cast aside so I could try to escape the mobs that were coming from all sides (pretty tough encounter if you're trying to avoid taking damage). A little bit of lighting could help particularly in the room that sort of loops back on itself, although I get this isn't supposed to be 'hospitable' as much as an underground/maybe fleshy membranous tunnel where lights wouldn't make a lot of sense... A little bit of randomization and/or some variants for the weapon sfx would go a long way, imo. Also those mob attack sounds, they remind me of demons/bull demons/pinkies from Doom 2, which I thought was a good choice for their mouthy design. I liked the enemy models, and the mood shift when the player character is revealed in the opener is pretty sweet with the camera and the music. Oh yeah, and the cel shading - I feel like I don't get to see this as often as I like, I'm not sure how easy it is to implement as a non-programmer/artist but it looked good! Because of the hunky player model and the way the ADS looked, ...I felt like having a combat roll or something and a grenade would fit right in. And then maybe I could finally watch that closing cinematic! Nice work!

I did miss the info tab. And the first time I was lucky enough to see the Eyes approaching I did pop cloak, but when they walked right up to the cloak border and just sat there for a few seconds, I boosted and hightailed it to an evacuation point lol. And yeah, I did really like this game - the arm being tough to use is my only constructive criticism; I had a friend play it and he was also impressed by the atmosphere and the kind of storytelling it accomplishes along with the cinematics/drop sequences. Really good within 2 weeks, imo.

I'm not sure if your team executed on the entire design idea or if you had to shrink scope, but it'd be interesting to see what more depth (maybe not just more content?  But probably starting with more content) would look like in this game.

You pretty much just have to pick a direction and book it with the worm, you can burn the hydroboost first-thing if you want for a free escape. After the first one or two extractions I don't think you see the worm again - but arguably the Eyes are worse. You have to make use of the scarecrow and speedboosts with those as soon as you start hearing weird stuff, I think. I did play on easy mode (😇) but I ended up maxing out my mech in this game lol.

Thank you for playing, and I very much appreciate the audio feedback! You are 100% right on the music -- unfortunately, that was the price I paid for implementing at the last-minute; hooking up to the in-game settings menu controls for some reason made the SFX bus super quiet -- setting Music to under 30% is closer to where I intended the balance. Nothing can be done about it now, until after the jam period... but I'm glad you took to the settings to fix it! 🥲

Thanks again for playing!

I made the same discovery as another commenter below (I thought I was even more clever than it turns out that I am), blocking midair does allow your stamina to recover and also freezes any vertical momentum. Honestly, it was kind of fun to do that lol. I did end up skipping the enemies after a certain point, since a lot of them seemed to do a lot of damage due to their fire rate and there didn't seem to be a reason to kill them. However, outside of the mech, my pacifism was gone, and I very much enjoyed that you can attack out of block and resume block immediately by holding shift and left-clicking. It's a little thing, but it's smooth. The scale of the game was bigger than I expected - there are at least three zones (four, counting the grass + temples). I know it's a jam, but I'll still say that if each zone had unique enemies, that'd be pretty cool. Bonus points for unique OST per zone... Your dark area and purple area seem like opportunities there imo!

Wow, I'm kind of proud I got through that double-door puzzle lol. Unique concept! My left ear is grooving in a way my right ear won't ever understand

Pretty fun - moving joysticks in the cockpit is a detail I really enjoy.  Nice sound selection. I notice that, like my car, the mech often tends to wander slightly toward the right... I wasn't sure what the blue things were, so I shot them, and then it seemed like that was an objective. Not sure if I got them all... but I did acquire 3 types of guns and take out two or three tanks, and climb all the way on top of a building to run over a sniper with my feet. So I am sure the enemy offensive, if not also their spirits, should be blunted, for now...

The OST is cool - it was like argent guitars intermixed with... jungle? (I don't know genre names that well) I went and checked out another project with audio by Luca afterwards and was impressed by that one, too ('The Swarm', really nice synth tracks!) The movements on mouse took a little getting used to for me until I realized the scale, being that the player character is like 60 meters tall. Then the projectiles made more sense, too. Ended up able to clear the game with the gun stun --> sword followup.  I noticed the aiming behavior got disrupted by directional input in an unexpected way (not sure if it was intentional), but I really appreciated the fact that you have a genuine boss fight at the end.

The little people, I fell onto them a couple of times... I defeated Gelanor, but at what cost?

Well done. I got bested by a sudden deluge of rockets right after what might have been a camera bug around a lower-left-to-right loop after the third? weapon swap. Suddenly I found myself missing the jetpack and the rapid fire gun to try to survive that!

Wow!

I think I can explain why this game has only one rating so far: those who've downloaded it forgot they were playing a jam game, haven't stopped playing it, and haven't come back yet to rate. Every artistic (and design) decision communicates the atmosphere extremely well. The concept and the world are compelling,, design and well-developed game loop are a lot of fun... the sound implementation and unique movement style make the mech a tangible, lumbering tank, and combined with all of the modelling, the cockpit design, the environmental work, the upgrade UI... all of it works together beautifully! I am enjoying this enough to keep playing just for fun. Super well-done and congratulations!

Cool sound selection, the hunky mechanicalism was well-captured (I did end up turning the music down a bit to hear more of them, and there were some details that actually only became apparent afterward) - although it's true there was a bit of lag when the two weapon SFX first fired, but that worked itself out right afterward. Nice job on the models for the player mech and the enemies - I'm also a fan of the 3D-but-through-pixels artstyle (whatever people normally call that...). Controls felt well-tuned; I only played on Normal difficulty but I felt that was fair - and no bugs on my playthroughs. Nice work, and congratulations!

Oh my gosh the music OVERFLOWS WITH ATMOSPHERE! And your writing, and the art - it all puts me in a world that feels very compelling. Thoughtful project, short, but refreshing and leaves me feeling differently than I did before trying it.

Best,
Elliot