itch.io

Fun little game, love the eye movement. The goblins yearn for the mines.

I'd recommend not having the goblins stop their task when being hovered over; tad annoying having them all stop. Especially on long tasks.

Enable game to be played when out of focus and in background.

Farmer goblins can't work together, they keep repeating the same task another goblin is doing already. All you have to do is add a boolean check to the vegetable bed, isBeingWorkedOn and toggle it on when a goblin is walking to or actively working on it. And set to false when they are done. Then when a goblin checks for any veggie beds that need to be worked on, you also check if isBeingWorkedOn == false. Also, make sure to set isBeingWorkedOn to false if a goblin has been picked up by player and is currently working on a veggie bed!

Good job so far.

Pretty fun overall.

Agree with @Abnessor aka Findoff, please disable the animation or have a fast mode toggle. Upgrade tree is way too linear(doesn't feel like you have a choice in what you can upgrade, pretty much forced to get everything as they pop up) and you don't have any idea what upgrades will unlock, if any at all. Recommend having any adjacent upgrades to be transparent or have a lock on it.

Tad annoying having 3 projectiles all die when hitting a tiny asteroid; strongly recommend making projectiles not destroy itself if asteroid health is <= 0. Or during projectile collision, disable asteroid collider to prevent next projectile from colliding in same physics frame.

When buying or earning $, around the end the $ particles become too much to render, causing stuttering. Recommend having a  fixed max particle count(40-60?) spread over 0.5-1.0s, and if you are instantiating each $ every time, make sure to pool them!

Pacing is a little too fast, first game had a more slower but refined progression.

Need many more upgrades, especially unique upgrades, and some sort of challenge. Like destroying specific asteroids to unlock something, different weapon types, unique asteroids that require certain weapons or upgrades to defeat(armoured, timed asteroids that disappear after 1-2s when being shot, super fast ones, deflects standard projectiles, invisible, absorbs any asteroid it collides with, etc. Keeping it simple, don't need anything complex.) Just a random thought, not required. But more weapons, drones, and unique upgrades would be great.   

Performance seems pretty good actually, even with so many physics based asteroids. Good to see no AI rubbish also, it's best to learn by doing it yourself.

Good job mate, keep it up.

Appreciate your work, mate! Love how punchy and intense most of them feel.

Google翻訳:  素晴らしい仕事ぶりですね！ほとんどの作品がパンチの効いた、強烈な印象で大好きです。

Agree with @Sui-hin Mak, start is a tad tedious while mid-late game you blaze through upgrades. Enemies providing no real challenge. Game Jame wise, it's a solid game.

Honestly, the only issue is the difficulty curve; next time what you can do, is give yourself all upgrades and set the stage to 10. Now adjust ghost health just enough so you barely finish stage 10, this is your end-game difficulty and final stage. Repeat same logic for stage 0(No upgrades) and stage 5(50% upgrades)... Add a non-winnable stage 15 if you want player to be able to finish an extra stage or two. If you want something more endless, after Stage 10. Increase ghost health by 2-10%? per extra stage after 10. I'd suggest ending the game at wave 10-12, endless only works if there is some infinite player upgrade or my favourite "last stand".

Create a 2D Curve in your given program with the values you calculated. 

X-Axis(Time) = Stage, Y(Value) = GhostHealth

For example:
stage 0 = 1HP  
stage 5 = 2.5HP  
stage 10 = 12.5HP  
stage 15 = 37.5HP

Now you can query the Curve Time(stage) to get the ideal GhostHealth or "Difficulty". Adjust curve handles and add more points as needed -- just like with animation, the more points(keyframes) you have the more time consuming and more restrictive adjustments become. Try to keep as few points as possible.

Ramps up slowly in the beginning and super fast mid-late game, due to the nature of incremental games and having lights hit every ghost in contact. They will need a lot of health to get anywhere close. 

Mid-Late upgrade costs most likely will have to be increased(Can use the same curve as above, just make sure to normalise it). Or reduce bonus soul value; player already gets more souls as Ghost spawn count is increased.

Extremely hard to get player engaged just👌, when upgrades tend to be exponential. Going from praying a gust of wind doesn't blow a white sheet in between your lights to nuking shadows out of existence with disco lights.

Found your game via Itch New & Popular; good luck with the Jam. Had fun playing it.

Pretty cool for 70+ hours, no real issues. Managed to win only losing a single gnome, poor bugger.

Feedback:

• Having a currently assigned units / max available unit count would be nice. To show how many units player can utilise. Basic unit stats; health, speed, damage, short description of the unit's logic and or backstory. Pretty much have all useful information about each unit in the raid group area.

• UI displaying current gold at all times, throughout each scene/level.
  
• Boar clan map: have a simple strength level for each location, to indicate how strong the forces are there. Player also has one, clearly visible. Strength level is just all units combined based on their effectiveness in battle(Goblin = 0.8, Boar = 1.0, Troll = 4.0, for example). Had no idea if Hog Clan or Boar Clan Leader was stronger, luckily chose correctly. 
• Having off map raids that could be repeated to gain gold/troops. Once you lose some troops, you don't have much chance to win.
• Some type of battle of power UI, displaying current strength of you vs enemy during the battle.

• To save time on the next Game Jame, i'd suggest not adding a separate tutorial and focus on making everything streamlined. E.g. having all relevant information displayed in key locations during game play. Highlight viable targets to attack on the map(glowing, slight breathing animation or twitch, UI saying attack, etc), and darken or add fog to the other locations, clearly showing they are not intractable as of yet. Add big red text buttons to the war table and gnome, currently it's a tad difficult to see what is clickable(Yes it has a highlight, but a button instantly tells your brain I can click here.) Focus more on directing the player's attention, and add interactive tutorials if needed. Blocks of text and dialogue all in one go, causes people to skip it. Breaking it up into short concise information, spread throughout the game is the way to go. For example; player starts with only goblins(fragile, but have long pointy sticks), eventually they get a few boars(high health tanks, knocks back enemy) and notice goblins can stay behind the boars to safely stab enemies yet weak when unsupported. Let the player have an option to fight a troll at the beginning of game, and get decimated by it showing it's relative strength or have it aid you in a starting battle. Show how deadly your opponent is, as they attack in full force raiding your camp after 2-3 turns, afterwards gnome hints we should defend the camp from now on(A small goblin/boar raid that succeeds if player isn't defending is fine also). Stuff like this is how you can teach the player without directly telling them. Aside from that, adding short refined dialogue and input popups ever so often is fine. Also don't be afraid of letting the player die/fail, as long as your game play loop is tight with little to no padding dying over and over slowly learning is a valid option.
• Save currently assigned unit's each time player enters a battle. Had to manually remove boars and max goblins/gnomes every time.
• Possibly make your camp followers jump up and down ever so often and flip axis randomly.
• Battle Juice: each time a unit takes damage, flash their sprite to white and back to normal. On death launch them backwards high into the air, like they were punched into the sky or just do a quick shove 2-4 meters backwards rapidly. 
• Having each unit be unique would help a lot. Currently they all are just variants of close range melee. And yeah i know, time constants.
  • Goblins throw spears, or have extended attack range, low health.
  • Boar charges at enemy stunning them for 1 second, attacks for 2-4 seconds runs away then charges again, high health and damage, slow attack.
  • Trolls do an area attack hitting max 6 enemies per attack, massive health and damage, very slow movement and attack speed. Possibly throw rocks ever so often.
  • Gnomes are invisible until they attack or spawn from behind enemy, and focus attacking goblins. Super fast attack speed, poor health.
  • Demons knock back enemies with their mace, with a slowing effect

Overall well done. Gamedev is tough, especially with a time crunch. Keep it up.

Very addictive and solid game overall. Having multiple ways to interact/remove symbols, and the companion system is pretty sweet.

Feedback

• Personally i'd prefer if the level was a bit shorter and more challenging. Allowing the player to fail faster and test builds faster.
• Find a way of allowing players to not focus on gold so aggressively; currently you pretty much have to min-max gold to get the trinkets and deck layout you want. Increase trinkets in shop to 4-6 perhaps? Or give players a free refresh. Not sure.
• Possibly add a fast mode that removes or speeds up animations. Collecting resources and dealing damage can drag on a little bit.
• Polish/balance some of the build paths. Some are ridiculously overpowered, like having beserk armour with axes dealing 100k+(Potentially dealing ((8 base damage? Can't remember) * 3) repeated 23 times for each beserk armour on a single axe = 753,145,430,616 damage). To avoid this, look up Multiplicative Vs Additive damage modifiers. You need to use an Additive multiplier(or a 2 tiered system). For example, instead of tripling the axe damage over and over 23 times. Try multiplying by it's baseDamage value one at a time separately and add them all together. I.E this is for 23 berserk armours and 1 axe -- (8 axe base damage * 3 berserk armour multiplier) + (8 * 3) + (8 * 3) + (8 * 3) + (8 * 3)... 23 times = 552 damage. 10 axes & 10 berserk armours: ((8*3) x 10 axes = 240) * 10 beserk armours = 2400). Now you can add another multiplier like some global damage buff: 2400 * 1.5(+50% all damage) = 3600 (REMEMBER if you have multiple buffs of the same type or category, add them together before multiplying! I.E 7x 50% global damage buffs would be 350% = 4.5 multiplier). Much easier to balance the game vs the current Multiplicative approach. Example code below, haven't tested it.

private static float symbolStartingBaseDamage = 2; //Before any modifiers, helpful when you want to reset a symbol to default value
private float symbolCurrentBaseDamage = 8; //Base damage after any added flat bonuses
private float symbolDamageAfterAllMultipliers = symbolCurrentBaseDamage;
void Awake()
{
    ResetBaseDamageMultiplier();
}
public void AddToBaseDamage(float baseDamageToAdd)
{
    symbolCurrentBaseDamage += baseDamageToAdd;
    ResetBaseDamageMultiplier();
}
//Called from external symbol/trinket usually multiple times
public void AddMultiplier(float multiplierToAdd)
{
    symbolDamageAfterAllMultipliers += (symbolCurrentBaseDamage * multiplierToAdd);
}
//Should be called after all multipliers have been added
public float GetFinalDamage()
{
    float finalDamage = symbolDamageAfterAllMultipliers;
    ResetBaseDamageMultiplier();
    return finalDamage;
}
private void ResetBaseDamageMultiplier()
{
    symbolDamageAfterAllMultipliers = symbolCurrentBaseDamage;
}

• Easiest way to test build viability, is give yourself all the best possible symbols/trinkets for each build and see if you can beat the last few waves. Ideally each build should be able to win within 0-2? spins after boss spawns for example. If boss instantly dies with the player dealing 2-4x? or more of max boss health, then you most likely need to nerf that build as it could indicate, that once a few items are acquired it snowballs, ruining the challenge and making certain items way too valuable. If you can't win or struggle, then it needs a buff, rework or new item. There is no issue with having a build shred the boss instantly, the issue is with symbol balance against other symbols causing players to pick the same symbol for most builds. Gold and food will be the worst affected areas as you want to min-max those using as few slots as possible. It's worth finding out the best methods for earning gold/food and having multiple balanced ways of achieving similar outcomes. Giving the game more depth than going for topaz gems into rich lady each game, for example.
• Possibly reduce chest spawn rate mid-late game, some builds don't need anything apart from top tier Symbols. Having to skip or spam symbols that companions eat, isn't fun. Issue being, as you develop a good build you are able to shred any enemy. Rapidly going through spins. Solution would be to constantly keep player engaged, by dynamically increasing enemy difficulty if player is killing them too fast and reducing difficulty if player is struggling. E.g adding/removing bonus health from enemy, adjusting enemy spawn count(some enemies might not drop chests), spawn enemies that counter player build and or adjusting rarity of chest drops. Or just balance symbols/trinkets/builds to avoid player being too powerful mid-late game.

Ideas

• Wolf/Dog that eats raw/cooked meat to get stronger, dies if eating nothing for 3-5 spins. Possibly add sheep that can also be eaten > sheep eats any plant or mushroom to survive and duplicate.

Best of luck with the game mate, game dev is hard. Keep it up.

Awesome game. Hard difficulty seems to be tuned very well, took quite a few attempts to win. As a prototype not much to complain about honestly; just needs more mechanics, random offset of enemy spawn locations(?) and some polish. Keep the levels short & sweet as you have; turn based games can become a slog with many units and tiles to traverse. 

Always love seeing berserker type units in games.

Like to see what units have over-watch and the effected tiles, seems to pop up out of no where. Ability to see when each enemy unit will take their turn. Pan camera with middle mouse or right mouse. (Maybe) Zoom in/out to see full extents of attacks like Monarch's missiles. 

Fix camera lerp when selecting units one after the other. Camera currently jerks around in the browser version.

(Completely Optional) Recommend hyper specialising each ally unit, to avoid making them all do similar things. Amplifying their uniqueness and character. Goblin is a good example focusing heavily in tech with no direct offence, so is Monarch if she had a min attack range for main missile and mortar -- forcing her to keep distance. For example:

• Blackbeard: swap assault rifle with a short range stun gun that disables flying units ability to fly until they start their turn. Pushes target to the end of the turn sequence for this and next round.(Takes it's turn after everyone else) Useful for keeping high value targets from attacking too soon or bypassing an enemy. While stunned, they can't react.
• Shallowtail: swap assault rifle for a mine launcher. Less damage than Explosive mine, 2d3 for example. But can be reused as much as needed. Covering the land with mines. 
• Kobold: using the terrain mimic to jump from terrain to terrain, throwing satchel charges on un-aware enemies, ground or buildings that explode when triggered dealing massive damage. Planting and detonating(all) both take 1 power each. Can't be detected even if adjacent tile is occupied as long as we don't move. Has bonus detection avoidance. Has an energy knife or shovel, dealing massive damage if from stealth. Can build walls/cover while being undetected, even in the mist of battle.
• Etc.

Add Linux version if possible.

Would love to have more player artillery & support units. The ability to spawn a wall is fairly unique, having a soft cover version would be nice. Some other "ideas"...

• Hard cover platform that during player's turn retracts to the ground and can be walked on becoming no cover. On enemy turn, move back up and become hard cover. If something is on top of it, it can't move back up.
• Spawn flying drones(3/3) that follow an ally, peppering nearby enemies. Can be targeted by enemy.
• More effective mines, beserkers tend to be the only unit that activates them. Yet they receive so little damage. Adding reliable 4 perhaps?
• High armoured(4-6) ally that focuses on holding down a 9x9 area around itself, those tiles act like water. Ranged attacks that would hit nearby allies are re-targeted to self. Little to no offensive abilities, can taunt map wide(?). Armour helps avoid ally AOE damage.
• Sniper focused ally, using a giant anti-material rifle that can pierce through hard/soft cover hitting all tiles along the way. Requires a full 2 power to reload. No other weapons, and fairly weak health wise due to favouring move speed and cloaking.
• Ally(Furnace) with massive heat capacity(20) and absorbs reactor heat from nearby allies. Ability to cool allies and recover their reactor stress levels at the cost of increasing own heat. Uses some type of heat weapon, generating more heat to self on each attack. More heat means more damage. On death or reactor failure, explode based on current heat. 3-4x the standard explosion size when at max heat.
• Acid Spitter ally, focusing on removing enemy armour over range while also shredding them at close range with corrosive claws. Every tile it moves on and around a 9x9(Only when stationary) becomes an acid tile for 2 rounds causing damage to both allies and enemies.
• Minigun styled ally, focusing on dealing with unarmoured enemies and flying as each bullet deals 0-1 damage. But can fire many bullets is a single volley. (When an attack is activated, call that attack multiple times one after another to avoid adding all damage rolls into a single value and dealing damage. Which would negate the whole point of this character.) Can suppress enemies, reducing their movement at the cost of missing most shots and increasing heat. Can shoot huge volleys, with a heavy heat cost. Slow movement.
• Mind control type ally, that can take control of 1 enemy unit at a time. That unit is AI controlled but acts as an ally unit. Enemy can attack that unit, and it attacks nearby enemies. While active: high heat cost each turn, cannot move and is vulnerable.
• Flame tank ally, that focuses on burning down forests and soft cover. Turning tiles into fire tiles that last for 2 rounds, dealing damage every round.
• Level that has a rouge AI launching missiles randomly at all units. Goal is to avoid killing enemies outright, as the more enemies that exist the less chance you will be hit. All while storming some fortress, eliminating external generators or just trying to get to some evacuation zone.

Best of luck mate, game dev can be brutal.

Overall a fun solid concept. Good job.

Before adding new content, recommend polishing the game-play loop, mechanics and balance. For example:

• Make sure cards interact with each other correctly. Diamond cards need their formulas to be corrected. As you'll see below.
• Speed up the beginning a touch and slow down the ending. (This is a scaling issue, which is common with incremental games. Either slow as a snail, or you blitz through upgrades to the point they don't feel impactful. Hard to balance it just right.)
• Going anything but pure damage/speed leaves you at a disadvantage income wise. Forcing players to lean more towards defence/healing, building combos and using other cards would be good. Adding enemy variety/challenges would help shuffle people's strategy.
• Game snowballs hard when you increase draw speed and use the upgrade card. Need to find a way to balance Draw Speed cost, or reduce how rapidly the upgrade card can activate.
• Tools are kinda redundant. With the upgrade card upgrading everything for free, even if you were to use tools to manually upgrade, you'd always be better off using that card. You could make it so the upgrade card has to use tools to activate. (Tool income would need balancing) Or it costs increasing amounts of gold based on effected card's current upgrade level to activate.
• Shop needs more expensive cards. Once you start earning 50-100+ gold per second, there is nothing to buy. Even the basic sword/shield is capped at 450 gold for 32 damage / 36 shield. Adding expensive rare/exotic weapons could fix that. Making cheaper cards redundant and giving player something to aim for. Each with unique modifiers alongside the default base value. (Examples below)

Most of the fundamentals are there. Game works, functional UI, decent SFX, card animations, upgrades, simple combat, etc. Music would be nice! Good music adds so much value for the effort.

I'd recommend adding some type of backpack or temp storage, where players can store unused cards they don't want deleted. Or the ability to enable/disable cards for free. Spending all that time upgrading a card, and having to delete it when wanting to switch up strategies or experiment is a pain. 

Not a fan of being forced to use at least 1 basic attack card. Any card that deals damage should be allowed as last card. Even better, just make a fist or wooden sword card that is free. (Wanted to use shields only. Also the deal damage based on missing health as the only source of damage. Having health reset each battle is an issue; was going to remove all damage cards to get beaten up as much as possible then shred the enemy for 500 max? missing health x multiplier.

Possible cards or upgrade ideas to add:

• Food or Bandage(Heal health over 5-10 seconds), Armoured(Provides shields on battle start), Warpath(Receive bonus damage on taking hits to health, not taking damage after 5 seconds resets bonus to 0%), Taunt(Force enemy to attack more often), Final Strike(When losing all health, draw next attack card and attack with a bonus 1000% damage)
• Thorns(Acts like a shield), Guardian(Blocks a single lethal attack to player, instantly draws next health potion and removes self from this battle. Cannot be drawn, but still takes a card slot) 
• Siege Crossbow(4x additional damage, stays in deck but can't be used again. When drawn again, does nothing but waste a card draw), Light Crossbow(2-3x additional damage, but has to be drawn again to reload it. Small chance to destroy self on reload), Rapid Shot(60% chance to fire another shot, if so reduce by -10% and repeat), Volley Fire(Remove self from deck and spawn 8-12 arrow cards that when used are destroyed. Drawing an arrow card deals damage and instantly draws next card)
• Shiv/Dagger(Instantly attacks multiple times 3-5x), Soul Ripper(Permanently gets stronger each time an enemy dies), Cursed Blade(Deal additional 2x more damage, but receive 50% of that), Sword Of Greed(Deal damage equal to current gold, sword consumes 10% of current gold on each hit. Or steals 80-90% of the gold you would get from damaging/killing enemies), Mace(1.5x additional damage, small chance to stun enemy), Untrustworthy Flail(No bonus damage, has chance to attack multiple times. Chance to attack self), Time Ripper(4-8x damage, pauses game for 4-6 seconds), Sacrificial Blade(No bonus damage, takes 10-20% of player's current health and turns it into damage)

Some type of challenge would be nice. Like having an enemy with:

• Tons of armour with low health, so you need a spear to pierce or throw an acid flask to melt some armour. Poison could work also, poison daggers or something.
• Damage reflect or thorns, forcing player to invest in some vitality/defence or use damage over time cards. 
• Only attacks when receiving damage from any source. (Could be a tree monster, that hits you with underground vines) Requires high damage combos with few actual hits to defeat. This could also be a rage mechanic, each attack increases enemy attack damage.
• Goblin thief, that steals 1 card after each attack. Or steals half your deck on battle start, focusing on most expensive or most useful cards. Counters players who use as few cards as possible.
• All healing is turned into damage, damaging player for each used potion.
• High evasion or flying, requires some type of stun like from a mace or a dedicated anti-evade card like sticky goo that would normally be used to slow enemy attack speed.
• Joker/Dice/Coin, flip a cursed coin every 1-3 seconds. Heads, player takes all damage from every source including their own attacks. Tails, enemy takes all damage. Or to simplify it, who ever it lands on they don't get to attack. Use dice or coin that favours the enemy.
• Clone/Mimic, that copies every action player does. Clone/Mimic gets to use player's currently drawn card before they do. And is defeated using luck based cards, dealing damage to self, or that card that uses your missing health as damage.
• Greed, deals damage equal to players current gold. Could also just steal gold on hit.
• Viper that deals poison damage, ignoring player's armour and preventing all healing.
• Onslaught, can't be destroyed. You must survive 10-20 seconds of ever increasing attacks both in damage and or speed. Heavily tests player's defence and fortitude.

Non-attack draw boost allows for insane damage bonuses. Seems like you are multiplying each status effect separately, need to add them all together before applying to base attack damage. 

(1.5 is the same as 50% when we want multiply a value with a % | (50 / 100) + 1 = 1.5) 

(260 = base damage) (1.5 * 12 = 18)

1. 260 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5  = 33734.05
2. 260 * 18 = 4680

Currently you are adding bonus damage to player without resetting it. Causing bonus damage to stack infinitely! Like above where i have a deck of 1 attack cards, yet dealing 1800% damage.

In your code, make sure that when the bonus damage card is drawn. You reset the cooldown like you have, but also reset player bonus damage = bonus damage on card. 

(Below code allows people to have a 120% bonus card for example, and a 15% bonus card but only keep the highest value if still active) 

If (currentPlayerBonusDamagePercentage < cardBonusDamagePercentage)
{
          currentPlayerBonusDamagePercentage = cardBonusDamagePercentage;
}
//Reset bonus damage active time or cooldown

(OPTIONAL) This allows for the card to be drawn multiple times, yet stack bonus damage on top of each other as long as their timers don't run out.

1. Or create a map/dictionary(Acts like an array but contains 2 variables, key & value (key could = bonusDamagePercentageOnCard, value could = currentBonusDamageActiveTimer) each time bonus damage card is drawn, loop through whole map/dictionary and check if any of the activeTimer's(value) <= 0. If so, replace that key & value with the new drawn card. Otherwise just add to the map/dictionary like you would a normal array. (This prevents map/dictionary from having unlimited entries which would crash the game)
2. Every frame reduce all activeTimer's in map/dictionary -= Time.DeltaTime(DeltaTime makes sure that no matter the player's frame rate, value is always consistence!)
3. Add all currently active bonus damage values from map/dictionary together to the player.

Best of luck with the game.

Fantastic game mate. Polished gameplay, clean visuals, engaging puzzles. Well done.

Let 1 foot hang loose. Focus on controlling the small rock hand as the body naturally swings to the left. (I'd add spoilers, but don't think Itch has that feature.)

2nd Part. Use your legs!

Awesome game mate, played 4-6 hours straight. Having an infinite upgrade path is nice, clean visuals, bug free as for as i played. Wish-listed.

Would love an instant animation option(for card animations, turn processing time, card effects, virus movement, etc.) and auto end turn when there are no viable cards or enemies. 

Add tons of meaningful content, bit more polish, balance new cards yet keep their uniqueness and tighten difficulty. Don't be afraid to compact the game-play loop if needed; games of this genre can drag on or become tedious after x amount of turns.

If player keeps using shields and doesn't kill anything, you can survive infinite waves. Viruses don't spawn if it's spawn point is blocked. Either allow virus merging towards player when all tiles are blocked, or newly spawned virus values are added to the viruses that currently circle the player. Cheapest option would be to reduce player health to 0 if virus can't spawn. 

Best of luck with the game. 

Fantastic game so far. After about 15 or so mins, entered a new level and opened the first door... Bomber Zombie spawned right at the door killing me instantly. Had a good laugh.

Looks good, serves it's purpose as a prototyping asset.

Sent a small donation for your effort. Cheers.

Just a Tip: Personally wouldn't recommend using this font for your itch page, hard to read and the size/spacing is too big.

Feedback; 

Once the conversation ends, there is no mention of the jump button allowing you to progress. Either indicate what to do via UI, or simply disable clouds when convo is done.

Personally i'd add prediction UI, indicating where the purple balls will come well ahead of time. For example you could spawn the row of balls, lock their position for 1-2s with a scale of 0. During that 1-2s scale up to it's original size and release them.

Reduce the player's collision box by 20-50%, as it's hard to get precise movement via keyboard. This can also be fixed with snapping player movement to the rainbow lines. Move left/right and it'll jump you to the next lane.

With "Brainwaves", tapping or holding down the mouse has the same effect but drains much more juice if held down. Since aiming doesn't seem necessary (as you just want to clear balls right below you) You'd be better off sending a large bolt right down the lane, for a fixed amount of juice with a single click. Or perhaps turn the bolts into a shield that destroys "ANTs" when colliding with the player, removing fixed amount of juice each collision.

Recommend starting the fall slow and gradually increase game speed similar to Tetris.

Managed to finish with a bit of cheese at the end. Once you have enough juice, you can pick any lane and quickly tap the mouse to zap what ever is below you.

Ending Notes;

Overall decent experience, for the short timeframe and being your first Game Jam. You did well to keep the scope small.

Good job, looking forward to the next.

Glad to see you finish your project on time, well done. Fully aware that you are a beginner and still learning, so don't take my feedback personally.

Music is too repetitive, you'd be better off making a slow compositing to drag the notes on over a 60-120 seconds instead. Making a more sci-fi eary feeling soundtrack with some random beats or taps to add tension. 

Movement feels very floaty, tightening up the character's motion will help (Increase gravity, jump speed and overall movement, add more friction or learn about Input.GetAxis, so we stop as soon as we release the keys). Getting stuck on the walls, is a little frustrating, and there is no kill zone under the scene to kill the player if they fall out of bounds. Would like to see WASD added and a double jump perhaps?

The combat is rough, but functional. It seems almost impossible to kill them without pressing attack, then instantly blocking. Noticed the 2nd scene's dummy enemy, has his attack bar go up slowly. Yet the other levels they spasm out, allowing the enemy to attack 2-4 times faster?

It's good to see the tutorial was built into the level itself, rather than having to read a massive wall of text or instructions. Scenes load fine, your combat/detection systems seem to work as intended(does need refining, as to be expected with a game jam). But overall worth a quick playthrough. Good job.

Cheers, happy you had a good time. Special thanks to @TheOwenEx for the last minute voice acting. Added so much more depth to the game.

Fantastic, glad you enjoyed the experience. It was an incredible rush to get everything done within the timeframe.

Your English is very good, and easy to understand. Don't worry about it, keep improving each day. You're doing well.

Brilliant, glad you enjoyed the experience. Spent around 3-4 hours placing those notes by hand(Excluding the 2 spamming sections -- done by code), and another 2-3 hours fiddling with the music syncing and timing offsets. Completely agree with not needed to fly the ship, as there is no consequence(death), flying is actually pointless. Definitely will be adding better feed back when hitting notes, in a future update(4-6 days?) -- it's difficult to balance since you don't want to overpower the music with an annoying beam sound every few milliseconds. Talked about it with @fortythreesam, in the comment section below.

In hind sight, i should of spent an hour or two filtering through the project to remove un-needed assets.  To try reducing the game's file size. Noticed quite a few people dismissed this game purely because of the file size, which is very fascinating. 

Anyway, appreciate the feedback. 

Good job mate. Love the randomly generated aspect. I would like to see more control with jumping, allowing you to jump at max height or just one block based on how long the jump key is held down. Or by pressing down, you quick descend. You might get stuck/blocked on one of the starting fence lines,  occasionally random jumping (thought this was caused by "tripping" over a rock, but it happens on plain grass too). 

Personally i would slow down the falling blocks(Will call it "Death Wave") for a few seconds and gradually increase it overtime matching how well the player is going. So, for example always keep the death wave at a max of 100 meters, allowing it to go to 120, but always lerp to 100. (So the player feels that they are making progress even though they are not). If player is at 60-120, make the death wave move very fast, at 40-60 meters  moderately  fast, 0-40 completely based on how fast the player is going. (Adjusts for slow player's, and the hardcore speed runners so everyone gets the exact same experience.)

Overall, you did very well. Good pacing, decent visuals and enjoyable gameplay.

Interesting game. Really like the concept and the simple yet effective AI movement. Well done.

You'd be better off having WASD to move, with the arrow keys solely for reloading instead. Or tapping space when out of ammo, could enable slow motion giving you time to reload without getting yourself killed. Also, when the enemy corners you, you can be pushed through the walls. As seen below.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated, you don't need to rate. But check it out, spent a lot of effort making this: https://haydens-studio.itch.io/last-hope-battle-sync

Perfect, that's what i was going for. If only we had one more day, could of refined the experience even more. 

Cheers for the comment.

Fantastic, glad you enjoyed the experience. It was such a rush to get everything done on time, yet still missed a few key features like the death mechanic, and better feedback when hitting notes. Bare in mind, this was actually developed by one person. Had to get a voice actor in the last few hours, and he(@TheOwenEx) did an awesome job.

Thank you for the compliments they are very welcome.

Thanks for the heads up, should of used an emulator to check the mac version. Will definitely mend that after voting ends.

Glad you enjoyed it, really hit this one hard -- only slept 3-5 hours in total during the jam. I'm curious, what did you find funny exactly?

Brilliant, glad you enjoyed it.

Honestly nothing to really criticize about, apart from that you'll occasionally get multiple points from one fish. (I assume it's a spawning issue) The colours are bright and attractive, movement is fluid, when you get hit you don't feel cheated as it's 100% your mistake, etc. Overall a very good experience, you've done well. 

Curious as to why you created 3 lanes, rather than compete randomization?

Also had a little fun with the game files as seen below.

Interesting, that would allow the player to focus more on the notes. And i agree with not knowing exactly when the missiles will hit, that will be fixed in a future update for sure. Right now those red lanes are calculated based on the missile's distance to the player, so if the player turns sharply they can completely miss and have to circle around. With the floating feel, this will be mended with a smooth follow camera(not attached to the player), and giving the player's ship a random position to move to every few seconds (Within a 1 meter sphere, not effecting our left/right movement). To make it look more like you are actually flying rather than being on a set path.

Thank you for the feedback, everything is appreciated.

Simple but an enjoyable experience. I challenged myself with avoiding all crystals as well, which took a while, but is achievable excluding some of the unavoidable ones. I would like to see WASD controls added, some music, checkpoints as stated below, maybe some 2D shadows and post effects like bloom, ball squish/bounce animations, maybe a particle system when hitting walls, etc. Overall well done, it's impressive you pumped out so many levels.

Got the answer correct the first time (No cheating), but went in again to see what happens if you fail. Nothing for a moment... Looked around... Scared the hell out of me. Hah, very nice. 

Nothing much to comment on, overall a decent experience. With good visuals and atmosphere.

Some of the letters like K look like R, for example. Using a crisp clear font would help. I would like to see when a word is complete, a cannon ball gets launched at the closest enemy or on the sides of your ship (So you need to finish a word aiming at the enemy). A little camera shake when typing letters can add some juiciness. Overall a good game for the 48 hours, well done.

Visual damage is coming soon for sure, want the ship to be damaged progressively until it breaks apart and explodes. Would there be a more engaging  way than just adding text you think? Animations, particle system, sprite swap, etc? Also what do you mean with a symbol, genuinely curious. Thanks for the feedback.

Oh, didn't even notice you could hold it down thanks. The red circle means you missed the note, green for a good sync. Also, when hitting a sync, you actually do shoot the enemy fighters with a blue beam and can kill them, if you miss the note they fire a purple beam at you. Just needed one more day to polish it up, but oh well. (There are a max of 20 enemy fighters, that respawn every 5 seconds that decreases to 1.5 seconds later on -- wish i increased that value, wanted the end segment to swarm the player as the image below shows) Cheers for the feedback, will definitely be adding the fail state for sure and more polish. 

Having to run both the server and main game is a bit of a pain. People generally want to just jump right in.  While simple, i do quite enjoy your game. Wish there were more levels to explore, or perhaps something to collect.

That's good to hear, spent a lot of time on this.
There is audio, but was turned down since it would be annoying hearing a beam shooting every few milliseconds. We could add a camera rumble effect, or add physical damage on the ship perhaps. What do you suggest?

Agree with T-MotiF, once you quickly figure out what's going on, it becomes pretty boring due to the lack of challenge. Overall a good game, with clean visuals.

Reminds me a lot of the game Beats & Shapes. Interesting idea, the visuals are simple but attractive to look at.

Movement is a little slow, the cards would be better centralized and a bit more up so they are easier to grab. The whole idea is pretty interesting, good work.

Appreciate  the comment mate. If you don't collect the orange circles you can continue until the every end; get's pretty epic. Pretty annoying that tiny problem ruined the other 2 minutes of gameplay though, spent many hours fine tuning it.

Thanks again for the quick notice. Your voice lines added quite a lot.

Samurai's Choice (Cross Campus Game Jam 2018) #xcampjam2018 Updated Visuals, added a few cutscenes and other assets. Along with expanding the map and adding more SFX. Just over 5 hours left to go!