Thanks! I appreciate it. The game is definitely hard and a lot of people struggle to both move & shoot, but hey, devil daggers-esque games gonna be hard.

You shoot the logs, haha. I don't think that's ever shown though. My bad.

Thanks a tonne!

Thanks for playing!

Don't worry bout the rank, game's hard.

Improvements:

• Completely agree on the practice arena, might implement that, good shout!
• It does tell you at the start of a run, in the top left, but it does tend to go away if you accidentally use the mechanic, so I should up the number of times before the message leaves.
• The majority of the difficulty in the game is that you must always be bhopping, movement is paramount, the intent is that you are constantly trying to evade enemies, while using the overhead platforms for both spatial awareness and as the primary shooting surface.
• This is definitely a way to play! I'm aware it's an option, but it is most definitely not possible to win the game doing this, and as it's a score attack game I'm kind of fine with the "statue strat" as i've heard people joke about calling it continuing to exist - there's actually a winning run replay on the itch page that you can pop in your replays folder, if you want to watch how to win a run.
• Yep, intentional, the game difficulty is in evasion and managing the arena, shooting in person is for when you really need to clear the line in front of you - you actually get a charged shot if you wait before shooting that penetrates and deals more damage for this exact purpose, but this isn't mentioned anywhere (again, I should probably add a bit more guidance.)
• There are no headshots, no. The game holds a lot of complexity that isn't well described - it's mostly for people that want to be constantly moving very quickly and mowing down the enemies to maintain arena control, or abusing "roil" - which is a mechanic you may or may not have interacted with depending on how far you got - for extra score - it's all in the leaderboards!

Thanks for checking out the game, I appreciate the feedback - I think a big challenge of this is going to be 'putting across how the game works' and I like the idea of a practice arena that you mentioned, so that might be the next big patch, with a bit of guidance within it. Cheers for the suggestion, I hadn't thought of it!

Genuinely, well done! Really interesting idea and it's fun, I'd love to see this develop further and further. Following you so I can see how this turns out - my only gripe is that it's a little indistinct in terms of colouring (i.e. it can be a bit hard to tell apart different bits like resources, where my units are, and so on) from the background, but it's excellent in concept, and I think quite satisfying to play in general.

Cheers a bunch for playing it - it's a hard game, I commend that you're continuing to try!

As for performance, aye, constant battle, trying my best to keep performance as smooth as I can, I'm not letting it go under 144 on my system (RTX 4070, 32GB RAM, Ryzen 7 5700G), but I can imagine it can be touch and go depending on hardware. Been trying to test it on my wife's laptop to try to keep it running at least reasonable, but there's always more optimisation to be doing.

Again, cheers for trying it, keep at it - if you want some guidance, there's a winning run replay I did that should (hopefully) function if you download it and move it into your replays folder.

Thanks man, appreciate it! 

my thank

My goat

Thanks a tonne for comment, I'm really glad you enjoyed it as much as you did - I do like where your head is at with playing with angles more, and I will be having a think about potential options for sure - play around a little with what I can make.

We'll see where it goes in the future.

The game itself does check if there's an update ready, so whenever you launch the game you should have notification right there on that menu screen if there's something new, so please do continue to share your thoughts, I love hearing what people think about the project.

Thanks a million again!

They do! I've found people, more than any other game i've made, do continue to send me messages regarding the game, or trying to improve upon their scores. I think the leaderboard is the main driver of that, I noticed a lot more of that when the leaderboard got added. Might just be the simple things, but I think score attack games live on competition - I did market research into Devil Daggers and talked to the community there, and a lot of them were driven by the leaderboard.

Ah I had ran endless for a bit, then tried the first level - I had thought the onboarding might be there. My bad! 

I had indeed relied on the LMB chaining mechanic, so that's just me not understanding. Either way, yeah, I still think it's a neat project. Good work!

the rhombuses can actually be shot from any angle, all that matters for the overhead mirror shots are that the target is infront of the platform, but from the first person perspective as long as you're aiming at a target on your platform it'll hit.

as for your game, i like the idea! I'll only talk about the controls and fun of it, since that's what you've asked for: I found it initially a bit iffy for control, and the sword feels a touch sluggish, but you get used to it, that's for sure. I think it's fun getting the cuts in, and I think you'll do well with this as you continue to develop it. I think if I had to give a suggestion, it might be something like mouse-based slashes around a radial, like if i swing my mouse to the left, i slash from right to left, swing from diagonally top right to bottom left, i swing that way in the game. That's what my brain wanted to do at least. 

Either that or you'd need some level of introduction into the slashing for onboarding, so people understand how the slashing functions, but that'd be my suggestion.

Unfortunately not, game's a bit too much for a web build, I believe. Apologies!

Hello, hello.

I'm completely happy to trade feedback if anyone here would be willing to try my game and see how far they get in it, and let me know if they think it's far too difficult. There is a leaderboard system that does send some backend data of how you died and at what time, so if you would please do upload your score once you are 'done'.

It's an intentionally difficult arena shooter that has 2nd person shooting mechanics (weird right?), so be warned it's not intended to be easy, but I do want to hit that correct medium line of "obviously hard, but a skill that can clearly be honed". 

While you're at it, if anyone finds anything they just think is annoying, or might even be a bug, then do just let me know - even if it's not a bug, it still means it isn't obvious, so anything helps.

Link is here: https://jonsprojects.itch.io/psyche

And a little gameplay:

Cheers!

Good stuff! keep up the good work

Fun game, and neat idea! well done!

Hello, hello.

I've recently spent a lot of time working on one primary project that I've grown to be quite fond of - you might have seen it if you also look at the itch.io reddit!

What Is Psyche?

Psyche is inspired by Devil Daggers, and contains secrets and unlockables, and has a unique twist (first of it's kind?) with overhead copies of the arena that you can shoot at, to deal extra damage to enemies! I won't bore you too much, but if any of that sounds interesting, please give the game a download here: https://jonsprojects.itch.io/psyche

If you enjoy it, please do rate it, as it helps a tonne. Updates are common, so check back whenever, and if you want to share any feedback, I'm all ears here or on the comments of the page.

Thanks for looking!

Played quite a bit of the way through, very fun puzzles and the art is really, really good - especially like the parallax of scrolling images. The personal aspect of it comes across really well, and it's something you've clearly put a lot of effort into, good job!

Tried on steam cause it's a little more convenient for me, fun little incremental game - definitely something you can't go too wrong with. Good job!

My pleasure, man!

I use godot - but not to worry, half the fun for me is working it out. Heck, if I get it implemented I'll let you know haha.

Initially I wasn't aware you can dash over water, so I was for a moment a bit lost on where to go, but I sort of realised that might be a thing due to the length of the dash, hence I tried it, and it worked - I realise that's the intention now, but that kind of thing requires the player having played a game before that has that "dash over gaps" mechanic. I've played Hyper Light Drifter, so I got that, but for someone who's played, say, only 3D roguelikes, or roguelikes where that mechanic isn't present, or even just a usual player of "another genre" might not realise.

Beyond that, the "clues" system had me thinking I was looking for something, over just advancing through the level, but even then I wasn't completely sure what I was supposed to be doing with it, other than it being a level progression mark.

Bottom line is it would just really just benefit from a vertical slice tutorial of "this is what this means, this is what this means" and so on - I agree hand-holding isn't great, you shouldn't have to type stuff like "walk around with WASD, this is your health" and so on, as these things tend to be quite obvious, but mechanics that aren't present elsewhere, or of your own making, will need explaining.

I'm a perpetrator of this too! PSYCHE, my current project, has literally no tutorial to it, and features a method of shooting enemies for extra damage by shooting the replicated platforms that surround the arena - I should really make at least a note that says that somewhere, because not everyone's going to read the whole itch page, but that game is more something special to me over something I'm looking for mass downloads on, so I'm sort of alright with that being something a player might "find out" - I get the impression, especially with a steam release, that you're looking for that player count and eventual sale, so that might matter a lot more for you!

Either way, I definitely think you've got something cooking, visually it's a very pleasing game, and it feels pretty good! It just needs clarity imo.

Best of luck with your project!

Looks great - good job!

Played, very stylish in sound design and visuals, great job on that front!

I played a couple matches and found out what I was supposed to do by playing, but I do think it could benefit from a tutorial match of a kind, just to sort of ease you into the game. It's quite fun when you get going, but the initial hard bonk on the head of being clueless I think will probably turn a few players off. Big ups on the presentation though - I especially like the transition screen - might yoink that kind of transition for my own project, haha.

Neat game! I think it could do with ramping up to being a bit more difficult, the 2 minute cap out in difficulty was still a little easy - but I really like the idea behind the candles, and it feels good to play (if perhaps a tad slippy).
Keep it going!