itch.io

This feels like one of the more complete games I have played from the jam.

There is a bug with despawning bullets that eventually makes the game unplayable, so I had to quit before wave 50, but I really enjoyed what I did play.

I gave up the first time due to my hand getting tired from the clicking, but I had to give it a second attempt and I won. Really interesting idea making spawning units increase your income, and having the heavy unit decrease it.

There were a lot of reverse tower defense games submitted, but you came up with a novel way of ramping up the player's power over time.

This game feels very well polished. Great job!

Haha, yes, you played on one of the maps with broken navigation. I have a disclaimer in the description explaining to avoid that. I really wish GMTK allowed for small changes to fix game-breaking bugs like Ludum Dare does. It really is a 5 second fix.

There are 5 maps and the first two have broken navigation due to a bug in my navigation building code. I added the extra levels at the last minute and by chance I didn't play any of the broken maps while testing. I played on two of them and they worked, so I assumed the rest also worked since it was all using the same code. Whoops.

You can refresh and get one of the maps that work.

This was a stealth rage-platformer. Very solid game.

I really like the CRT effect. And an interesting idea with the music that plays the notes in reverse.

I enjoyed it. A fun little puzzle game.

I'll admit that I gave up on the 5th level.

I made some very ridiculous burgers. The stacking mechanic is really satisfying, though I question the ratings that the game has given some of the disasters I fed to customers.

I nerfed both the slow tower and the fire tower last minute, but I didn't nerf them hard enough. I had planned to have units with resistances and weaknesses to those towers but I didn't have time.

And yeah, the scaling of the AI is absurd in the end game. When I was testing I never got that far. I didn't even complete my first run of the game until after I had submitted, at which time it was immediately obvious that the game had balance issues. It's saved slightly by the fact that the AI is only allowed 3 actions per turn (building or upgrading towers), so it just winds up with more money than it can spend by the end of the game.

I like the idea enough that once the jam is over I might polish it into a better state.

I wanted the game to feel like a traditional tower defense game, except with you and the AI switching roles. So I didn't want to add any mechanics beyond just having to overwhelm their defenses with your units. That would have felt like cheating. I wanted it to just be the AI playing the game exactly like a human would, and the human player playing the game exactly like I imagine the AI would: building an army off screen somewhere.

The idea was that it would be a bit rock-paper-scissors-y with certain units being better or worse at dealing with certain tower types, but a lot of the mechanics I had planned got cut for time. I had intended there to be a lot more strategy.

And my AI is almost too good at placing towers. I randomized it a little bit so they don't always place them at the exact optimal positions, but I think it needs to start picking from the top 10 best spots rather than the top 5. I was so paranoid that if it chose from too wide a selection the AI might do things that look really dumb or that it might just make the game too easy.

Yeah, I definitely need to reduce the difficulty a lot. It's funny, during development I was worried about the game being too easy, and now it definitely seems almost impossible to win.

I didn't add a speed toggle because I was hoping there would be enough to do during the wave to keep the player entertained. They can manage their base, and I had planned on allowing them to pay money to spawn units at any time but that got cut for time. But in hindsight I'm glad my game doesn't have it, because that's what distinguishes my game from all of the other reverse-tower defense games in the jam.

It's amazing that you managed to make a rage platformer this good in 3 hours.

Haha, yeah, I've been there. With one of my Ludum Dare games I was feeling that it was way too easy, so I made some quick changes at the last minute to up the difficulty a bit but ran out of time for proper testing. I accidentally made it way too difficult, to the point where some players were getting frustrated and just having no fun. It really hurt my ratings, unfortunately.

Thanks for the feedback. I did feel that the game was too easy at the start, but I try to lean towards making my jam games too easy rather than too difficult, because it's really hard to judge the difficulty of a game you've been constantly playing during development.

I'm curious, was the game still too easy after 3 minutes, when the harder words started spawning?

It does get progressively harder, it just isn't as balanced as I'd like. It starts off spawning 1 "easy" 3 letter words every 3 seconds. At the 1 minute mark, it ads an additional spawner for 4-letter words every 4 seconds. Then at the 3 minute mark it starts spawning 5-6 letter words every 5 seconds. I find that once the "hard" words are spawning it's only a matter of time until I get overwhelmed.

After releasing a few game jam games that were just way too hard I've taken to always leaning towards making them easy. Especially if I don't have time for a real balance pass. After all, most players will only play a game jam game for about 5-10 minutes max, so they don't have time to get good at the game anyway.

I didn't manage to build a single robot.

This was the most frustrating game I've ever played. On my second attempt at playing, after I had ragequit during the first attempt, I finally managed to hit the ant while spamming bullets in its general direction.

I love the art style.

The game could use a balance pass. Some of the fish are just too fast to possibly react to.

What counts as working on the game?

It sounds like we can plan out the entire game before we start working on it, acquire/create all art and sound assets before we start, pick out music, etc?

Are we allowed to playtest our game when the timer isn't running? For example, if we separate our time into one-hour blocks, would it be against the rules to play through our game once or twice during our breaks just to assess where we currently stand?

Really good game. One of the more interesting platformers in the jam. I'm not sure buttons were taking me to the right levels, though.

The difficulty was a bit high for me. I couldn't beat all of the levels.  

A couple changes I think would improve the feel of the game:

• Touching a wall prevents you from pulling in the grappling hook. Maybe make it slide the player along the wall instead of just stopping.
• When you walk/jump/fall with the grappling hook in the air, the hook moves with you making it difficult to aim shots while jumping. I think the hook should maintain its own trajectory even when your trajectory changes.

I'm glad you enjoyed it!  

The Magic Bullet aims at nearby enemies, but if there are no enemies within its range (kind of short) it fires in a random direction. Of the enemies within range, it does sort them by distance but it only sorts the first 5 and then picks the closest. It was a preemptive optimization, because I wanted to avoid potentially sorting 100 enemies by distance. 

I'm glad you found it balanced. The wave spawner was written on the last day so a lot of my precious final hours were spent tweaking the levels instead of adding other polish.

Yeah, I was developing it on a reasonably powerful PC, so I have no idea how poorly it runs on mid-range or low-end hardware. My PC can handle around 400-500 enemies before I get any kind of frame dropping, so in the game I capped the number of enemies at 200. I was hoping that would be good enough for most people.

I'd say Magic Blast and Smite got the most use while I was testing. Magic Bullet is really good if you get it to level 5, especially if you combine it with the projectile upgrade.

This is a really well made puzzle game. The idea of distributing points like that was very unique.

I found some of the puzzles near the end almost impossible. They don't leave any room for error in your timing, because you don't even have a fraction of a second to spare.

I'm pretty sure the zoom issue you are having is that the aspect ratio is wrong on your Itch page. You can change it in the settings.

The original plan was to only release it in the browser, but unfortunately I had an issue at the last minute and didn't solve it before the submissions were due. It worked out, though, because the game actually runs poorly in the browser and I wouldn't have had time to optimize it. Next time I will try to make sure I test the web build hours before submissions are due, but I say that every time. I was in crunch mode for the last 2 days of this project and still ran out of time.

The rest of your points were also just things I planned but didn't have time for.  I saved sound for last and never got to it. The XP bar would have taken me 20 minutes, but while I was testing I realized that the levels come so quickly even near the end of your run that the benefit wasn't enough to justify prioritizing it over more important things. And I was working on critical features until minutes before the submission deadline, so I didn't have time to add more player feedback and juice.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

My original plan was to allow the player to toggle any augmentation on any ability they had, but my concern was that there is likely an optimal augmentation for each ability, and adding the RNG would keep it more interesting by preventing the player from always being able to just go with their favorite. That's also why I only have one augmentation option per level.

I agree that the whole game could be more intuitive. I was watching Vimlark play it and in his first run he kept choosing more augmentations instead of levelling his abilities to increase his damage. It would be easy enough to pick up after a few runs, but for jam games very few people actually play for that long.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

https://itch.io/jam/vimjam3/rate/1710075

My game Hell Slayer is a short little "reverse bullet hell" game. It's a clone of heavily inspired by Vampire Survivors, which I played a bit of over the last couple months and thought it would be a really fun genre to make a jam game for. I was a bit overly ambitious so I didn't get all of my planned features/polish into the game before I ran out of time, and a lot of art that was intended to be a placeholder made it into the final build. But all of the feedback has been positive so far so maybe you will enjoy it, too.

For the focus "Multi-Use" there are augmentations that can change the nature of your weapons and make them work completely differently. So for example, the poison augmentation can increase your weapon damage but all damage will be dealt over time instead of instantly, and the holy augmentation will halve the damage of your weapon but will heal you for a fraction of damage dealt. It's just another mechanic to allow you to mix up your strategy, and another way of having all of your abilities/upgrades/augmentations work together to create synergy and turn you into an unstoppable demon-murdering machine.

To meet the theme "Turn Up The Heat", I decided to give the game a DOOM-esque setting. You're slaying the forces of hell, and the final level is set in hell itself. And of course I didn't forget the most important part of any DOOM setting: a kickass metal soundtrack. Royalty free, courtesy of Alexander Nakarada (https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/).

So if this sounds like your kind of game, check it out. I'll return the favor and rate/comment on your game as well. Just leave a comment in this thread or in the comment section for my jam submission.

Thanks!

Interesting concept.

I played a few rounds and got a high score of 17. In the end, my score really depended on how closely the RNG placed bushes together. Sometimes I could get 5 or 6 in one explosion, and other times I was lucky to get 3. In the game that I got 17 I didn't need to harvest my corpses at all.

I think a much bigger map is one way you could improve this. That would make the mechanic of harvesting your corpses for time a bit more important, because then you would need the extra time to take long trips to find distant areas with lots of close bushes. And maybe some upgrades that you could collect to change the way your explosion works, so that your score could be dependent on a little more than RNG bush placement.

https://itch.io/jam/vimjam3/rate/1710075

Really impressive how the two of you managed to make so many small games in one in such a short amount of time, as well as all of the art and sound assets. If I have a critique it's that in some of them the goal was unclear and when they ended I wasn't quite sure if I had won or lost them. But a very solid game, over all!

The mechanics are interesting and fun. The graphics and sound get the job done. Solid game!

https://itch.io/jam/vimjam3/rate/1710075

https://itch.io/jam/vimjam3/rate/1710075

Really great little game. The mechanics were well done and the art was nice. I beat the game with 58 coins. I am pretty sure more coins despawned on me than I managed to collect.

https://itch.io/jam/vimjam3/rate/1710075

I lucked out, because I picked up all of my persistent GMS licenses in a Humble Bundle for 50% off a year or two before they changed to the subscription model. Getting rid of persistent licenses completely was a real scumbag move.

By the way, I just stumbled onto your Cowboy Legs YouTube video and subbed immediately. That video was well made and absolutely hilarious.

Yeah, GMS requires you to pay for the browser exports. But I think you should be able to export a desktop build without using an installer.

If you decide you don't want to pay for the web license, take a look at Godot. It's free and open source. I was using both GMS and Unity for years, and Godot seems to have all of the strengths of both of those engines combined into one. I made the switch 2 months ago and I've never enjoyed game development more.

Haha, yes. If you look at the submission time, the game was submitted 18 seconds before the deadline. So that explains the lack of polish. I was still working on the important stuff right up until the last minute.

I way over-scoped, and I was in full-blown panic mode a day before submissions were due. 24 hours before the deadline I was looking at my TODO list, and I did the math in my head and realized I needed to start cutting a lot of the features and polish I had on the list. 12 hours before the deadline and I still needed to build the entire wave spawn/level system and make the 2 levels I had planned, including the art assets. 2 hours before the deadline and I still didn't have a main menu, level select screen, win/lose screen, etc. The art for the main character was a stick figure until about 20 minutes before the deadline.

But even with all of the problems I see with the game, I am pretty happy with the result.

This game could be a lot of fun if you expanded on the concept. It's almost like an idle game.

Props for using Love2D. I used it years and years ago. Compared to modern engines like GameMaker, Unity, Godot, etc. Love is definitely hard mode.

My biggest complaint is that there is A LOT of clicking. Select a plot, go click a button on the other side of the screen, go select another plot, etc. Rinse and repeat. It should work the other way around: select a crop and then click on a plot to plant it.

Anyway, it was an interesting concept that was fairly well executed. Good job!

It's a really good prototype. The game would be a bit more engaging if you had more resource types to collect, and more things to craft. But considering the focus and theme it made sense to only have wood.

The waves of enemies should be a bit easier to deal with in the early game. The very first wave of enemies I encountered was large enough to overwhelm me.

Solid game, over all, though.