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Hi!

Geometry Wars is definitely a huge influence on Amazoom's gameplay (and the planned controller support will mimic that control set).

Gems can be picked up using the shield- but we've received a lot of feedback from people hinting that our pickup range for gems without the magnet is probably too small (it's 3 tiles from ship-center at the moment- a lot of people bonk the nose of their ship on stuff trying to get their center of mass closer to the gems).

The tutorial map is set up to introduce the player to basic navigation, and over the course of the rest of the missions in the first world map you're steadily introduced to different mechanics that help ease the burden of doing everything yourself.

Gunbuddies, autotargeting, autoshielding, and other stuff that unlocks as the game progresses delegate tedium to automation so you can focus on driving, dodging, and exploring- I'm glad that getting a chance to take one of the endgame ships for a spin did a decent job of breaking the ice on that haha

Right now, what we've poured most of our time and effort into as far as levels are concerned are procedurally generated maps for different themed areas. Story missions like the tutorial will have static maps with more areas to explore and lots of incentives to go looking for stuff. One of the big goals for this project is to make sure that there's some replayable elements for players to come back to if they decide to pick the game up again after a break, so we're fine-tuning the procedural bits first and then laying out the story missions. For now, story missions are mostly procgen placeholders with static values for cave length and enemy density.

Thanks for trying out the demo! 

We discuss all the comments that show up on the AGDG demos- a lot of optional features like ship highlighting mid-level were added because of feedback. As more stuff gets polished up and finished off with the procedural cave generation and we get more time to focus on the story progression, I'm sure a lot of the stuff you mentioned here will get smoothed out before release.

Cheers ♥

Hey there,

We appreciate any feedback we can get! Thanks for taking some time to give the demo a try.

Bullet speed is influenced by the total stats of the ship that you're using and the crew members that it's loaded up with.

We'll probably be making tweaks to air travel time with the bullets before final release- there are also other weapon types like lasers that sidestep bullet travel time.

"It's basically a static png" is one of the things that different ships handle in different ways. Some 2D shooter games have animations for the player that make it look like the ship is banking left or right as the player moves up and down- we ended up deciding not to do that with this project, but we totally get why it might feel weird if your experience with this genre is rooted in games where that art choice was made.

Thanks again, cheers!

Most of the new content for this demo is inside the Thicket biome.
Complete the tutorial to unlock a Thicket mission. 
You can also complete the other remaining story missions to see some other Thicket tests we've been working on.

Patch notes over here: https://pastebin.com/TWrzJrgV

Thanks for the feedback- glad to hear that you liked it! 

The tutorial is something we've tried a bunch of different things for, and we'll probably be redoing that a couple more times before the game's full launch. A lot of people have commented that there are too many targets to hunt down to remove that barrier, so we'll likely be reducing that or making the area a little smaller so it's easier to find the targets.

Cheers \o/

Putting this here because I forgot to when I submitted:
Patch notes: https://pastebin.com/w3JG1sRu

We appreciate the feedback, thanks!

To answer some questions:
- Most enemies count toward the yellow bar that fills up to increase your weapon's damage output. The 1x/2x/3x/4x/5x isn't a score multiplier- it's how much damage each bullet does.
- Enemies have a higher chance of dropping gems and certain powerups depending on the ship/crew loot configuration, which is the bottom stat with the gem icon.
-  "Make gibs for all enemies" is on the TODO list
- "Attach explosions to defeated enemies" is also on the TODO list
- Floofyboi is indeed precious. The plan is to make one of the enemies from each major tileset into a playable character so they will likely end up in the final character roster too (the experiments with tribal-themed dump kobold-like creatures just aren't coming out how I wanted)
- If you spend all of your money before you start a mission it just means you can't hire contractor crew members. Your weapons still work if you have 0 gems.
- The Garbage Worm's HP hasn't changed, but it is likely to get buffed significantly. When the Garbage Worm fight was designed, we didn't have damage multipliers yet or even a shield to deflect bullets with. Adding these two things has prettymuch trivialized the fight, so I'm planning to make him tougher- if not in the initial encounter, there will at least be a harder rematch later.

Found a lot of typos and grammar problems in the startup sequence- definitely recommend spellcheck.

I pressed ESC to pause and it closed the game lol.

After moving the character in the first room, when selecting "wait", the UI gives you the options "Config" and "Objective". Seeing this every single turn seems exhaustive and just results in a lot of unnecessary extra clicking.

It is strange that we are told to bring a 'collectable sword' but then in the next fight we are equipped with a 'short axe'.

The transitions between the topdown view and the side view for an ongoing fight are extremely weird.

Enemies seem to be able to walk out of the terrain sometimes, too.

Overall I didn't get very far in this demo. The turn-based movement feels extremely clunky. This one isn't for me.

Will post in #v3-2023-participants when it's done rendering. Cheers \o/

Patch notes showing what changed between DD50 and DD52:

https://pastebin.com/RRPwZsvU

I appreciate the detailed feedback!

There is a balance we are still working out with enemy visuals which is especially relevant in the dump tileset.
Most of the enemies use colors already present in the tileset because it makes sense for the enemies that live in the dirt to be the same color as the dirt, so we are relying heavily on the motion of the enemies to make their presence obvious. Certain enemies like the cats rely on their coloration to blend in before pouncing, which puts some pressure on the player to keep alert.

Some ships are definitely larger than others, but we've tried to make sure that all areas are navigable for all ships. There are a few spots with especially-tight squeezes that will probably be getting minor updates in the coming weeks.

Different tilesets have different ways that they express the shapes of their terrain, and the tight, claustrophobic feel for the dump is definitely intended. As more tilesets move toward completion hopefully some of that feeling of being compressed too tightly will be alleviated \o/

Enemy health scales with mission difficulty, which can make longer caves feel like the slog you mentioned without backup firepower. The gunbuddy powerup adds an autonomous drone to provide support during missions and you can have up to five of those at a time. We're still working on adjusting their drop rates so that they show up often enough to be relevant but not so often that they make the player useless. For a taste of what they feel like though you can punch ACUTEKILLINGMACHINE into the cheats menu a few times.

I'm glad you like the art! Some of it's still kinda' rough but we're constantly iterating.

Thank you for trying out the demo ♥

My first run ended at about 2430.

I dig the concept here a lot - the visuals remind me of games like oldschool Asteroids but the pacing feels like it's going to hit something more in the neighborhood of Geometry Wars as difficulty ramps up.

Do you plan on adding any other modes to the game? I was sort of expecting the missiles to go flying off the edge and come in again on the opposite side instead of ricocheting and feel like a "borderless" mode might shake things up a lot.

( If enemies that appear at harder difficulties already do this, then I guess I just need to get good :P )

There is a small chance that the game can crash when generating a map for the dump tileset.

This bug has been fixed and an updated downloadable demo will be available later today.

I appreciate the feedback, thank you!

friends and i have decided that this title is pronounced steven

Thankyou for the detailed feedback!

There's way too much for me to respond to all of it here, but a lot of it is being actioned! This is very helpful.

The newest uploaded version of the game has a functional missions menu with story missions as well as random-generated missions.

The HP bar has been given some extra love and polish.

The player's ship sprite now blinks during mercy invulnerability after taking damage.

Still a super sick project. My favorite world so far is the Desert but I haven't gone past that yet.

Also, forest 2's music is jacked up.

This feels like FEZ and Super Meat Boy at the same time. HOW DO I PURCHASE

This install is kinda' huge for what it is. Is that a Unity thing?

Quit To Desktop button does not work for me in 1-1

The dead body of purple cubes in 1-3 can be used to push sawblades around

Cannon controls in 1-3 might be reversed.

At the beginning of 1-4 you can tilt the dash UI while the camera is spinning.

Particles emitted by pigs in 1-4 seem to be huge red squares.

In world 2, it is unclear which enemies are supposed to be killable and which ones aren't. I thought purple meant killable and red meant unkillable but I can kill lots of red enemies, especially in Easter.

Leading slow pig to puzzle cube does not kill it. (Easter 3)

I encountered a few deaths (mainly from the homing spotlight pig) where pressing R to retry did not save my progress in the level and started it over completely.

Certain parts of the map trigger sad/danger emotes even if the enemy that would cause the danger is dead already.

It is unclear what the pumpkin does. Pig no-detect?

Sometimes you can roll through your friends without completing the level. (Easter 1)

HOW DO I SAVE HIM

1-2 occasionally lets you fall forever.

Waterfall noises are a bit much. Maybe lower vol.

Might just be my keyboard. Sometimes tapping shift to roll to defend myself feels too slow or like the inputs for other directions are messing with it.

While tabbing in and out I managed to completely break/freeze the input handler and had to forceclose the game. (Easter 2)

Enemies defeated by puzzle cubes respawn when the player respawns.

Pressing 1/2/3 etc to go to the different levels is still turned on.

Learning to use the dash to cross gaps takes some time to sink in. I'd def recommend fleshing out that section of the tutorial to make sure the player understands that they'll be using it that way.

Music is on point, mostly: the boss fights are too short. The track always kicks in right as the boss dies.

Anyway I'd love to keep going but I have other stuff to do. This looks awesome so far, good luck finishing and shipping it!

Thanks for giving it a playthrough!

I am still finding the right balance for tight spaces and open spaces. Different tilesets will express the terrain with different shapes, too, with some being more vertical than others. Dead-end cavern branches are coming soon, which should shift the game's focus a little bit more toward exploration.

Right now, there's a single clickable mission on the "world map" that generates a 12-segment cave (at approx 5 enemies per segment) with the Jungle tileset. The plan is to generate missions of various lengths across different tilesets, and different missions may also generate with constraints or modifiers such as time limits or higher/lower enemy density, so terrain pressure will not be the only thing to consider when the game is complete. Underwater missions are currently on the "maybe" list, too.

Ship drift on the x axis is something that's been suggested a lot but I think you are the first person to suggest also slowly drifting down on the y axis. I'll play around with gravity and see if anything sticks; ship drift might be an interesting opportunity for crew members with engineering/piloting perks to tighten or loosen controls.

I've found one lockup so far and instead of fixing it I wrote detection for it and plan to hook it up to an achievement.

I appreciate the feedback, thanks again!

Attempting to play the game in the browser WebGL panel, I was able to get to the control display for shift and ctrl. The play AND quit buttons became greyed out and the menus stopped responding so I gave the downloadable version a try instead.

Music's on point. Good job on that.

The inability to slash while the shuriken is airborne is very strange to me. It sort of feels like you are forced to warp if you want to use spells. Maybe practicing at the game will make this feel more natural for players, but while I'm learning the controls it feels easier to just not use the shuriken in combat.

Putting dash on C meant that I simply wasn't able to use it while moving with WASD. Perhaps I am just baby idiot noob who needs to get good.

Z / X / C as default inputs is painful. I'd recommend putting them somewhere like Q, E, R, T, or F so that they're within easier spiderhands distance from WASD while moving, or assigning them to keys like J / K / L / ; so that players can move lefthanded and input righthanded (in addition to arrowkey input righthand and zxc lefthand)

Being able to shuriken out of the map is pretty OP. The doors seem to correctly block shuriken OOB glitch so hopefully the next demo treats walls that way too.

Enemies popping into existence as you enter a room is neat but could use a little bit more polish and fluff so they don't just immediately jump you.

I like the pointy screen transition on level exit, that's pretty neat.

Some SFX or manual-interact to open chests might make that a little more visceral. It seems that the item you get from the chest is dropped onto the ground in the same spot each time, too - it may be better to simply drop the item on the player and display the pickup over the player's head or something. Right now running into a chest then having to run a circuit around the chest to pick up what was presumably inside it feels a little raw.

The control /tutorial screen seems to be finnicky about which controls it shows based on whether or not you are using KBM or a controller.

Volume controls / options menu would be cool.

Visual clarity is pretty good but the brightness in some areas made it kinda' hard for me to tell what was what when it was all moving at once. I'd recommend taking screenshots of the game and reducing them to grayscale so you can see how bright things are relative to one another. It may help make the action more fluid in more difficult areas later.

Overall has promise, very fast paced though. Needs some kind of tutorial to familiarize with the movement mechanics and allow players to learn how to effectively move, because the current difficulty curve is "welcome to the real world" which might turn off a lot of players.

Reuploading with window resizing options now.

To play with the resolution of the game, open game/savedata/savedata.txt and adjust the following fields:

WINDOW_WIDTH|640
WINDOW_HEIGHT|480
ZOOM_FACTOR|2

The previous settings:

WINDOW_WIDTH|1280
WINDOW_HEIGHT|960
ZOOM_FACTOR|4

Thanks for the feedback! 

Visual feedback when taking damage is on the to-do list.

Each ship has starting HP and max HP. Certain crew members increase your start HP, so it is possible to begin a map with more than your max - these are the blue blips on your HP bar (similar to LifeBlood in Hollow Knight), and they are not recoverable if you take damage.

Heart pickups do refill red HP blips though.

Gave the demo a try! 

Some observations:

- The game doesn't seem to use the mouse. Maybe hide the mouse cursor while the window is active.

- It would be nice if the game showed the How to play / controls screen/esc menu on your first run

- Some of the obstacles seem much larger than they visually appear. Darkening the tiles beneath obstacles so that it's clear what's walkable and what isn't might help the player better judge distance.

- Font on score screen is really hard to read

- Jellyfish can spawn on the player

- Anchor making the player slower until they pick up sushi feels kinda' rough, maybe time limit on that

- It is very unclear at first whether or not the shrimp gun has X shots or X time. Maybe add countdown

- Unclear if any of the enemies do anything differently

- Auto pause on window focus lost would be cool

- Can only punch 1 jellyfish at a time even if they are stacked

- Sparkling pearl quits flashing after one animation cycle. Not sure if intended

- It'd be cool if pearls that were obscured by powerups could be shown as transparent silhouettes above the powerup

- Fish enemies can walk offscreen using the bridge

- Extra life at 1,000,000 points would be neat

- Warp tunnel idea is cool

- Not sure how to exit the game

Ended up with a high score of 1276350

Thanks! Taking damage in general will give more feedback soon. SFX and a little bit of blinking should help make it clearer when the player gets hurt.