itch.io

Hey, I’ve finally fully updated the Boss with Spell Practice and the Dev Room. Took WAAAAY longer than anticipated.

The Spell Practice can also be used as a High Score mode and includes 2 things not present in the Boss-Fight itself.

Everything should be unlocked for you. But I am not sure if I added some code to unlock the separate attacks in Spell Practice after having finished the boss. So you might have to sit through some of Ph2 to unlock everything. Attacks get unlocked as soon as they are triggered. You could also just edit the SafeFile wherever your OS put it, when opening it with a text-editor it can be easily edited.

The Dev Room should already be fully unlocked. That purely depends on how far you got in the fight.

I’ve started liking Tower Defenses waaay too much. And I relly like the twist in this one.

However it could really use some touch up on the mechanics. Currently you can’t really spend karma to improve your gift-delivery. You can only spend Karma to temporarily boost your Gift-Delivery.

It is a nice mechanic to have temporary boosts like that. But having some more variants of fairies to buy or upgrade santa and have some elfs deliver too.

Maybe also some secondary money in the form of cookies… No clue what to use it for but cookies are great.

Edit: played for 6 minutes (have to rush now, will update my personal notes later with this)

I’d have liked it more if I had enough money to buy more than 4 usable Fumos.

Hidden things sounds cool. Though I don’t think I’ll get around to digging through the game to find any. So I’ll keep myself to imagining what secrets there could be. That’s also a form of fun.

I’ve had donations on since about a year now. So far I haven’t gotten any yet. Though I also couldn’t put as much work into things this year as I wanted due to personal reasons.

How hard it is to setup donations depends on your Country. Itch needs to know some things about how you are allowed to make money, and the legislation for that depends on your country. I am from Germany so I had to do a little bit wrangling through bureaucratic things, but after the initial setup the legal part isn’t really much extra work. I do have to fill out some tax-papers every year. But doing so actually returns some tax money to me.

Other than the initial setup there’s also the extra “pressure” from doing something for money. Unless you put some extra effort into getting people onto your page it’s highly unlikely you will make monetary gain. And on top of that, of course you’ll need to make things of high enough quality so that others will donate.

I personally would recommend focusing on getting better at making games. The money is secondary during the learning phase. That’s what I am currently doing, putting not much effort into the “how to make money” and more effort into the “how to make game”. Even if I want to sell my games at some point, I first need to know how to make them.

Of course if you can find some time to figure out the steps to turn on Donations then go for it. Even if I haven’t made money off of my donations yet, I am happy to have dealt with turning them on already. This way I won’t have to bother with the legalities when I find the time to “market” my games more.

Pretty cute. Some of the dialogue was also really fun.

Though the color coding is missing on some things. Some doors have color-coding while others don’t. I am guessing to distinquish between locked doors and doors you can use.

Would there have been a way to allow for different colors for different interactions? Or is that just a limitation of bitsy?

Also is there any secrets? Seems like there could be some.

I absolutely adore this. Probably my favourite twist on Snake yet. It just feels so “modern” arcadey. There’s just so many things at play here which interact in really fun ways.

On another note I am kind of unsure how exactly it decides to lay off some of my goo. I understand it when I get hit by something that isn’t my head. But other than that it also seems to happen randomly.

I am 100% certain this is a form of existence Frankensteins Monster would’ve far preferred over the one he actually got (ignore that that’s a very low bar to clear).

I also feel I kinda made something Touhou-Esque!

And while it was already mentioned in an earlier comment I also wanna point out how much the swapping between grave-robbing and dress-up just helps give this a bit of flair and time to think about what creation you wanna make. If Victor Frankenstein did that he definitely wouldn’t have created a miserable existence.

What even is the routing for such a time.

I only get to 5 seconds. And I don’t see that much room for improvement.

Missed the n and thought this was a pogo game

Kinda bummed about it but a short fun minigame collection was quite good to heave instead.

And also made me realize just how good I am at the cup-game again.

Wanted to respond a lot earlier, but I was missing only a bit to finishing up a project with some more fancy 3D things. Exclusively fancy 3D things, nothing else, no Gameplay, just pretty 3D scenes. Here link. Took longer than anticipated because Real Life is being busy. And I spend some of the little energy left on Nightreign, the Game is making me feel like I have to step up my capabilities of making pretty 3D things.

My plans for now with my 3D knowledge is getting more experience in the pretty 3D scenes I am already good at, and learning some better blends to 2D so that I can also use that skillset in 2D games.

And the post launch fix version sounds like a good idea. There’s always things in a project that feel like they need some dire fixing. But which only really become apparent after release. I’ve heard from some friends at DigiTales that they like to do an anniversary patch to tidy things up. And it’s similar to what I am planning to finish up next with Cosmic Boss Cube (though that’s more me finishing the Spell Practice to make it easier to learn the attacks). I also don’t care that much about whether that’s for an existing player audience or not. I make games because I like making them. And while I do wanna make money with them some day, I think I should prioritize the developing of games before that

Tutorialisation is always one of those tricky things, especially when its about GameFeel things you really only get after some experience with the Mechanic or even just the genre. I’ve even had people not be able to do any air control in a Jump n’ Run which doesn’t automatically halt movement in the air. Something I felt was completely natural to be able to do due to my years of playing SMW. So goo luck with the tutorial overhaul.

And I’d be very interested to see what you can dig up on those old shaders.

The Pyramid-Stars bit is the most simple setup I could jam up together to render a 3D background in a 2D space.

About kmm, yeah I did get past the dog via Chainsaw. Pretty sure I noticed the weapon swap and how OP the chainsaw is before the getting to the dog. But I did also try to let it live (didn’t manage to do it). And I did watch through some of the Developer commentary when I was struggling to figure out why I didn’t get to the next level. So I already heard that nobody read that fanficiton.

I did see Robotron got released, but I am not sure if I’ll get to it soon. I still have 3-4 playthroughs going on right now. Nightreign for some casual fun, KMM for janky cool single player, Environmental Station Alpha for some secrets and I’ll probably start Baldurs Gate 3 now AND on top I have a backlog of ~15 short Games on itch.

I haven’t even been able to get back to KMM yet. Atleast next time I start it I can actually do some progress because I now know it just didn’t save my progress as I had it installed in programm files (I also remember when I didn’t know why appdata existed).

Sadly didn’t manage to get far.

However I nearly found a really cool easy mode. If you restart after dying the ship will still respawn. Meaning you have 2 ships to shoot things down. Sadly this bug allows you to shoot yourself. So it is rather impractical. Kind of a shame because at that difficulty I would’ve loved to grind a bit.

Anyways I really love that graphical style you got here for this remake. remaking my first game is also something I gotta do someday (when I know how to make levels that aren’t kaizo).

Neat shmup

I think my biggest issue is how chaotic the screen is. I know that’s usual for shmups but the screenshake seems rather overdone. I also think giving the player bullets a little bit of transparency and/or making them render behind all other bullets might help with the readability a bit too.

But take that with a grain of salt, my shmup experience so far is just Touhou. There the focus is far more on pretty pattern recognition than player-abilities. When I see other non-danmaku shmups it also feels a little too chaotic for my tastes.

I really like the idea of the grappling hook. And it does seem plenty usefull. Sadly I barely used it, I think the tutorial should make sure to show it off a little better. And maybe giving some more reason to swap out what your holding could make grappling hook use a little more dynamic than just grabbing the strongest thing around and keeping it.

(I do have some other things I could mention but they all boil down to ‘Touhou is different’, if you are interested in some differences that I notice do tell me)

And at last I also wanna ask about this post you made a whopping 7 years ago about a star trail shader. Just wanna know if that shader ended up complete and how good the effect ended up being. I just love Star Trails and am always looking for new possible shader techniques.

(and yes I indirectly came here via that post lol)

Hey, thanks for playing. What does it remind you of (just asking in case it reminds you of anything other than SMW)

Also I finally started playing Killing Machine : Movement. After digging way too much through the first level I can already say I’ll definitely have a lot of fun with that game. I especially like the inclusion of ridiculous amounts of text/books as exposition laying around (I won’t read them). I have a similar idea for a game I wanna make, just a lot less… chaotic. But seeing 40 pages of Star Trek Fanfiction casually sitting next to a Bible-Section does make me wanna do absurdist stuff too.

And about your attempt of running my Cube-Boss: I kind of expected it to atleast try to run the game instead of crashing instantly. But I guess changes in rendering hardware/software just say NO. It probably notices it needs to do some specific GPU instructions and that your GPU-Driver just doesn’t have that instruction. Kind of shame, but I’ll keep that issue in mind in case I actually make something 3D that I want able to run on ancient hardware.

I think the game crashed when I hit the YOUR TAKING TOO LONG… atleast it didn’t do anything anymore… either that or it was taking too long.

Got to wave 28. Really cool how the balance starts going towards trying to pick up as many blood droplets as possible to stay alive because of how quickly the blood starts depleting.

Though the upgrades no longer counteract that so it starts feeling somewhat impossible at wave 28.

The second game I played from you, will definitely have to check out your other games.

This is some really fantastic tiny arcade game.

My only singular issue is that while looking extremely clean the graphics don’t have much of a meaning. White doesn’t particularly mean it doesn’t hurt you, red means it hurts you but also not, and the cool outline stretch doesn’t automatically mean it can hurt you or you can collect it.

Also the screen shake should only happen when you get hurt. So many times my instincts told me to think about why I got hurt even though I wasn’t hurt, lol. Maybe that’s just a representation of how the live of cat owners feels.

Edit: I also had this funnny littlöe health bug:

Well it is the time of being a cheapskate, so don’t rush it with upgrading your machine.

Though could you tell me the specs of your current setup? Would be good to know a bit about how performant my stuff is.

By the way in the settings you can turn off the biggest performance issues and turn on the CRT shader which lowers the resolution by a lot. That should get it running on pretty much anything. Looks very much diffrent though.

But don’t rush yourself. Especially as I might soon finish an update with some extras.

Hey, first off thanks for looking through some of my ~2-ish years old post.

I am not sure if I am too big a fan of Long convoluted stories or hard janky gameplay. But looking through some of the stuff you put out about that game it just reminds me of why I love the internet. It looks like its from some forgotten corner of the internet in the early 2000s. It gives me the feeling of looking into some weird thing for 4 hours which could be absolute trash but might be one of the best things humanity has ever created.

Even without having played this this has been some of the most fun I’ve had on the internet in a long while. And it definetly found me in the right moment, so thanks a ton for plugging this here

It might take a while before I get to this but I’m putting it high on my list. My internet is broken and I’ve gotta spend some times developing my own games.

In the meantime I’ll just plug my BossFight project which also ended up becoming overly ambitious: https://stardddude.itch.io/cosmic-boss-cube

Less in the feature creep “What the hell is this”~manner, but rather in the overtly high polish manner

Finally a game which proves that everyone can be happy. If it weren’t for those accursed asteroids!

Hey, thanks for reading through my lengthy feedback.

Great to hear development was a good experience for you. I wish you the best for your future voice acting career.

Second game I played this year which is just called o… though this one has more o.

And I really really like this game here. The bomb mechanic is insanely cool. Reminds me I should really brainstorm some cool platformer mechanics for my games.

Outside of the really cool character-mechanics puzzles I really really adore this artstyle. The frogs are an insanely cool way to create Key-Doors.

The bomb-explosions have that really fun weight to them. I love how they are predictable in how far they shoot you, very good for a puzzle Platformer.

And I am insanely happy I just replayed this with the music on. The sounds are fantastic, booth the music and the sfx. I love the layers the music goes through, especially the fly layer. It reminds me of Pikmin and how sometimes the pikmin will sing along with the melody.

Edit: Oh god, while I was writing this Lil’ o started sleeping and the music stopped (though maybe the music stopping was a bug because it won’t turn back on). Insanely cute, I love it.

That was really really really pretty. Artstyle and its execution is fantastic. The 3D environment is absolutely fantastic at setting the mood. And the usage of 2D for the character is some great spice on top of that. I love how the lantern actually works as lightsource to light up the scene (even if sometimes its placement leaves the player area a little too dark).

The story… I do not understand. But I didn’t realy expect to understand anything with a game of this name. So I am really more interested in the mood set by the audio logs. I really like the mystery aura they give off without giving a conclusion. I think their execution could be better, but it’s still noticeable how much work went into the voice acting and writing.

On the Gameplay front there’s not much to say. I love grappling hooks. And the camera angles to set the scenery work together really well with the movement (except like once or twice when walking into a weird corner). It just feels great to walk around in that little world.

Though there should probably be something like a respawn button. The game did softlock me once. Though that wasn’t such a big issue in such a short game.

I love platformers, I love Sanaes stretchy stretch snake, this was fun.

Zebulon was a good cat. I’ll remember him. Wanted to play this for quite a while, am happy to finally get around to it.

I loved how interconnected that little world was. All the different routes really helped getting back to points of failure. And on subsequent run they allowed for some fun routing.

I am also really impressed with how smooth the controls are. It feels really polished and there were barely any moments which felt like the controlls failed me (except in the water), which I didn’t expect from a PICO-8 game.

I also love Zebulons animations. They look really fun and complement the character controller surprisingly well despite how chaotic they are. And the little animation for the end of every run is extremely well done. I just had to watch it to end off a run.

Something I only noticed on my later runs is just how neat the Overworld looks. Even if it is very small it has what I think are meant to be normal building, the rooftops on top, and a little Forest area with a lake.

The challenges for subsequent runs resulted in a really relaxing difficulty curve. With the last few ones having some actual challenge. My favourite were likely the Minit and Half Minit challenge. Those two work absolutely perfectly in such a small game.

I also wanna say that the music was a really fun listen. Especially the energetic part even if it was a little overly chaotic just felt great. i always tried jumping along with the melody, which did result in me missing some jumps because I was way too eagerly playing along with the music. But it was fun.

Ok, where to begin. First off, one opf the best games I’ve played on itch. Was overall fantastic.

I really like the story/dialogue, it’s very fun and feels perfectly in line with fun precision platformers. The music is also fantastic.

I think the majority of the levels is great. There were few which I didn’t find interesting. The Different modes are always fun to play through, though sadly offer little variety.

Except for during the Final Boss. Where each mode feels really unique to play.

However that final fight is definetly too much “RNG”. Not in the sense that it is actual RNG, after all when you do the same you did previous run it does the same too. The problem is that, especially during the 3rd phase on growth it just starts moving into the player constantly. I don’t care anymore. I beat this boss, even if the game says no. But seriously I would love to have a little fix on the bosses behaviour so it is more easily predictable when you’ve gotten yourself into a situation where the boss will just move into you.

Yeah, this was very funny. I love how the cube just… spins. The level Design is also seriously funny, most of the jokes work really well.

Though I had to stop on the falling platforms, I’d continue, but only if there was a checkpoint before that. Those platforms seem like they need some insane precision. And it’d take another 10 minutes to get there with how often I fall for the fall-through Ground.

Been way too long since I played some PICO-8.

Love how some levels look impossible or like they have some weird trickery, just for you to notice that you have to push some blocks to the side and walk outside of the area.

Also explosions are great.

Oh god I love that this is a remake of an older jam game. The polish of this version makes it a billion times more hilarious than the concept itself already is.

Also, as a European I can confirm this is how the average day works over here.

Okay, finally got my hands on this a while back. I am not an expert on soundeffects and am also rather new to using them. So don’t take anything I say too serious.

First off the soundeffects themselves are nice. My favourites are likely the Menu soundeffects, they are a nice mixture of Wii-Era Menu Sounds and Musical sound thingies. Or maybe that’s just me usually liking UI sound packs. The Terrain/Nature sounds also have some great stuff, but they suffer heavily from an isssue of the pack I’ll mention in a bit. My favourite category overall might be the Charges & Fires.

The pack itself is varied. There’s 9 categories of sounds, each ranging between 4 and 23 sounds. And the categories with more sounds usually also have like 3-4 different styles of sound. Leading to the usual soundpack problem of having 100 sounds and like 3 fit your usage. But that’s just the usual thing I experience from sound packs.

Now to the actual problem of this pack: It’s very noticeable this is the first SFX work you’ve done.

The sounds are rather “long”. And by that I don’t mean the sounds themselves, that is perfectly fine depending on the game. The files all have 3-5 seconds of nothing in them. Even on effects I think should be used in a loop they have this nothing at the end. EXCEPT for Engine Stationary (1), that one has no empty space at the end and actually loops… Except it doesn’t because the files are all exported in MP3.

MP3 is fine for casual music listening. But due to it being lossy and a peculiarity in how it saves data it just doesn’t work well with soundeffects. That peculiarity leads to a miniscule amount of nothing when looping a track. Normally soundeffects are exported as .wav (Higher Quality) or .ogg (lower quality).

Overall this pack definitely needs a reexport of all sounds with more sensible length and filetypes. Also, while there are indeed 102 unique soundeffects, which is quite many sounds. But still, when compared to other packs on this site that is among the pricier ones.

Finally I wanna mention a personal issue I had when trying to use the sounds. I tried using the Small-Itemcollect 1 Soundeffect for coins like in a platformer. But I quickly noticed the soundeffect for the coin went on quite long. Meaning that if I spammed some coins around, you could hear the soundeffect stack on top of itself till it got really loud. And it also takes a little while to quiet down. For comparision, Super Mario Worlds Coin Soundeffect is roughly 0.4 seconds long. While your Small-Itemcollect 1 is roughly 2.2 seconds long. I do have some recordings of how it sounds in-game, but I can’t send them here on itch.

Oh my god I love this. If I were actually able to use 10 finger stytem I would probably grind this.

The gamefeel of this is fantastic and makes me genuinely wanna play this even if it is just typing. I got a score of 33500 points. I love how that score feels high enough to still feel fun even if I am not particularly good.

I also love some of the absurd words put into this project. How does one even find words like Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia… That sounds nearly as long as some of the German words I can come up with like: Luftschlossautohausbauarbeiterleitergeschäfft.

An important part in development is finding your own process in developing a game. There’s many many different possible approaches to making a game and using the tools at your disposal.

There’s also the issue with Tutorials that they often are made by people who are still learning themselves. I’ve seen some tutorials try teaching some fundamentals without actually understanding them. So whenever you watch a tutorial always question the quality of the tutorial itself and try coming up with other solutions.

The only Godot tutorial I can truly reccommend is Wye’s remake of super mario world. He’s new to godot but already experienced in making Games through ROMhacking. He’s also very carefull when implementing things, always trying to find a good solution. Though the tutorial series focuses more on the structure of solutions that actual direct coding. And as he isn’t finished with the project yet, he hasn’t released the source code for it yet.

Also if you’ve got any direct questions, I wouldn’t mind if you asked me. I’ve already gotten a good bunch of Godot experience by now and feel fairly competent in my personal developing style with the engine.

Oh, I can kinda get how that happens.

I usually donate some money to my top 10 free games on itch each year. But I don’t really bother giving stars. There’s a few reasons why that happens:

First off, I don’t like 1-5 star ratings. I have my own rating system ranging from 0-10 in my notes. And in there, there is no judgement over a game being bad when it has 2 points. I may enjoy a game but still only give it 2 points because there’s just better things.

Then there’s how ratings and their comments aren’t public. you can write a special comment alongside your rating but as far as I know that isn’t publically put into the comments. So when you wanna say some words about the game to the world, you’d rather use the comments than the rating. If these two were properly connected I would probably use ratings a lot more often.

And finally it’s just that… Why would I care about giving a rating when it doesn’t really make much of a difference. From my experience playing and developing games, people usually are a lot more interested in real tangible support. Wether that be money or a players actual thoughts. Those things have an actual value, meanwhile a 1-5 rating doesn’t have any value neither virtual nor real. The best thing about seeing those ratings is just knowing someone played my game, which is always a great feeling.

However I am thinking about using ratings a bit more often on here.

This is a nice project. I think my favourite part is actually those absurd structures. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just love massive abstract structures. And this game has some absolutely amazing ones.

The gameplay sadly lacks some polish. Though I can understand that, making the scene switching smooth is really hard due to how game engines handle that sort of thing. And grappling hook controls are also hard to do, though honestly I enjoyed how absurdly overpowered the spacebar is on the grappling hook.

At last I kinda wanna mention that “The Heroes Journey” isn’t actually that widespread. It is a somewhat common trope in folkmyths. But by far not common enough to say it is at the core of any myth.

Overall that was really fun to play and had some amazing visuals.

No problem, Lone Ruin is looking really neat. I might check it out if I find the time for it (but my game-list is already quite filled up).

First off, that artstyle is absolutely fantastic. I love the way every enemy has a face. The music too is fantastic and fits so well. I love the presentation of this game.

Gameplay wise I wasn’t too big a fan of the level design, there were a few random sections which felt way harder than the base difficulty (sudden spikes when switching rooms, those bullet ball stairs or those swimming sections with a height of 2 blocks).

But what I reeally loved where the enemies and obstacle designs. They feel really varied. Especially the crystal spikes and floor.

Really makes me wanna work on more Jump n’ Run things. Will probably try take some inspiration from the spritework and enemies.

Thanks a ton for playing and giving some feedback. The visual spectacle of patterns made up of many many bullets is one of the main reasons I like Bullet Hells, and why I usually call them Danmaku.

Oh and I finally know itchio has a spoiler markdown, that’s fantastic to know. I’ll respong to your gripes in spoiler markdown too.

To finish this, thanks for playing my game and of course congrats on beating it. I am really happy to hear that you enjoyed it and reading the feedback was very fun.

Good to hear, I hope it wasn't too difficult to set up.

I just donated a few bucks. Would've done so yesterday but was busy pulling off an all nighter to finish up a game.

Don't worry yourself with getting donations running "soon". It can be a bit of a hassle because of legal issues. I have only done it myself recently when I've had lots of free time on my hands. Though itchio itself wasn't a big hurdle, only the bureaucracy that comes with making money from something.

I also just checked back on the music as that glitched out on my playthrough. It is really good, I like such atmospheric spacey synth tracks. From the very little I know they can be hard to make due to how much possibilities there are with synths. To use that for an atmospheric track needs atleast a basic understanding of sound engineering/sound designing or whatever it is called.

But I shouldn't really try to analyze beyond my own knowledge. What I can say for certain is that you managed to pull off a really good atmosphere with the music on this game.