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am also so hyped!

Also if benches and tables blocked bullets, it would also mean that you would never get shot if you are underneath them!

Oh that's a really good point actually. Cobalt who helped with the final push of the game actually suggested that as well. The tables are a bit taller than the cops and Gruntled, but it totally makes sense that even if that's the case, from the cameras perspective it should block their bullets.
I'll be sure to add benches and tables blocking bullets. I think the other thing is mainly the speed of the bullets. I kind of like the precise accuracy of the guard shooting, but I think maybe it would be good if they lagged a bit behind as you moved around, which would incentivize trying to get them to loose you.

Afroduck suggested also that this game could really benefit from difficulty settings. If it was level based there could be difficulty modes for each level, which could give the player the chance to learn the mechanics in previous difficulties before stepping up. I think the game currently is balanced for an Ultra Hardcore mode LOL.

Thanks for trying it and for the feedback!

I'm curious, did you play the game before I got around to updating it? If so that's totally fine, its just so i know if post balancing its still too difficult.

Thank you again for giving it a shot! I already have plans to work the idea more, and I want to shoot for smaller levels that aren't as spread out. 

Also the inside of the museum acts as a checkpoint, so once you make it in, that becomes the next death reset point (similar to Hotline Miami) I was design wise going for a game like that, that is designed to be difficult, but I went too far.

There's still quite a few hours left in the jam! It's a pretty short jam too so often times there will be a lot of submissions at the very end. :)

2900 LET GOOO!

All good! I always appreciate suggestions! I have actually been playing with the vehicle movement way of moving the cart, and also having the stomp for when it gets to heavy, and that already feels great!
I'll brainstorm ways though to make it more clear that the pickaxe is being thrown over the cart  in terms of layering. Maybe they can grow when thrown and then size back down after traveling a bit.

Been working on the game post jam, and was able to solve the pit issue by adding parallax backgrounds! I think it helps a lot.

Yay, thank you for trying it and the feedback!

The pits definitely are tricky. I'll definitely need to brainstorm how to make that more clear, since it's tricky with the top down perspective.
I thought initiallly about doing a typical 45 degree top down perspective like most top down games, but it made the cart aiming feel a bit weird. Maybe I need some sort of shader that can make them fade out from the edges in to give the illusion of depth.
I think my thought was setting up that the walls are lighter than the floor so it's clear that darker tiles are further down, but that probably didn't read as well as I thought. 

I'll also make the gem loss less punishing when the cart falls. Maybe they only loose a quarter rather than half. That way when the player discovers it, they learn, but it's not rage inducing when it first happens LOL.

Makes sense that there are problems with the enemy spawning. Thank you for pointing it out so I don't forget to fix it.

I also really like the pickaxes! Excited to develop on that mechanic a bit further too.

Thank you for the feedback and checking out the game! I decided against the pickaxe moving the cart, because there would then be no way to attack an enemy if the cart is in between you and that enemy, since throwing the pick would instead move the cart instead of going over it. I might play around with it though to see how it feels!

Thank you for trying it!

Yeah my thought was to keep the prompting and tutorial aspect of the game to a minimum, and to allow the player to discover how the bots route and move around the space as they play. I'm glad you were able to figure it out though and you enjoyed it.

I'll be sure to implement some sort of very short interactive tutorial for post jam!

Note: Due to how shader compilation works in Godot 4.3 (and me struggling to find the issue) the game will take longer than you anticipate to start up. It might be unresponsive while this is happening, but it is simply compiling shaders.

Hey there! Not sure if you are active or still around on itch, but we are finally reaching a demo stage of this game post jam, and would love for you to help playtest if you're interested :D

For those who are interested, we are reaching a point with this game that we plan to start some playtesting! If any of you are interested in playtesting on the game, feel free to reach out to my email straightupgruntled@gmail.com!

Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed the game!

Thanks for the feedback on the movement. The movement polish will be addressed for sure!

- Gruntled

Thank you so much meekbug!!! We really appreciate the words of  encouragement!

We are actively planning out a full release for this game actually with the positive reception we have already received! We are thinking a smaller dev cycle of around 4 - 6 months and shooting for the $10 - $15 price range. We have been brainstorming,  and we already have plans to put out a new version ones the rating ends that fixes all the bugs for at least the jam version.

I will keep you updated for sure :D

- Gruntled

Thank you so much for your feedback!

The gem pickup issue is something we are already planning to fix after the jam. It was definitely a slight oversight when we were putting things together in the end.

To get the higher scores you have to utilize the rewind mechanic pretty heavily. You can trigger it manually (which there are prompts for in the top right and it is taught in the beginning) That way you can move around and collect stuff, and rewind and get all your time back while also keeping all the progress you have made.

There are ways to exploit that mechanic but we already are working on thoughts to fix that after the jam.

Glad you enjoyed overall!

-Gruntled

Thank you so much! I super enjoyed your guys game as well. It's fantastic!!!

I'm glad the criticism was helpful! Yeah maybe having a more generic representative color, like white, could have helped. That also would have helped for accessibility as making a white note would contrast well against everything regardless of hue.

This game is really so polished. Despite not having implemented all the features you wanted to, it still resulted in an INCREDIBLY polished submission. You did such a good job with prioritizing all the feedback and important parts of game polish that a lot of devs forget to add.

Excited to see what you do with the game in the future!

- Gruntled

I really like this game idea as a super huge rhythm fan, but I do have quite a bit of critique for you guys as you continue to work on this.

Player Feedback - Make sure that when the player catches the note the have much more feedback so they actually can tell if they have caught a note or not. I find myself on the fence on whether I'm catching notes or not, and that feedback is really a core part of rhythm games and critical to making them fun and engaging.

Visuals - Make sure the visuals are easy to follow. I like the simple style but I think with slightly different colors it could be even easier to follow. I think the notes dropped much too quickly at the start of the game. I would suggest having it start slower and working towards a larger speed. Maybe have a slow and fast gravity property, and have when a note appears it be in slow gravity mode, and then drop in fast. So with this explanation, I'm saying that the fast gravity needs to be slower.

Wave Crossover and the Clap Attack - This is really tricky for me, because I like these mechanics, but every time I try to cross over the waves and then move them together to catch the small purple ones, I literally always accidentally activate the clap ability, and then it takes way too long to recover after this. I would maybe have the clap not have such a cool down, and make the overlap between the waves more forgiving, that way the player has control between the two and it doesn't become a rage rhythm game. (If my understanding of these mechanics and how they work is incorrect, then I wasn't able to follow the tutorial and understand how they work)

Overall I really like the idea! I want to make it clear that I mean this review in a critiquing way to help you in your process of working on this more, and not as a way to bite at the bad things about your game. I would definitely take a look into these polish elements though as they made it hard for me to play through and enjoy to it's full potential. But thank you for delving head on into rhythm games for this jam!

- Gruntled

Also I love the correlation of blue with freezing time. I'll definitely make note of that. Might even be cool if it was almost an ice like blue.

I was able to get to around level 12 with the time I had to play. I really enjoyed it! Here's some thoughts I had while playing

• I REALLY love the art style and how it ties in with the mechanics. It is incredibly effective and looks really polished
• As a person who creates music, I love the little bass riffs between each level. Would have been nice to have some sort of chill music track, just to give the game more mood and feel.
• I wish there was a way to navigate back to the level screen without having to refresh. Nice on the game persistence though so you can refresh and still keep progress.
• I also would like a level reset. It seems like the levels are always beatable and never soft locked, but I like having quick resets on games like this to make playthroughs more efficient.
• I love the design of the levels, they really make me think!

Overall great job on this submission. Very well polished and the issues I had with it had nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the game itself

FOCUS = The game is created off of checkpoints in mind. They save the current song position and allow you to rewind back while keeping all the progress you have made.

THEME - You cross paths with your path to create a time effect that allows you to slow time and have more accuracy in shooting (and move at full speed during half time

COMMENT ON SHAPLEY DIVERSIFIER - We started this jam with pertaining to the Shapley diversifier, but it spiraled from there into more, so we decided to abandon it and use it more as an inspiration rather than a restriction. I'm glad we did this!

Thank you so much! Appreciate the kind words and feedback!

Hey Walaber, thank you so much for trying it out! I'm glad you liked it. I actually am working on a racing car game and I followed your car vehicle tutorial on YouTube to learn the basic concepts! Thank you for trying out the jam game though.

Thank you so much for trying it out! Yeah I wish that we were able to spend more time working with the keyboard controls. The controller controls are much easier to grasp and figure out. I'm glad you found it interesting though! Excited to check out what you made once I get the chance to as well!

Thank you for playing! Yeah trying to find a good control scheme was difficult. The controls are listed on the game page, I just didn't have time to add a controls page or a tutorial in game. Thank you for checking it out though!

Thanks for asking!

The song for this jam will not have any lyrics. It will be completely instrumental!

-Gruntled

Hey there! I thought I would ask if we are required to use a certain version of Godot to create a game for the jam. I've been having a lot of luck experimenting with Godot 4 lately and really want to try to create a game using the Godot 4 alpha. If I'm able to create a game that is stable using it, would that be allowed for the jam? Thanks!

I just noticed in the list of rules that it must be every member. I should have looked that over first fully. Thank you anyways! Still excited to possibly participate!

Hey, I'm curious about the 18 year old age limit to obtain the jam prize. If I am working on a team where I am older than 18 but I'm interested in working with my brother who is only a year under that mark, would we still be able to obtain the prize, but just directly obtain it through myself? Just curious so I know if that situation is required or not. Thanks!

Hey! Thanks for playing the game. And I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, the game over screen sometimes gets clicked through since you have to spam click to shoot without the power up. It's something that didn't cross my mind when developing in such a short time. But I super appreciate the feedback since I hope to make a full game out of this. I'm thinking having some sort of gun reload time would also help to reduce spam clicking and make shots more impactful.

Hey I really enjoyed this game! I felt like the mechanic was super cool, and I also liked the use of contextual colors to convey information. The theme interpretation was pretty loose, but I still felt like the game was pretty solid in how you developed the mechanics.

The game was also a little weirdly balanced, and scaled up really quickly. However, game balance is really tricky in a jam, and I also struggled with that.

Here's my high score on third playthrough. Wish I could have gotten far enough to see all of the ability bubbles!

Don't worry about it! Thanks for the update! I'll be able to play it on stream tomorrow :D

Hey, just wanted to let you know the game doesn't run. I think there are other files that need to be uploaded with it :) Make sure all the files are zipped in a zip folder together and then upload that zip folder! Also if you get the chance to reupload it, I can play it on stream tomorrow, or in a future playtesting stream.

Hey, sorry itch didn't actually let you submit to the jam D:  But I'm really excited to play your game, and thank you for posting it here for us to all still test out! :D

Hey thanks for listening to the soundtrack! I'm glad you liked it!

Im glad you felt the track felt cohesive. The goal was to create a soundtrack that felt similar in sound but different in style, so that way it felt unique but cohesive!

I wish I had more time to fix the clipping issues but I was running low on time unfortunately 😂 But I'm glad I got to submit it to the jam!

Overall thanks for your review! I super appreciate you checking out!

This is fantastic! Great to show people there are other ways to interpret the theme!

And so far my best score has been I think 7:15. Then again, Afroduck played this game more out of anybody I think ever will need to :D At least like 30 times