itch.io

This game was a vibe. No marks. Only egg. Grats on striving and making game.

Solid game! Shame it didn’t get done in time for the jam, but it stands pretty well on its own as a solid typing game!

Cosmomoney’s on the money with the feedback. The blacking out was annoying, but I’m really glad there was a save function! It stopped what would have made the game unplayable and turned it into merely a minor nuisance.

Overall, great job!

This game was pretty fun! Felt very different from its inspirations, but the differences were definitely not detriments. I like the music, and the sound design is very solid. All in all, pretty fun.

I would have liked to see the enemies have different appearances that would have hinted at whether they were walkers, shooters, or twin-shooters. The guesswork involved was a little frustrating at times. However, it was very well received that even if mistakes were made along the way, the game would only put you back to the beginning of the room.

The velocity mechanic was interesting, though I feel it really tends to slow down the pace of the game due to forcing the player to land frequently and take careful steps. One thing I really like about Downwell is how when you’re spiraling down the chute, you gotta maneuver yourself carefully and make every bullet count, not necessarily slowing yourself down but being careful to keep your steps secure, whether for your combo’s sake or to avoid obstacles. Here I just felt like it was a slow-paced platformer, and felt encouraged to linger and farm enemies rather than blitzing through carefully. With the ability to backtrack as well, I quickly became too powerful.

I like the idea behind the world-switching mechanic a lot! I thought it may have been somewhat underutilized, though. Both worlds seemed more or less equivalent in content, and although it seemed like it may have been useful to switch between worlds to dodge bullets, the bullets both came somewhat too quickly to react fast enough consistently enough, and enemies tended to fire almost immediately upon world-switching for me to the point that trying to world-switch to evade often just ended up putting me in even more danger than I was in before. I think with some polish, though, a mechanic like this could really shine in a game like this.

All in all, it was a good time. Good job to the team!

This is really cute. I love the vibe! The music fits really well, the art is phenomenal, and the concept is really fun.

As a fan of fighting games, this game left quite a bit to be desired gameplay-wise. For one thing, blocking feels a little too effective without any way to open up or punish it, such as the heavy attack inflicting some kind of guard crush or chip damage. With the heavy knockback and inability to deal damage to people after getting hit, fights dragged on for a quite a long time unless you’re able to sneak in some sneaky heavy attacks here and there. Though these are not really too much of a problem considering you’re fighting a CPU opponent that won’t exploit these much.

Overall, though, the idea is really inventive and fun, and I’d love to see this execution brought further to life! The game is great for what it is, and it was fun to mess around in for a while. Great job to the team!

Neat little game! There was a lot going on, so it was hard to get my bearings, but I loved the art and sound design of the game, and the concept seems really neat!

Some thoughts on things I would have liked to see:

• The music was nice but got a little repetitive pretty quickly, especially with having no variance between dying or rooms or anything.
• I liked that there were little things to interact with here and there. It would have been nice to see a little indicator when you were next to something you could check, such as looking at your mailbox or standing next to the door. In the first room, it took me a moment to realize that I had to “interact” with the door in order to go through it.
• In the chaos of everything going on during the fights, it would have been nice to get a little bit more of an indicator for when you take damage. Whether the screen flashing red, character flashing with iframes, or otherwise. Using the same damage popup indicator as the slimes makes the damage feel just happenstance, which can be extra dangerous when you’re taking damage and don’t even realize it until you’re dead.

I’m glad to see you guys plan to continue with this game! I look forward to seeing it progress in the future!

Great job with this game! Love the music, love the vibe, and the game’s pretty fun once it gets itself going!

Here’s a few thoughts I had while playing:

• As far as critique goes, I feel that although the game feels just right at that balancing point, the game takes a little too long to get itself going. The first 9 waves drag on pretty hard before the sudden difficulty spike on Wave 10 and continuing on. It was pretty fun from Wave 10 onwards, but getting there was a bit of a slog.
• I really like the music for this game, but the gameplay and standby tracks get very repetitive when constantly alternated with no variation in between. I think it would help a lot if the music either started at different loop points, progressed as the game went on, switched up the track throughout the game (maybe with the Menu theme?), or did something else to keep things fresh!
• I would have really liked to see the ability to hold down the mouse button to fire repeatedly, as clicking rapidly became a chore and yet was the most optimal strategy.
• I really like that the tower’s primary fire has an AoE blast, allowing you to hit multiple enemies at once. It was really satisfying to clear waves faster than expected by doing this, and looking for groups of enemies to strike down was incredibly important in the higher waves. However, because I had no real reference for how large the area of impact was for the blast nor any reference for if enemies were taking damage from blasts that were too weak to kill them in one hit, there was a lot of guesswork involved in measuring the range of the attack. Adding some indicators and responsive feedback would help a lot to this effect!

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game! I got up to Wave 21 before letting myself die just to see what would happen. Great job on this!

The game’s pretty fun and delivers a solid concept, and it’s really cool seeing that this was all made purely through web dev tools by a solo dev! Liked the graphics, and really liked the polish of entering the forest on the title screen when starting the game. That was fantastic!

As far as pain points go, movement felt a little strange in this game. It makes sense to me that you would move slower in a direction opposite to the one you’re facing (which forces people to kite more actively when at lower speeds), but I found my character always drifting slightly towards the mouse cursor when strafing, which felt unintuitive. Besides that, I would have liked to see a bit more variance in the enemy types beyond just speed and HP. It would have been nice, for example, if the tankier enemies dropped more gold, making it more rewarding to seek them out and kill them, or to see the robed guys shoot little spell bullets or something. The ambient growls weren’t bad, but seemed a bit too repetitive. As far as things I would have liked to see, I’d love to see the difficulty ramp up as you continue to get upgrades, perhaps introducing new enemy types or something to break the waves. When you can keep up with even huge swarms with the first five upgrades, it would be nice to see there be something to work up to!

Overall, though, I spent a nice amount of time with this game! Good job!

Oh damn! I might have to give it another look, then. Thanks for the heads up!

Appreciate the kind words! We’re definitely looking to continue developing it. The learning curve has been a consistent pain point, so we’re hoping we can make the game feel easier to pick up in future updates!

Thanks for playing!

Agreed on the font (especially when scaling up in Firefox; looks way better in the original size on browsers that actually play in the insert instead of opening new windows), and messing with the shape of components to make the types stand out more is not a bad idea!

The right-to-left was an intentional design choice, representing the player character being almost the “villain” against the light while also allowing the player to seem to “progress” left-to-right up the tower while retreating. Breaking the usual convention was a bit of a concern in development based on how unusual it might feel, but we hoped with the benefits the arrangement brings and with other even recent RPGs out there sharing a right-to-left arrangement (such as Octopath Traveler) that it would be something quick to get used to and enjoyed all the same.

Thanks for the feedback! I’m glad it felt rewarding enough to tough through that initial learning curve and enjoy the game!

All great points! I’m sad to hear the tooltips didn’t correct themselves when spawned by the edge sometimes, as that’s a problem we worked to solve and struggled to reproduce, but there will always be those “edge” cases, I suppose. :’) Everything else I’ve definitely noticed and fully agree with you. We definitely plan to expand on this game, and look forward to improving on these factors and more after the Jam.

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

I wonder if the cards that didn’t seem to do anything may have had Methods (blue components). The idea is when you use a card with a Method, the Method adds its listed effect to the other component it’s attached to, enabling powerful combos. We’re working on making it clearer that it’s basically merging one piece into the other in the next release.

Thanks for the feedback!

Beautifully made, incredibly polished. You all did a phenomenal job!

As far as constructive criticism goes, there is precious little I can give:

• The character felt a bit slow-moving. It would have been nice to have a little more snappiness to the mobility at the start. But that’s mostly my own personal tastes.
• The mechanics of rocket-jumping off the bombs dropped from the ceiling felt a tad frustrating. Rocket jumping is still unwieldy in your own hands, but you can pick it up with practice, and it’s super fun rocketing around once you do. The one from the ceiling, though, felt incredibly precise as far as timing goes for bouncing off of it, and it took me several frustrating minutes to finally get a good jump.
• Very minor bug I noticed: The height you gain from repeated jumps off the bouncy slime does not reset when landing on a one-way platform.

Overall, incredible job. This was honestly super inspiring to play!

I really dig the vibe of this game! It does what it does, and it does it very well. My only thought regarding how it could be polished in its current state is that the health pickups seem way too plentiful considering how much damage you’d realistically be taking. It also would have been nice to see a few more challenging elements, such as hazards to avoid like enemy projectiles. Beyond that, you got it! The visuals were great, the animations were a joy to watch, and the music you picked out worked well with the vibe. Great job!

This was a lot of fun! Everything worked well with each other and it all felt really polished! The lack of music also didn’t feel like a blow against the game, as it seemed almost to set the ambience nicely. Excellent job! If you continue working on this in the future, I’d look forward to playing through whatever comes next!

The premise is neat, and I wanted to like the game a bit more, but I ran into a host of pain points along the way.

• There seems to be a little too much information being thrown at the player from the start, presented by the Engineer’s speech. For example, it seemed a bit much being told what and where all the machines were when realistically all I needed to know was where the crafting table and drill were.
• I found myself very frequently pressing the wrong button, firing a laser when I meant to use a melee attack or gather a resource node. I think it may have been better if these different options had unique controls, rather than all being on mouse. If you’re already using keyboard controls as well as mouse controls, I think E could have been used for interacting in general, and perhaps for Melee attacks if there was nothing to interact with.
• Rather than forcibly respawning when firing one too many lasers, I feel the laser should just lock up, preventing you from ending your own survivability.
• It took me one or two random deaths to realize that I had been taking contact damage from enemy corpses. I see that’s already on your list of known bugs, but I think it would have been nice if there was a bit more responsive feedback for taking damage, which would have helped me realize sooner that I was in danger. I could see, for example, a red aura filling the screen while taking damage or something as a simple way of doing that while continuing to allow the game to feel as free as it does movement-wise and hit-wise.
• As far as audio goes, the home base music was pretty good, but the field music, although good, was comparatively a bit too loud. The sound effects were pretty good, though the drill sound loop bleeding into the field was a bit unfortunate.

Once I realized how to play around all the pain points (clicking my own character constantly for melee attacks and gathering, and kiting enemies vertically to get around the shifted hurtbox and inability to use melee attacks in any other direction), there was a pretty fun game to be had! The audio and visuals overall was pretty solid. I think if you polished up the issues above, made it easier to control, and added a bit more variation to each trip to the field, it would shine a lot more!

I dig the concept! It was fun moving around and felt pretty flavorful!

I did unfortunately find myself breaking the game quite a few times, such as by shifting into the shadow realm after I had died which put the game into a bit of a fugue state until I refreshed! Also, the game did not load any of the wall textures (as well as a multitude of other issues) in Firefox for me, but worked perfectly in Chrome. I wasn’t sure what the numbers when dealing damage or dying represented, as I assumed them to mark kills but they didn’t seem to add up well to that. And I can’t say I was too fond of the experimental mechanic. I get the vibe of wanting the action to sync up with the music, but because strikes seemed so plentiful, nothing else really sync’d up with the music, and the beats to sync to seemed to sparse, I felt that it broke the pace of the game more than it kept it in sync.

But when the game worked, it was a lot of fun! I’d have to experiment more with the shadow shift mechanic to avoid careening off to Neverland, but I was able to flow well through it, movement felt like a blast, and the aesthetics and visuals were on point! Overall, despite it being a little rough around the edges, I had a lot of fun with it, and I think the game has some really good potential! Great job!

Chin up! What you made works well in the time you had, and we just gotta take the lessons from it as far as priorities go and push forward to next time! I couldn’t get much in the way of sound effects in our game either, but so long as the rest of it shines, I think it’s all worth it.

Very nicely made for two weeks’ time! I like the vibe, and I was impressed to see a level as long as the one you made! The mechanics work and feel pretty nice, and it was neat getting to see what could have been made as a reward for completing the game! My only complaint would be that turning the camera feels really stiff and almost seems to bug out the character. Once I got used to it, I was able to enjoy the game.

Great job!

Neat concept for a tower defense game! I felt the music and sounds were perhaps too quiet, and I was expecting to be assaulted from multiple sides perhaps a bit sooner than Round 7 rather than being swarmed so early. That said, neat game, neat concept! Good job!

Overall a solid concept that was pretty well executed! The one frustrating bit for me was that shadows occasionally would seemingly appear out of place, such as in the final puzzle where the blinds seemed to cast their shadow across the entire room. I could imagine that the Master liked his privacy while he worked and moved his furniture around before he ascended, but it felt strange in the moment and forced me to spend quite a bit of time repositioning the light.

Besides that and audio being sorely missed, it was a solid experience that seemed to accomplish what it wanted to do. Great job!

Beautifully rendered, solid concept! The game is a bit unforgiving, however, and probably could have used some intangibility frames after taking damage, or alternatively removed contact damage altogether, as it felt unfair when I would slightly run face first into an enemy that I could barely tell was there in the first place. If you remove contact damage, you would then be able to get a bit more creative with the attacks while still allowing the monsters to feel fair. Beyond that, the letters felt on the verge of illegible, especially the wanted posters. I’m not sure if that was intentional…

Besides that, loved the ambience, liked the audio, and dig the vibes. Great job!

The game reminded me a bit of those retro games where it doesn’t really tell you much. If the description of the itch page wasn’t there, I’d probably have been almost completely lost. With the description and a little experimenting and patience, I was able to find my way through.

The things that confused me the most were that there were instructions for how to attack on the itch page, but you don’t actually start with an attack. I found myself confusingly floundering and getting caught as a result, until I progressed far enough to realize the weapon to attack with was on sale. Beyond that, I would have expected downing the patrolling robots to give scrap, if not becoming the prime source of scrap yielding more than dumpsters on the roof of a destitute city every could. And of course, having to tip the shopkeeper to close the shop window seemed a little silly.

There’s definitely room to freshen up the experience, but the controls felt solid (though might have a little bit of bloat with the added Enter key over just using the other two buttons for menu input). The animations flowed nicely, and the music fit the vibe. It was also nice to see the overhead indicators clearly show what could be interacted with as far as searching and hiding go.

I dig the aesthetic of the game! It’s visually beautiful and the puzzles are pretty neat! I did think the drone of the music was a little loud and grating at its default volume until I lowered it, and it would have been nice to see the individual items give a bit more of a description of how they could be used, at least at first. Our game shared similar woes regarding teaching the player how to play, though, so I definitely know how that goes.

Though the manual felt a bit overwhelming when starting the game at first, it helped a lot as a reference once I actually dived in. Though the thing I was most lost on at first was the fact that you even needed to click on the items after they were placed in order to actually use them properly. Once I figured that out, the rest was smooth sailing!

Overall, fantastic game, and congrats on a job well done!

I like the vibe of this game! I’d love to see it with a bit more weight and shift in weight for mobility to flow between attacks. Sword swings feel a bit stiff when they keep you in place which forces you to repeatedly kite horizontally, especially with such a tall hurtbox on the character. More mobility and weight on the enemy’s attacks as well as a more forgiving hurtbox on the player could also help make the combat feel a bit more fair.

For a prototype, it’s a neat framework, and I can def see where it can scale up from where it is! Great job!

Neat little puzzle game! I like the concept. The difficulty ramps up a bit quickly, especially heading into the final level, but the game does a good job of demonstrating its mechanics, leaving players with nothing but time to figure out the last one.

Besides the obvious lack of audio, I think this game would shine with some input buffering, allowing inputs a few frames in advance to make quick moves in succession feel smoother. That was my only real pain point, though.

Great job! I’d love to see this concept further fleshed out in the future.

Thanks for the feedback! We sadly ran out of time before the submission deadline to add those elements, but we’re absolutely prioritizing adding SFX and an interactive tutorial to the game after the jam. For now, though, I went ahead and polished the game’s description to hopefully make the mechanics a little bit easier to grasp.

I hope you’ll consider giving the game another shot in the next release!