itch.io

hi! i'm genuinely surprised anyone remembers that game! it's cool that you've been following my games!

i have a version of Chroma Cave with around 40 levels on my hard drive that i should probably release. hopefully i can find the time at some point, though my priority right now is making games that can connect to my new site arcade2000.io.

i don't use Unity or Clickteam Fusion anymore. my engine of choice is Godot now

incredible score, nicely done!! i doubt you're having any skill issues, there's just genuinely more work to be done on making bullets more readable. in particular, once they cross the player's plane, i think they need to get dark immediately instead of just semi-transparent. i also think the enemys' habit of directly shooting through the screen origin, especially salamanders, is not an ideal bullet pattern, kind of a worst-case for readability actually.

i'm glad you got into it enough to discover that speed strategy! i'd love to see a video of it if you happen to have one on hand (you don't need to go too out of the way for it though). you're one of the most valuable types of playtesters if you can find exploits... though it's not an exploit if it's fun! my thought, just from your description, is that enemies should fire at least a small volley of bullets before exploding to a combo shot -- that way you can't remove bullet dodging altogether via mouse flailing alone (if the game is updated later this would be combined with better bullet readability). would you agree?

this was awesome, felt like a very complete experience! had a fun and funny time. was happy to see a nice point and click in the games!

the long hair effect was cool! the life system where you die of bald was fun

cute and the writing was funny, i liked the "twitch integration"

haha that’s so cool that you recognized me :) happy i could be helpful

thanks for the kind words! i agree with you on the bullet parsing. we agonized over communicating bullet distance via color, something a lot of rail shooters don’t even seem to bother with, but it still needs work

thanks for the kind words! the visual style and funny writing is all thanks to bnanasmash! i’m sorry about the motion sickness… did you try windowed mode? i have no idea if it would help, but i wonder if i could make a motion sickness mode by overlaying some static sprites or a grid or something to give the brain a better frame of reference.

that is super weird that you never entered the name john gaming! my only guess is that Godot must have given you and another person the same device ID. i’ll have to look into it, maybe for whatever reason multiple people got an empty ID or something and that’s why.

if you linked the other account, and it’s someone else’s account, they can still submit scores as you, but they won’t be able to do anything else if you own the parent account.

i’ll look into it. thanks again for the bug report!

awesome!! i’m glad you played it to the fullest, and i can see that you beat my score! don’t forget you can set your banner image/PFP/homepage on the charts if you want to, and pin your rank to brag about it in other arcade2000 game charts.

that sounds odd, thanks for the report! i’d be interested to get to the bottom of this, i’ll let you know what i think happened and tell me if it checks out.

you launched the game and entered your name. if you truly never started the game im not sure what happened as you shouldn’t have a profile, but let’s assume you actually did play the game at least once before going to your profile. once you did, you changed the name to johngaming.

meanwhile somebody else also entered the name johngaming. you are allowed to do this in arcade2000 games with “frictionless” usernames enabled, and i remember seeing johngaming on the charts with an asterisk clarifying that the name was already taken and their actual name was johngaming-baldhairier (arcade2000’s solution for name collisions). so, this might all just be confusion caused from two people choosing the same name? hopefully, your account should be usable as normal. you might have to wait 30 days before changing username again.

really clever puzzle game! feels very polished and complete. i was too dumb to figure out level 10, saw the solution here, wanted to go back and try it but there doesn't seem to be a save or level select.

great creativity based game, i hope joel plays it! would be fun to watch

for sure, i understand wanting to not open a can of worms! mixels aren’t a big deal just figured it was an opportunity for some constructive feedback. game looks good as is.

really cool, it had a neat vibe to it! the music helped give it a more desolate feeling. we liked the different color palettes when you go into the houses. the ending videos were cool too!

had a great time with this! the music is great, and the monkey ball levels are fun. the snowboarding level was hilarious, though i couldn't figure out how to get out of it (skated all the way to the bottom and it just restarts). got the miku hair and the level timed out, after that i got soft locked as i watched my monkey bald disappear into the abyss... but yeah awesome job, great game, thanks for making it! i hope joel plays it!

also the windows build didn't work so i had to play the web build. i dunno exactly what's happening but usually if Godot is having trouble loading resources in the exported build, i check for case sensitivity (the exported builds are more sensitive to that than the editor). here's what the console said: pastebin

this was super great, if this is your dogshit i'd love to see what your best work looks like! loved the animations, player movement felt solid. it was fun, gratifying challenge that felt complete. end screens were funny

man i loved this! the graphics are so so good, loved the models, loved the skybox, loved the prerendered scenes especially all the different grim reaper scenes. somehow the way he looked just made me laugh every time. really funny, it reminded me of a Dreams PS4 game i loved called "chudscape." anyway awesome job, possibly my favorite of the jam so far

this is funny, i like how saying where the music came from was part of the dialog lol. stylish and cool, nice one

cool atmosphere with the volumetric fog, was fun to go around and look at the art

does the game game save? not sure if i can go through the first three levels again every time i wanna take a crack at norwegian mode, but when i played again all the levels were locked

cute concept, it made us chuckle, and cool art style (this is personal taste, but i would've made the resolution match the pixel size to avoid mixels). it's fun and i liked the writing too!

this is really well done!! the whole thing felt very slick. the movement feels really satisfying due to both the animations and the code. sound design and art was really good, it really evoked GBA era wario land 4 vibes. it's exciting to get a new wig and really tense when you're bald (that mechanic reminded me of yoshi's island). i wished that i could kill enemies in one hit... i think it would make the combat feel like a natural extension of the platforming instead of an interruption. i just wanted to keep running around and jumping so found i naturally avoided most enemies. the granddad power was a fun choice. final boss was challenging, still working on actually beating it. great job!

had a great time with this, good level design and cinematography and fixed camera angles. better game design than most sonic team games lol. the challenge of beating the truck was fun, overall impressive!

this was so hilarious, seriously good writing, "glussy" was really funny. F4 for fullscreen was appreciated, great art, five stars

very fun idea, art looks great, super funny when it all comes together at the end. hope Joel plays it, seems like a perfect toy for him. i tried hitting the maximize button on a large monitor but the window's contents stayed the same rather than stretching like i'd hope. the plucked hairs instrument also didn't seem to record for me (tried twice), but it was still a great time!

we loved everything about this, writing was hilarious, the music and sound was great (loved the BGM that plays while you're looking at the goober), cute art, fun fren origin story premise. i like how mold grows on him in phase 3, i love how the buttons look on the goober screen. my only nitpick is the clickzones are quite small, especially the one to go back to the room was so small i felt like i had to memorize where it was. we laughed a lot! great job

i love how you increased the specular on his head at the start. very funny, nice solid skeleton usage, overall great job

very cool and funny, solid concept, good presentation, norwegian mode is insane. i need a hint on how to actually do it

awesome, thanks for playing! you were almost there!! for the checkerboard blast you have to go in the cracks between the  rectangles. i think it happens once every seven blasts

there is an updated version now (1.3) if you want to try a level that's almost 3 times as long! we had the level done by the deadline but a floating point precision error prevented us from releasing it properly. we also tried to fix some of the issues with visual clarity.

thanks for the kind words! there will almost certainly be at least one update. we actually had a much longer level made before the deadline which you can see in v1.2, but i wouldn’t recommend actually trying to beat it because there is some kind of floating point precision issue that makes the bullets actually impossible to parse. they did say bugfixes were ok during the judging period so i’ll try to fix that when i have time so we can properly show off the longer level.

thanks for the kind words! sorry it was too difficult. the game is intended to be one where you die many times before getting good enough to beat it, a type of game i really like, but it’s not for everyone.

some general advice i can offer on the beam mechanic: it’s much quicker to kill enemies with the beam once you have a charge, and if you lock on to 3 enemies before you switch polarities, that’s how you combo (your beam will just refill immediately)

for the boss i think it’s most important to focus on survival. the beam does decent damage but you don’t need to worry about it too much about it, just focus on hitting the eyes with bullets. if you change polarity for every blast from the background, the only precision dodge you have to do is from its combo blast which is one in every seven blasts i think.

thanks for the kind words! to clarify, the online scoreboard site arcade2000.io has been a years long project for me. i have it set up so i can quickly and easily integrate it into a game, so i use it for gamejams. i actually opened up the API prior to the jam so anyone could use it, but i don’t think anyone’s tried yet.

as for the boss, i’m wondering if the main problem is that it’s still too hard to judge depth. i spent a lot of time on shaders trying to solve this problem in a stylish way (dithering + sprite size snapping). we’ll need to find a way to make it clearer. thanks for the feedback!

i hope you find a team, but if not, have you tried Clickteam Fusion? very accessible to non-coders, it's all dropdowns, very instant gratification. a little janky but it's perfect for making shitposty games (good fit for frenjam)

hello duendes, hopefully this isn't spammy! you could call this an ad for my score API but it's totally free, i don't make any money off it, and thought it could be a useful tool for the jam. i just now made the API public in preparation for frenjam 2 and another jam i have coming up.

it's especially good for gamejams because you don't have to make an ingame interface. you just fire off one GET request to submit a score, and then open a browser window to display the chart. 

if several games ended up connecting, i could make an omni board which merges players' scores together and would tell you who is best at playing the gamejam itself! just make sure you set your game's "Download link" to your itch.io page so i can tell it's part of the jam.

links: arcade2000 community games quickstart  |  Why connect to arcade2000? | Godot example project 

to get an idea of how cool arcade2000 is, you should poke around the Evil Egg scoreboard:

if you end up playing around with it and run into any snags or bugs please let me know! pre-jam, i might even be able to manage a few feature requests.

have fun!!!!

one other option would be to partner up with someone else for music. did you see this post? Composer looking for a team! - FrenJam 2: Electric Boogaloo community - itch.io

you could also try messing around and pencilling in notes in Fruity Loops if you haven't already. you might find it's easier than you thought, but i guess not everyone has a musical ear. Fruity Loops is $99 past the trial, but if you just wanted to make chiptunes you could try free software like pxtone.

thanks! i like this description

loved it! the presentation was really tight! the art is stylish and the battle backgrounds are cool! the gameplay is definitely fun (you can't really go wrong with bullet hell). the cool nickel and the penny had cool bullet patterns. having the grabbable green bullets adds great risk/reward. i do have a few notes, but they're just nitpicks.

i wish there was a bit more strategy to the car-washing segments, after a while it's pretty straightforward. the most interesting part was when i couldn't find a smudge of dirt on one of the wheels and was wondering why i couldn't go to the next level. maybe you could get attacked in the car-washing segment too?

to me the worry in a game like this is that the "minigame" part feels completely separate, and it's like playing two different unrelated games. i think you mostly dodged this by adding and subtracting time through the battles, making them feel tied together. if you were to develop this further, i'd just keep that limitation of "minigame" type encounters in mind, and maybe look for ways to more tightly couple them with the overworld. maybe something can still come after you in realtime in the overworld while you're battling, so you have to choose your battles carefully? just a thought!

this is very subjective, and balancing during a gamejam period is quite tough, but most of the bullet patterns felt a little easy. since hitting one bullet is by no means run-ending, by making the bullet patterns more challenging and balancing around that, you might be able to make the game more fun while not locking out beginner players, since they can still keep going even if they lose some time.

rock-solid entry, had a great time with it. thanks for making it!

the graphics are cute! moving the units around was intuitive. the way you can see enemy units behind walls is cool. there didn't seem to be much content, though, it seemed after only a minute or two i was just doing the same thing over again, unless i missed something. still, it was definitely fun to play around with for a few minutes! good job!