itch.io Spring Selects Series A
On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

Ultra Runaway Games

34
Posts
6
Topics
228
Followers
12
Following
A member registered Nov 12, 2013 · View creator page →

Creator of

Recent community posts

Glad you had fun, thanks for playing! We've got a few other small games here on itch

IIRC That's pretty much how it worked before the "allow to be claimed" was added, like a Steam free weekend

Glad you're enjoying it! 
Didn't test on tablets, so a bit curious, how are you controlling it on a tablet- a keyboard or gamepad? Cool that you can play it on your tablet.

Glad you had fun, thanks for checking it out!
Appreciate your report, will take note.

Toggle between keyboard and gamepad by hitting "C" key
Dive each time you've defeated the enemies.

Keyboard and mouse controls

  • Move - WASD
  • Aim - Mouse look
  • Jump - Space 
  • Dash - Shift
  • Shoot - Left mouse click

Gamepad 

  • Move - Left stick
  • Aim - Right stick
  • Jump - A button
  • Dash - Left trigger
  • Shoot - Right trigger

You are one of the chosen few to watch the ending animation. :) Glad you liked it!
We've released a few games now, a few are free on itch, hope you have fun with those too.

Thanks for checking it out, very pleased you were so absorbed. That's one of the comments a dev loves to hear. We have a few more small free games here on itch ;)

Thanks for trying it out, glad you enjoyed it. :)

Glad you had fun! That was precisely the feel we were going for on the New Game +
Seems a simple enough fix to add an "exit bug shooter" button in case of bug issues, so at least you wouldn't be locked in. Might not be able to find the exact source of that bug without some reproduction steps.

Between the theming, look, sprite quality, and gameplay loop, I'd say it's a pretty appealing game. Your store page is also good at presenting it, which is more than the average gamejam game on itch.

For a one week gamejam, I'd say it's quite successful at what its trying to do, you can take pride in that. What I saw in the devlog looked interesting and exciting, and if you ever get back to it I'll check it out.

Tried it out from the big bundle. Overall quite interesting though flawed, glad to see you've been developing a follow up. 
Some relatively small tweaks could greatly improve it.

Played as knight, and generally focused on melee.
I’d split the phases of the game Into early-game, mid-game, and late-game
Early-game: when you don’t have any stats maxed
Mid-game: when you have one stat maxed
Late-game: when you have more than one stat maxed
The early-game was a bit frustrating, but I also only went to the store page and read the "How to Play" around the beginning of the mid-game, so it’s probably because I didn’t know what a lot of things did. I didn’t know that P was potions, and assumed that the “defensive stance” mark was the one potion I had. The game became much more fun to play once I realized I had more than one potion stock.
Mid-game starts getting grindy and tedious somewhere between 2-3 stats maxed. This is when one wants to be able to speed up transitions and text appearing. But this is also the point where I found the game most interesting, where I had enough valid choices in combat to make interesting decisions. Perhaps have the initials levels come faster at first to make reaching this point faster, to reduce players quitting before it gets good. 
-I had a misconception that the more consecutive “Explore” actions one did, the harder battles would get, with higher EXP rewards. It appears that it is actually a random encounter table based on level/stats.
Late-game one's stats are high enough that you can settle into an optimal rut and it is kinda boring as a result. It becomes a cycle to farm EXP because all other resources are plentiful. Events become pointless because you always have full money for potions and heals and the scroll isn't useful if the stat is maxed.
----
Events have an issue with text being cut off at the top, which interferes with legibility as much as the font. In general, you should break a word to the next line if it can’t fit, as it is hard to read words which have only one or two letter broken to the next line. Seems you already know this though.

Scroll event is mostly frustrating after the beginning because it it doesn’t check if you have a maxed stat before awarding — leads to many times where you get an uncursed scroll, but it is useless anyway because it increased a stat that was already full, mostly intelligence. Ironically the first time it increased a stat other than intelligence, it was strength, which I had already maxed. I got to a point where I skipped all scroll events because they were useless to me.
----
Below the stats, there is a bar labelled +, which was a mystery for awhile, and is not clearly explained in your How to Play. It represents how many stat points one has, but when you have stat points, the red arrows appear, and there is no reason not to use them as soon as you have one, so I don’t understand why there is a need for a bar to track them. It is unclear and unuseful because in almost all use cases, this is 0 or 1 - where 0 isn’t useful info, and 1 is also indicated by the red arrows and thus is redundant. It would be much more useful if this was a bar that showed EXP and how close you are to leveling up again. This would factor into choices about whether to go to town and recoup or explore again in hopes of leveling up.
---
I never went to town to restore mana, because it passively refills, and by the point I had spells that used it, my physical attacks were way stronger and effective. The only spell I found useful was Heal, when I wanted to save potions during battles with weak enemies. But only using heal, mana recharged before I needed it again. 

 In general I didn’t find battle actions other than physical attack to be optimal. I really wanted defend to be useful, but it is only useful when you are a bit outclassed, and with only two rounds of buff, and it not working every time, it was really 50/50 whether it’s be more effective than just attacking. 

 By the time I built up enough Dexterity for Escape to be useable, I was so strong that it was a waste of EXP to use it. The fact that using it again doesn’t roll for another chance to escape seems a wasted opportunity, especially since it is possible to encounter an enemy that you cannot defeat. 

 I think this could be improved if some enemies were more susceptible to magic damage, or even impervious to physical damage like the WIsp, or the Ghost. This would validate using Magic attacks, and also for characters that don’t yet have magic, validate using Escape. 

 I appreciate that the stronger attacks and magic are more likely to miss, but it is random enough to eschew tactics regarding it. It would be nice if it had a system similar to Chrono Cross, where the more small hits you land, the more likely a big hit will also land, up to a point. 

 Sometimes the transition animation would just stay up after the transition period, obscuring the text. This only happened to me after I got to mid-game but I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not. As a result, I already had memorized the possible text and button positions and was able to muddle through. I noticed this mostly on explore events, but I think it may have happened going to town also.  
---
I almost made it to the ending, with Dexterity nearly maxed, and Luck halfway, everything else maxed. But I had my friend take the controller while I took notes for this feedback, and they died to an Ogre. I’m not willing to go through the grind again, so gonna miss out on the ending. Thus, I also recommend a save system be implemented, even if it’s only one save slot. It’s simpler than implementing some kind of meta game where the early game gets faster level ups based on how many times you’ve died or gotten further in the game…

Good cause! Add Bold Blade  https://ultrarunaway.itch.io/bold-blade

Maybe you'd have better luck looking at resources threads in the  RPGMaker forums?
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php

So if one has newer releases that aren't discounted as much as older ones, one may want to do a sale/bundle with multiple titles at different discounts.

older game A: 80% off

older game O: 80% off

newer game N: 10% off

bundled: 10% off the sum of discounted prices

Tried to do this withing itch.io's current sale system, did a bundle with all games at 10%, but bundled as the bundled price, and then another bundle with the deeper discount on the older title only. But itch.io's sales function only displays one bundle on the game page, so the ones that are in more than one sale (deeper discounted game A and game O) don't display the bundle with the lower discount at the top of the page.

(3 edits)

Magical Shooter - Arena FPS cute-em-up


I've been working on a cute FPS where you fight a bunch of ghosties. You have to manage the tug-of-war battle between the light and dark energy that powers your weapons. You have a rapid fire light magic shot and a dark magic spread shot. Using your light magic makes your dark magic stronger and your light magic weaker, and vice versa. Juggle this with running around collecting power-ups and dodging attacks. 
ultrarunaway.itch.io/magical-shooter

Art and UI are placeholder. Any feedback on difficulty, fun, or bugs would be appreciated. I'm also open to game name brainstorming.


For emails to buyers that are about game updates, a template function would be useful.
These emails tend to be largely similar in structure, so if I could copy a prior email (or save a template) and just change the version number and the notes about what changed in the version, it could save some time.

Never played that one, but I'll check it out, thanks!

Cool video, glad you had fun playing!

Fixed that damage bug, it'll be in the v1.02 patch, along with other adjustments and fixes. :)

Maybe when you play New Game+ you'll try the Psi Powers and other upgrades, haha.

Bold Blade, the bitesize pixel art action RPG where your sword keeps getting bigger! Pursuing the legend of a sword powerful enough to fell mountains, you journey to a remote island populated by demons.


Make your sword as huge as you want! What kind of sword is your favorite?
 
Balanced all-rounder

The longest blade

Wider than the ocean

If your sword alone isn't cutting it, purchase a variety of items to boost your passive abilities.


Or make offerings to the gods to improve your stats. 

Enhance your swordplay with a variety of psi powers.  Blast them away!
Heal your wounds!

Shock your enemies!


Want a change of pace?  Play a round of Bug Boshers, a fast paced defense shooting game. 

Oh cool, sounds good.
Thanks for the info about sales, makes my life easier to set and forget, haha. When you get around to sales scheduling, it might be nice to have it integrate with the tool that e-mails prior customers, to say something like: "game you liked is on sale, maybe tell your friends to buy it, share sale link, etc."

Have you seen the sales management page for Humble? It has a good selection of features. 

(5 edits)

So I was setting up some seasonal sales after getting the sale reminder e-mail. But while setting them up, I noticed there aren't any options to customize the sale page, the way one would for a store page. 

It would be nice to customize to either make the sale page cohesive with the game pages or to add sale specific graphics, like seasonal backgrounds for seasonal sales. Autumn leaves, snowy drifts, icicles, hot cocoa, flowers, rainy streets with umbrellas, sandy beaches, that sort of thing. Being able to overwrite the sale title with a thematic banner would be great, too.

An option to copy the page customization from one of the games/products included in the sale would be amazing, as it would save people time making all their pages cohesive. Font, bg image, colors, etc could all transfer over. The left hand side of the sale page could have identical settings to the game page, and the right side could have a darker/lighter bg. 

Tangentially, could we have a setting to schedule sale visibility? Right now the only way to keep a sale private until the start date is to keep it a draft, but I'm prone to forget to come back and set it live.

Ex: Dev wants to have a simultaneous sale on itch.io to coordinate with other storefronts, but the dates of the sale on other storefronts is supposed to be kept private until it starts. If there was a third setting besides Draft and Publish, like a "Schedule" setting that would go live either at the start sale date or a customizable Publish date, then a dev wouldn't have to worry about agreements with other storefronts.

I think it'd be cool if we could enable force projects to be "click to run." Especially if you know the file is big or intensive to run.

They wouldn't get the instant satisfaction, if it isn't publicly visible right away. Maybe that would be all that's needed.

Trying out the itch app this week. Pretty much the best way to try out a handful of cool free games in an afternoon.

There doesn't seem to be a way to remove items from a collection, or to move them from one to another. I've got an Interested/try later collection, would like to move items to a "Games I've Tried" collection and add notes when I do. Kinda cumbersome to do in the app, as I can add each to the Tried list, but then go to the website to remove each item individually. Would like to have either a remove selection option or a move option, with the option to add notes when I do.

I tend to add to my Interested collection in batches to try later, so it'd be useful if I could mark that as the default collection. It's my oldest collection, so I always have to click the dropdown menu every time I want to add anything to it.

While I like the idea of diversifying tags on games, thus improving the search system, the Steam user-tag system is widely abused and often inaccurate. Since they display any user tag once it hits a certain number of submissions, users can basically graffiti the Steam page with tags that don't apply, to the detriment of future users and the devs.

Perhaps users can submit tags, and once they're submitted a minimum of times, the dev gets a notification and can approve them if they apply?

To answer your last question, for Paper Sorcerer:
I use ORK in Unity, and it's built in that savegames are saved in a preset directory, persistentDataPath:
Windows save files location: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\UltraRunaway\Paper Sorcerer
Mac save location: Users/username/library/cache/UltraRunaway/Paper Sorcerer
Linux saves: /home/[username]/.config/unity3d/UltraRunaway/Paper Sorcerer

Since it's a file location set by Unity, it isn't possible for me to change the directory manually.

While messaging how much they might make from posting affiliate links would be good for the affiliate, I can see it being sometimes undesired on the dev end. Primarily if they have it set to zero until they get into the black, it might become bad PR if [the info on revenue cuts] is spread around to the general public.

An idea: if in the settings for itch.io cut, there was a sub bar for affiliate cut [not unlike the humble bundle devs, charity etc. sub bars] and if the affiliate bar is non-zero a tick box appears for if you want to display the affiliate revenue to affiliates. That way it's an opt-in process.

Also it feels like it is mostly weighted towards saying Yes to most things, so it might be more interesting if there were more things that seem like saying Yes might be good, but that No is better.
As a general governing rule, just making the decisions more difficult as you get further along. After the dragon comes, and you have money, it kinda gets easier in general after that.

After you say no to the devil guy Georgie several times, I think it'd be good if his questions got more difficult or tempting. Later on (post dragon slyed, lots of money) he kept coming a lot but we kept telling him no and it lost what made the character interesting.

These are just would be nice features:
Physics on coins would be cool, so that you could keep seeing more coins as you make more than 3000 gold. I'd also like to see the city in the background grow more.