itch.io

your game starts from a park, the map only has another place that has has just a park and no houses around it. across the road there are 2 green buildings with a red cross above them. that is the hospital.

i guess you did not see the volume slider? i have put full bgm and sound effects to it.

I also spent lots of time choosing 3 bgms for different situations in the game.

I have killed countless babies (ideas) throughout the jam, but none are as important as these:

In my game half of your time will be spent punching, and my fd had told me since the 3rd week starts, that i should add monster "being punched" reactions.

I wasn't familiar with unity animations and delayed making it in any shapes or forms. Turns out it is just a doShake() call and set it to operate in lateupdate and i can secure a very basic flinch animation on the boss.

My ultraman-like Giant also should have gotten a finisher move (imagine that!) but i just delayed that indefinitely for more important stuff (which i did not regret arranging my priorities like that)

Also i have always been planning to add 3d look sensitivity and invert axis to my game. I even did audio volumes settings, but never went far enough to do that sensitivity thing... And then a streamer actually needed it in order to enjoy a game. Also i still haven't published it to my friend circles because one of them also use the look camera with invert.

Luckily i have a plan to make even more games of this genre, so i look forward to one day implement all of them at once.

I even let you morph at half price after the first morph so that you can morph again sooner after you finish the first morph

glad you liked it :)

Feels like the Zachtronics Opus Magnum approach would fit very well to your game, if you ever expand the type of operators available.

Say, footprint would be a nice metric to compete with other players, also players can try minimize their type of operators. Think of modern ICs only using the same NAND gate for every logic gate imaginable.

Of course you can compare the number of ticks to finish the puzzle as well. (i basically quoted the entirety of Zachtronics histograms)

i think one thing to change is to not stop shooting when the shield is not up (i.e. keep shooting unless the shield is up). That way you only trade "the amount of time not shooting" for the exponential bullet waves, and the enemy difficulty will be more constant if the player has semi-reliable baseline firepower.

I quite like hoarding bullet charges as tanking power. it gives weaker players a way to survive longer, while skilled players can throw the tanking away for a truly hung amount of attack power.

It would also be great to customize the charging weapon's type for diverse way of playstyle expressions. Say, homing photon missiles or a think ol beam, or just regular spread shots.

Score: 332 cookies after clearing the first level.

Rocket launcher is satisfying to use, sending enemies flying with explosives always heats my blood in a cold weather. I don't know how the milk gauge is filled. It isn't tied to me killing enemies, nor are they related to cookies or time. Maybe it is killing enemies but i simply could not kill them?

Sometimes enemies become invulnerable to my rocket, i don't know why. But when i press space to transform, it looks like i can kill a lot of them (plus moving way too slow in this form), and i don't know why pressing space again will de-transform so soon, and that depleted my whole gauge as well. I guess refund would be great if this was intended.

Then the invulnerable enemies suddenly becomes vulnerable again. did i secretly level up my rocket without knowing it? the game state is not clearly shown nor clearly communicated. Some polishing would make it way more fun to play. Music and SFX would be nice.

It's a nice touch to leave corpses on the ground. However they quickly make it so that i can't see the trees either. In the end i have to be super careful not to bump into trees or i will be hit by enemies. I would suggest dimming them with some transparency shaders, or at least drag these models half way into the ground (even better, do it slowly to pretend it is melting), so they still contribute to that "dead bodies everywhere" vibe, without blocking vital gameplay information. Oh and some snowman corpses are still standing, so i get confused to whether they are dead or not.

Blood on the ground gave really good festive vibe (don't ask me why blood gives festive vibes). I can foresee the blood on ground, together with the corpses, may tax the machine too much in the long run. Luckily i have a dedicated graphics card, so that is not my concern.

Forgot to mention: the cursor is not at all able to be seen, during all that mayhem. From my top-down shooter experience, there are usually 2 ways to fix it. Either you use a super-oversized cursor so it never blends into any gameplay elements, or do add a laser sight (like i always do), so the player can at least trace the laser to find the cursor. Visual contrast is the key here.

The present cannon has good wave-clear abilities. Well done with the balancing. I would say that the cannon cooldown is too long to be comfortable though. It would be better to have a progress indicator for cooldowns that long. A pie-shaped indicator or just a bar near the cursor would be great. A bar on the screen around my peripheral vision is also ok.

(Oh i can see that you took the same theme interpretation as i did. Cheers)

Cool sprites indeed, and gameplay is very barebone indeed.

One thing to note is that the lighting is obscuring the enemies quite a bit, and the "relic" also hides the enemy behind it. Next time you may want to look into that.

Music choice is not bad, this game has sound effects?? That's great. The volume is also consistent too.

Another thing is please tell me how to play it, even just writing a few words in the game's page after jam. I has to guess the controls which are usually WASD and mouse, but if you have had other stuffs, sorry i did not try them out.

The basic gun's dps is not enough to kill all the red enemies, so my game session was extremely short with them constantly eating my relic non-stop.

"It's too easy", no, just kidding, it is super fun.

It is more like shapez than factorio to me, since it mainly challenges my geometry logics than any factory throughput stuff.

I like how i am confined in a very small space, so not just the geometry logics was challenged, but also how i need to cramp all the stuff in the space.

I'd say the levels 1-12 are like tutorials. I breezed through them with at most 1 failures, then i immediately get what's wrong with my assumptions and fix the problem. Actually quite a lot of them are simply one-shot. It means that you have spent a lot of time tuning which puzzle comes first, so that i am gently taught how to play the game, one trick at a time.

I wish i can right-click a cell to clear it, as if i am using the eraser tool.

Man, your game is very well-programmed. everything "just works".

Another nice thing to add would be the ability to skip puzzles, and/or a puzzle selector, to quickly skip to / from a puzzle.

(Ok, one last puzzle before i beat them all... Wait for it... Ya i watched the walkthrough after lv14, just to see how many levels are there. You can say i got a bit fatigue from it. Still, lv14 and lv15 are engaging enough once i get myself to challenge it.)

Ok, the game challenged my assumptions really well in the last level. While some of the previous levels got me because i wasn't familiar with the game system, lv16 was definitely one that required me to think outside the box just a bit. Although i figured it out while designing (i.e. dry-run in my head), i still got that aha moment, even if just a short while. It is good signs for a puzzle game.

Now i just wonder what more can you put into the game to make a full release. As-is? Cool but is it enough to be sold for 0.99usd? probably.

More shapes? Triangles? more dimensions in the grid? The possibilities are a lot.

I do like the factory-less approach you are taking. I feel like the throughput requirement in shapez is not adding to that game.

Oh forgot to mention: It is a very good idea to not put the expand-x and expand-y operators in my toolbelt. It makes that operation ever-so-slightly more challenging, as i would need to first expand-xy then shrink-x to produce what i wanted. Really meshes into the sim-city gameplay very well.

also need to add more moves too the giant. it's only got 2 alternating fist attacks.

Should be fun tramping over police cars (movie cliché) as well

Updated cover, thanks for reminding me

Thank you for your thorough review.

The stock 3rd person controller from unity actually gave me free-aim, and i played with it for a week. Often times i got frustrated because i "just wanted to shoot at this enemy". After adding the lock-on system, i (and my playtesters) can focus on dodging bullets while shooting at them. It enables them to play more intentionally. The moving tank also magically missed the enemies sometimes so i happily left the bug in and require the player to stop for a tiny moment in order to surely hit the enemies.

For the buildings, i did come across some building assets, but i could not find ones that are blocky enough to enable the tank's little platforming actions.

Normal enemies are a bit tricky. I am afraid if they can move they will dodge too many bullets, so i hesitated to give them movements. But i do agree that looks too static for anyone's taste. (Or i just make the bullets have bigger invisible hitboxes...)

Thank you again for trying it out. Have a nice day and good luck on your journey.

P.S. good one spotting out the volume inconsistencies. It bugged me a bit even playing it myself. Will need to change it post-jam. (Future me: take notes!)

thank you for such a high praise. i gave someone else the click bait advise, and now i need to work on mine (hehe)

i tried to make it look like gundam versus but i did play some armor core for reference, so now it looks more like AC6 than GvG.

Thank you for trying out

Very fun shmup game, where i need to take risk at timings i ain't familiar with.

Finding a good bullet pattern to gather multiplier is fun,
being able to tank damages at unusual timings is fun, 
being able to last that long in the rain of fire is fun.

However i feel like this game has not got enough play-testing.

For one, releasing the hard-earnt multipliers feel underwhelming, as i frequently straight up kill nothing, even with an overloaded energy reserve. Some kind of help in guaranteeing at least one enemy is being hit will be nice, say, part of the energy is homing, or i don't know, just give me more barrage of bullets will be great. At this point, i am basically 80% time not shooting and  19% time shooting barrage at the void.

It said in the description that my attack power is exponential, but compared to the amount of time not shooting, it is actually less than that.

As for the enemy wave, i feel like the waves are totally random? i makes me not able to shoot at any enemies for a long time, because i only see the suicide green fighters. I tired to ram my shield at them, thinking it would charge my attacks as well. I was wrong. I would appreciate a choregraphed stage that i can practice and recite, (but i have done that and it is hell-lot of work to choregraph a shmup stage, so...) or you can create some always-on enemy types that are more like ammo crates with legs (wings) than actual enemies, just like how Doom 2016 balanced their ammo crate balancing.

Man, such a nice idea, wish i can see a next version with better balancing :)

(Edit: Oh yeah having a guaranteed boss around is also nice, coz again you can guarantee some amount of bullets to harvest from. Just give it a boss health bar and you can reuse much of all your existing wave system. And make it so that killing the boss clears the screen)

(Edit: also the sfx choices was great. Super intuitive of what they represent. The music is kinda too chill though)

Quite nice graphics, basic but interesting gameplay, bgm fits the atmosphere.

The laser sound can use a few variations so that it is not too monotone. Gather (or remix) 3 variations of the same repeating sound is good to break it up a little bit.

character controller is a bit basic. Tileset is good enough for the purpose.

Level design is surprisingly great. In the 8 path level i actually need to survey and identify the source of threat by clearing a little bit creep and let it regrow on the map.

On the other map, i don't have a direct path to the source of threat, so i was forced to race the clock to clear the hive before the creep comes to my base. That was good fun.

The tutorial part is not enough to convey that there are actually creep creeping to my base. I died about 3 times not knowing what killed me. But i guess it is not too big of a deal for a jam game. The cost to retry wasn't that high either, so i um... yeah it's a bummer but not greatly reducing the fun.

I haven't advanced too deep and only got one upgrade. The area clear is great and serves as an offhand weapon to be while reloading. Did add a bit depth to the early game. Choosing it over the auto-fire feature made me feel smart. I don't think auto-fire is that useful in the early game though, since i am more limited by the reload window more than anything else.

That area clear skill feels powerful, but needs skills to use. i like it. i think you basically fired invisible projectiles behind the scene, and it makes line-of-sight a tricky part to master. I need to fan out enemies in order for my AOE to take effect. I think it is neat.

Oh, forgot to praise the creep graphics. Super nice (and life-like considering the pixel art style). Looks like the hive must fill in every old pixel before expanding out? i can just cut the creep for but a pixel and still managed to slow down their advancement. It's great to see that the game rewards the effort to understand the game.

Good job!

Graphics and audio is top-notch, the gameplay of matching your pose with the boxes add some depth to replay the game and master the physics.

I wish there was a line to tell me all the controls needed. I figured out that WASD does the driving, but wasn't sure if there are other buttons that i can press.

Matching the z-scale is kind of a far fetch to the theme, but i still see it as "scaling the mountain in reverse", so i am ok with the theme part.

Did i guess the game rule correctly? am i supposed to drift in a certain way so my silhouette match one of the colored boxes?

Quite a polished game in game jam standard.

The dragon's telegraph is good enough, the fight is generally fair.
I particularly like the fireball rain which tracks your future position.

In later stages i would like the the fireballs to fall faster on top of the already quicker successions.

The dragon has a good variety of moves, the player does not. The player's skills tied to carrots was an interesting idea i wish we can discuss further, but all i see if to spawn more carrots for... May be healing? The carrot missiles overlap with the throwing sword, which is much more interesting than the carrot.

Throwing sword almost has the LoL Draven vibe, where you throw an axe with less risks, but you have to react to the axe's next position and catch it. I would hope the throwing sword's landing position would be random but telegraphed. It would be so fun doing that.

The scales falling on the ground: Good job animating the final collecting sequence. At first i thought i had to pick up the scales and spend them to cast spells or something. But it is nice this way as well.

about the the black cubes things, i originally wanted it to be some kind of materials which you salvage from the enemies, and the low would be to repurpose the material to materialize things.

Turns out i never get to implement these and still calling it material is also confusing.

But yea, maybe i shouldn't cling to the "material" thing to much and just make it orange or something. Making it too dark just makes it look like poisonous or something.

you are absolutely right. sensitivity settings was in the backlog, just never high enough priority than all the other game play features and effects i added.

in fact, the audio settings page was the 2nd last thing i added to the game, right before i added the results page.

I can surely add this settings to my next iterations.

thanks a lot. you should check the credits page. i ve put links to almost all of the assets i used, including all bgm

Did you forget to upload the latest build? All i see is a template world with minimal zoom capability (with keyboard Q and E)

Ping me again and i am sure to come back to rate again

would it be better if the camera control is not like a joystick but a track pad?

i have debated it myself during play test but also thought having to lift the finger to drag again is also clumsy. I even booted up PUBG mobile for a spin to research it, still got no good answer for this matter.

i know right? i learned to start it muted by playing my favourite game Seventhsky (by Nextframe). That game has a dedicated screen just to tell you beware of volume. i took it one step further here.

[2023-11-25] I have 3 questions during closed teesting:

1. Does the web version run smooth without a dedicated graphics card? 
2. How is the difficulty?
3. Is the game loop compelling enough to make you want to think about strategies to beat the game?

High score after 15 minutes of practice: 310 (Police cars surrounding my dead body: 11)

Very fun arcade style game. Controls have some nuance to it that i need to practice to get better at. I like that i need to plan the steering curve to be wide so that i don't bump into police cars and also maintain speed.

Bumping into buildings is interestingly non-punishing rather than bumping into a random car. I like this design. I also find it hilarious (and painful, literally) to bump into the red cars and jump into the air, taking real damage and then taking another portion of damage when landing.

The med kits are a nice addition. Too bad it is red, the same color as the arrow at the top. Differentiate color coding so it is more clear. Also, their locations are too random for me to strategically find them when i need them. (One suggestion is to only spawn them randomly at, say, road intersections, so i know i just have to drive on the road when i need to repair. I am not saying all intersections have to have the repair kits, but some patterns in the random generation would be helpful.) The point is to create an extra layer of challenge / risk-taking when the player wants to deliberately heal. (Perhaps trading nitro for heals could be another nice direction.) (Another idea: tell the player if nitro is kept full, there is a higher chance to spawn more repair kits. You know, these are stuff that adds challenges.) Healing ideas come from Hollow Knight and Doom 2016

Getting caught by police cars is fun. You immediately slow to a stop. However, there is not enough ways to get out of their hold. I wouldn't mind losing 50% hp to a bad decision, but i have a few play throughs where i made a small mistake and have to sit through more than 80% hp drain, while surrounded by police cars. I suggest slightly improving the collision physics to allow sliding out of the police cars? or at least let me rotate in place to find an angle that is still available for leaving.

The music is genius. I can see that the bgm transitions in a brilliant manner during game start and game over. I am surprised that the music actually connects whenever i game over. What magic did you employ?

The map generation is nice for a game jam. Feels organic enough. I am nitpicking but I wish the generation rules is a bit more complex so the map is more believable. I do understand it is in fact a difficult task to generate something that exists in the real world. I doubt if even i can make a map that good in 48 hours.

The criminal dialogs are a nice touch that ties the game back into the theme. It would be nice to know how many police cars are currently chasing me.

Camera angle and size is good. I am constantly afraid of the next offscreen thing that can kill me, but in fact i am given just enough information to survive.

Has potential to turn into a micro mobile game that sells at 1usd or has advertisements. Just need to tap-hold the direction to go to, plus a nitro icon to tap on. Can remove the forward button and auto-decelerate when not actively touching the screen.

The game juice tastes good,

but it is difficult to distinguish bullets hitting me.

Upgrades feel fresh and each have their character.

Controls is a bit much but juggling weapon rotations is fun.

yea 1000 colliders worked fine on my gaming computer, but not my work computer. i have now segregated the collision layers so post-jam update will have that perf issue addressed.

thanks for reporting that

thank you for your review. i totally agree with the "why you don't separate the drop button???" part.

May i follow up with asking:

Did you lose to the monsters after you got the hang of the game? if so, did keeping the campfires alive mean anything to your revival?

thank you for trying it out

I feel like a kid all over again

Normal difficulty, on a 13inch tablet, using 2 fingers.

Got 247536 after 8'53"

(much higher than using a mouse, 150000-ish)

Anxiety-inducing, in a good way.

I never knew how it felt to be the OS. Now i know, and i will be more patient with it.

Feature requests: please also show the difficulty on the score page. I'd like to screencap and send to my friends with the difficulty attached

i m new to print-and play games. what kind of rule sets can i use with this dungeon?

Graphics was of fantastic quality, UI design is not clear at all.

The game could use some labeling for ui elements, or at least put them in a tutorial sheet.

The direction of enemy path is not clear. I have mistaken the end as the beginning and had to reset due to very tight room for failure in wave 1.

I can see that the tight income capacity is intentional, for the interesting trade-off for random contractor quality, but it also double as a steep difficulty curve for new players, if they didn't play good enough at the start of the game. It is a very difficult task to balance the early game perfectly, so no pressure for that. (also i m bad at this game)

Upgrades directly reflect on the tower's skin. It is great but i have no idea what "1" and "6" is regarding the dice throw. How much stronger does the tower get, or how much better than the next tier of tower? It is very difficult to catch the info during a short playthrough.
(Just read some more text, and i saw "Accidentally click a lower number, and your lousy space contractor might damage your turret, downgrading it!". So it does not determine the quality, but just success or not! Now i see.)

When i get off work i can spend  bit more time and perhaps I will learn more about this game

Edit: Tried a few more rounds to try to get past 5 walls broken. 

The power up is quite interesting, making the gameplay more complex than how it looks.

but the way to get there still involves many resets, which is a not-fun way to deal with randomness.

I take back the comment about the dash's physics property.
You do want the player to look after their momentum, and adding to the momentum to break through the random walls is THE gameplay. With that said i still think it is too difficult to master the control of the character.

It almost gave me a Nanaca-Crash vibe, now that i play it more times over. I think it is quite enjoyable.

Highest Score: 269m with 10 walls broken (5 during the power up

A lucky run got me to 250m. Wasn't sure how fast is enough to break walls, but the shoot-to-move mechanic is well-implemented.

Fits more to the "dual purpose" theme from the first jam than the one this year. The level has randomness but i don't see any interesting ways to interact with the randomness other than "being in it". The dice being the player makes me think a bit about the geometry a bit, but most of what it did was to tell me how many bullets (or jumps) are left.

Reading the comments, I originally thought I could shoot the platforms with my gun (but risk going backward instead of forward), so i was surprised to see that it is not the case. The gun is full-on a jetpack.

Theme aside, i think the gun can do a bit more roles, say, it may help collect ammo by shooting crates or something. 

Oh also, I observed that whenever i am out of ammo, i would secretly wish my character would slide just a bit further, so tuning the friction to very very low (proly 0 isn't that bad) would be an interesting addition to the game experience. It would also help with planning my next shot by giving a predictable slide path.

Oh yes, i see that shooting the gun applies an impulse to the player. This is very accurate in the physics simulation, however, i think directly setting the velocity would make it a much more gamey experience, since as a player, whenever I click the button, i expect it to go where i point at, but sometimes my character would boost so little, that i cannot save it from a fall. I can also imagine my suggestion to not work, since it may make the game become far too predictable and the player can just "air-dash" everywhere until they get the next bullet stack. Do take this paragraph with a pinch of salt.

Fast paced, nuanced shooter experience.

Shooting makes you run slower, counter this with rolling, which is at a cooldown and cannot control the roll distance.

Different weapons have their trade-offs, but even the pistol has a merit: its slow shooting speed lets you hold the trigger without too much movement speed drawbacks.

Very polished shooter, but has a major drawback that hinders its enjoyment: the screen is too small to see enemies from below, and the charging-exploding enemy is too for a pistol with average aim.

I wanted to enjoy the game longer, but the difficulty curve kept me trying for 3 playthroughs, with play time shorter than what i would have hoped.

At this high pace, i would have liked to have an indicator of where the next dice is (as it minimizes my time with the low roll, and idk, does it double as a level up item?) Perhaps buff the pistol by making the roll lethal when holding the pistol. The power drop is too real to stay in.