itch.io

A fairly straightforward top down shooter. It was easy to see where the enemies were, even though they were incredibly small, which is good. The lighting effect looks good, and the bullets are nice and large. Awesome to see sfx in a 2 day jam! They help a lot 🙂

It always baffles me when developers use click-to-shoot in games like this, it causes actual physical pain when you get to later stages. I can't play this game for more than a minute or two, because my hand cramps. Hold to shoot (or at least an option for hold to shoot) is basically a requirement in games like this. If you're making games like this, nuclear throne and enter the gungeon should be required playing 😂 if they use semi-automatic weapons, that's usually a very intentional choice, it's limited to a few specific weapons, and you basically never continually fire them. In this game, there is no reason to stop shooting, so you click the mouse button as fast as possible. You want something like recoil or reticle bloom or something like that, or if you want the player to be continuously firing, HOLD TO SHOOT. Hold to shoot is better, it's more comfortable, it's less physically painful. Click to shoot semi auto weapons suck when they are the only option and there is no reason for them to not be full auto. It SUCKS. This might sound like harsh feedback and like I'm harping on one point, but games should not literally hurt to play.

There's no real feedback when anything gets hit, which makes it difficult to work out what's going on. It also makes shooting feel a bit "meh" - nothing happens. When you shoot, you want explosions and flashing sprites and things like that! You need more juice in this game.

There's a bug where if something collides with you, you spin - moving the mouse points you in the correct direction again, but if you stop moving the mouse for any period of time you continue spinning. Since this is a unity game, I'm pretty sure you just needed to check constraints -> freeze rotation z. That'll stop any physics from changing the rotation 🙂

I didn't understand what the point of the charged attack was. It didn't really seem to do anything.

You're probably aware of this, but there is no reason to move 😂 the player doesn't take damage, so you can literally just sit there and shoot - though there's a slight bug in that enemies don't get hit if they're too close to you?

If you play for too long, the game crashes. I got to 1,180 score by just sitting in the corner and shooting the timers, then the game froze. It happens pretty consistently.

Well done! This is a massive step up from the other games you've made 😄 the overall game feel is much better, and the recoil is a genuinely fun little mechanic.

Feel free to ignore the rest of this if you want to leave it at that, but I do have some thoughts about improvements you could make.

• Click to shoot on a rapid fire gun feels bad. Hold to shoot is much, much better on games like this. I don't know why people keep doing this, I must've commented the same thing a few dozen different games from different developers now 😂 click to shoot is great for precision weapons that you don't fire often, or have burst fire (think the DMR and BR in Halo), but it is painful (as in, causes actual physical pain) to rapid fire click. It's a small accessibilty tweak that can help a ton of people!
• Speaking of weapons - there's very little feedback when you switch weapons, which does make it take that little bit more brain power to work out which weapon I'm using. That can cause frustration with not being able to move for the split second it takes me to realise that's intentional!
• The big weapon doesn't really feel... powerful? It does more damage, clearly, yeah, but there's no spectacle...
• It doesn't really feel like much thought has been put into the bullet patterns, and it doesn't really feel designed as "bullet hell" so I'd drop that from the description tbh. That isn't a criticism! 😊 Labels like that just give people certain expectations.
• The enemies should be there to support your core mechanic, they are there to make it more fun and engaging to use. It does feel a bit like you've just thrown them in without much thought, I'd prefer less content that is more considered! Think about how you want the player to move, what purpose each enemy has, how you want the player to deal with them. Some examples from Polyfury:
  • The square boss has very simple patterns, that teach the core mechanics. One that makes you move quickly (the laser), one that makes you move slowly (the aimed pattern).
  • The pentagon boss has a lot of very graze-able patterns, which helps reinforce the laser charging and extra damage you get from that nice and early.
  • The heptagram boss, which I'm working on now, has a bunch of patterns that make you move TOWARDS the bullets in order to disable tracking, which is a much more aggressive play style, and makes grazing more challenging.

I hope that helps, I'll edit this comment with some more thoughts in the morning but I need to go to bed now ;)

the whole screen gets a blue tint, your bullets are bigger, faster, and they're a different shape. Plus the little blue collectibles appear a LOT more often! It should be pretty obvious 😊 in the next version it will also make you sparkle in a really noticeable way

cool - yeah you were probably seconds away from beating it! You get a damage boost for being close to bullets and lasers, which is why I said under a minute. It rarely takes me longer than a minute now 😅

thanks for the feedback 😁 yes that's a really good point, I realised recently that it has been a year of are no sound effects on anything but the first boss!

Honestly that seems fine. If you beat the hexagon, your in the top 5 or so percent of players currently 😂 in the free demo on Xbox, I've had ~600 people play in the last month, and only 18 beat the hexagon 😉 

the health bar is the big orange ring in the middle! There should also be a little black marker to show when it's going to change.

It should be about 15 minutes before you're comfortable enough with the controls to consistently beat the first boss/level I guess. Basically, if you can beat it on your first couple of tries, it's too short. If you give up before beating it, it's too long 😂 if you don't die, you'll beat it in a minute or less.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey, thanks for playing my entry - I've just given yours a go :) it's a pretty little game, and I loved the flying cows lol. I also thought the visual depiction of health was excellent - I enjoy a good diagetic health display!

Since your entry was disqualified, I can't rate it. I'm pretty sure this was because you didn't follow the theme (sports) in any way?

I think it can be a little too difficult to control at times. That might be what you were going for, but I must admit I did find it frustrating sometimes. Coupled with the fact that it's possible to get hit seemingly out of nowhere if an obstacle spawns in the wrong place, and the fact that it's possible to get stuck inside obstacles and lose health quickly, it can get really annoying!

Otherwise, though, I like the concept and the overall art direction is good - though the finer details I think suffer. It could do with some juice - actual visual/audio feedback when the player does an action. The background music was lovely, and really fit the theme, but the sound effect on getting hit was jarring. I felt like the UI really needs a lot of love, too, though you're probably aware of that!

Good job :)

If you collect one of the blue diamonds, you can launch yourself again - it's mostly just a satisfying little time waster, but you do actually have control :) you can tell whether you'll be able to launch yourself by the colour of the outline - if it's yellow, you can't do anything. If it's blue, you can drag across the screen again to get an extra burst of speed

how about some subtle camera zoom and a post-processing vignette that fades in the stronger your shot is? That way the player can tell roughly how strong their shot is going to be, but it's vague enough to not be repeatable.

Chasing that 10 seconds of fun like most of my games - "Oh, Balls" is pinball-like I guess? 

It's chaotic, it's satisfying, the music loop will probably drive you insane, and the sound effects do not fit the gameplay at all, but that's what makes it lovable.

You'll keep coming back for more, you'll add it to your phone's home screen, you'll play it on the loo. I'm sorry about that. Truly. I haven't put this stupid little "physics go brr" game down since I finished it yesterday.

Let me know what you think: https://wayfarergames.itch.io/oh-balls

it's not on google play yet, but I've built an APK just for you 😂 https://app.wayfarer.games/balls.apk

I have no idea 😂 I'll do some more testing, but the likelihood is that this becomes a pure mobile game rather than a web game anyway lol, which should immediately fix that issue. I hate Unity's WebGL export, it sucks

It's a really pretty game, great job with the graphics - though I'd mimic the others in saying some sort of transparency would be nice.

On my phone (Pixel 5), I could yeet myself 20 feet into the air by tapping the jump section, I don't know if that's intentional since I don't get any stars for doing that lol, and it makes the game very easy.

I would appreciate being able to restart with the space key when not on mobile, but the jumping works just fine here.

Otherwise though, I think you nailed all of your goals for the game. It's a nice, relaxing little skateboarding game, and the graphics really are lovely.

oh no! I'm not sure why it didn't work on your iPhone, I've tested it on four iOS devices and they all worked fine - an iPad 2, an iPhone 6s, an iPhone X, and an iPhone 14...

I'm glad you liked the juice, that's kinda my whole schtick when it comes to making games 😂

A simple little game. I liked the glow when the ball hits things, that's really satisfying!

I feel like the gameplay is missing something. Maybe the ball needs to bounce a lot more, add some sound effects, maybe a little bit of screen shake, and the whole thing will feel a lot more fun and alive!

The controls work fine, but it's hard to gauge how much I've dragged - some sort of indicator for that would work really well I think. Without that, I basically just swipe with no real care about what I'm doing, it feels difficult to control

On mobile it feels like the swipe threshold is to high - I find myself having to swipe across pretty much the whole screen to get the player to move! That makes the game incredibly difficult.

I think the whole thing also feels quite slow, generally games like this make the player feel like a speed demon narrowly avoiding obstacles. When I crashed in this game, it generally felt out of my control rather than because I had made a mistake.

The leaderboard didn't work unfortunately! You should check out Unity's leaderboard service, it works really well and is incredibly quick to implement 😊 I did it in about 10 minutes for this jam!

I liked that you can customise the skis, and having controls for music and sound effects is great in a jam, though I felt like the UI was incredibly small and not designed for mobile. 

The graphics were great, though! Good job there 😁

Easily the best I've played so far. The music fits, the graphics are well made, and the game is incredibly satisfying - you nailed the juice here. I also love that there is metaprogression through the shop, though it feels a little bit "tacked on" and like it goes against the competitive spirit of the game.

Some minor gripes (and they are minor!):

• In a pixel art game, it tends to look and feel better if everything is aligned to a pixel grid. You've got rotations and scaling and things, and it just feels a little bit "off"
• It's a really tough game actually. The controls feel a little weird, and its very easy to lose points for what feels like no reason. I think this might just be an issue with the fact that it's on mobile, and your thumb covers a good portion of the screen! Maybe some extra padding at the bottom would help prevent this? Or you could possibly make the player's collision box a little bigger than it should be visually - this is a very common "game feel" tactic.
• The pixel font kinda sucks, it really takes away from the visual style. Check out https://chevyray.itch.io/pixel-fonts for some decent pixel fonts, I think "Thick Juicy Grapefruit" would go really well in this game.
• Related to the above point, the pixel font on itch is abysmal and you should never use it ever. EVER. It's so bad, it actually puts me off playing a game. 

This was a really tough game 😂 I feel like some sort of indicator of where the next ball is being spawned, even for like half a second, would make it stop feeling like I was being sucker punched.

The UI is really slick, though only the play button actually did anything for me. I love the "pressed" frame, it really adds a tactile sense.

The background music doesn't really fit, honestly. It's decent music, but a game like this really needed something upbeat.

I absolutely adore the control scheme, which seems like a weird comment but it actually kept me coming back even when I was getting frustrated by instakills. Good job!

Really loved the both physics when you score, that little bit of extra feedback is really satisfying.

I think not being able to save a score to the leaderboard without a wallet really harms the competitive nature. You need to figure out a way to make it so scores save without logging in.

I see that you used AI for some of the graphics, and it doesn't work particularly well in my opinion 😅 it doesn't give you a cohesive visual style, and honestly the menu and UI look rushed and basically like you didn't really care about it (which is fair given that it's a jam, but that stuff is really important).

The gameplay itself is simple and solid and works nicely. It's a really stable game, I couldn't break it no matter how I tried! Good job on the polish for such a short jam.

Lots of polish, and everything works really well - good job!

It's a little bit simple, but because of that there are no major bugs and you had time to polish.

I personally didn't particularly find it very fun, and the controls were awkward, but I think that could be improved if you had more time!

Thanks! Yeah the competitive aspect was intended to come through generated insults you can send the other players in your group (everyone is sorted into groups of 4, you only ever see the other 3 players in the group), but I didn't quite have time in the end!

That makes sense, thank you 😁 though I'll have to miss the party, as I'm in the UK and Google maps can't even work out how to get me there at all 😂

Hello! I found this jam on Twitter, but I can't see it on the itch list of game jams - is it a public jam and can I join?

https://twitter.com/OneSwitch/status/1656969620031414273?t=wSvQI45FF14oT44eb9Ecmw&s=19

Congratulations on coming third in the jam! You're due a key for the BulletFury unity asset, give me an email - dom@wayfarer-games.com and I'll get it sorted for you 😁

Congratulations on coming second in the jam! You're due a key for the BulletFury unity asset, give me an email - dom@wayfarer-games.com and I'll get it sorted for you 😁

it's only officially on desktop but it works just fine on mobile! They just haven't bothered to fix things like input fields, but it broadly works fine and most of the big issues were fixed by the community a long time ago!

And would a unity WebGL export be good enough or not?

What's the reason for that limitation? Mobile games don't need to use web tech, and it seems like you're wanting mobile games?

what do you mean by 3D? You can use your own meshes, it'll render in 3D, but collision detection assumes gameplay happens on a 2D plane and always will. It's an asset specifically for traditional bullet hell/shmup games - it's very niche, and optimised for that specifically!

I've replied :)

Ah I love that core movement mechanic, and the rest of the game supports it really well too! I have a few more critical thoughts:

• make the player shots bigger!! I get that it's not a core mechanic, but it'll make the game "feel" better. You should also massively increase the fire rate too lol. Either that, or remove player shooting entirely and just put the bosses on a timer. It essentially is that already, and I like the context shooting adds, but removing it is definitely an option.
• I beat the whole thing without using focus at all (and I'm on a trackpad too) because I'm a madman. It doesn't really feel that necessary 😅the later levels could definitely up the bullet density!
• I'm a little bit offended by the pizza sprites, I put all of this effort into making bullets go brr and you just throw a pizza image on there and it works that fucking well? Pain ;)

Honestly though this is a really great little game, as other people mentioned I think it would work well on mobile. The humour is on point, the difficulty in the first couple of levels is excellent, and my complaints are only really small nitpicks.

I think it's a good start for a project - the enemies are visually super interesting, and the concept works pretty well, other than the odd bug (I couldn't shoot in the second area, for example). There are a few things I'd take a bit of a deeper look at, though:

• The movement of the player has a ton of inertia - when you let go of the button, you keep sliding. I'd examine what you actually want to deliver with player experience. It's fine if you want the player to feel "out of control", but it should be done for a specific reason and with a specific mechanic/player experience in mind. Bullet hell games are usually about precise movement, and inertia ruins that. It's very difficult to make precise dodges when you slide all over the place!
• The enemies all do exactly the same thing. Again, worth taking a look at what you want the player to be doing in the game, and what other games in the genre do! Having a bunch of variety in how the bullets move and spawn is actually really important, it creates interesting challenge for the player. In this game, you basically just keep moving and you're fine. Aimed patterns (which is what your enemies do) are good for stopping the player from being safe in one spot - but you might want to consider combining them with more static patterns to force the player into moving in specific ways. Again, the general theme with bullet hell games is movement and dodging :) your aim should be to make that as entertaining as possible
• Enemy health is VERY high. This is fine for high-priority and boss-level targets, but when every enemy has such high health it can get pretty boring - especially when the enemy only does one thing. If they moved and changed bullet patterns, it would feel less repetitive. Generally, bullet hell games sprinkle a load of "popcorn" enemies around which have very little health (i.e. one-three hits to kill them), which helps the player feel like they're making progress and like their shots have impact.

Overall, there wasn't a huge amount of polish - but it's a jam so I'll forgive that 😂 in future, though, you should consider making enemies react to hits, otherwise it's very easy to think the game is broken. Check out the videos on the juice jam page for more info: https://itch.io/jam/gdb-juice-jam-ii

You might also want to spend a little longer on your UI next time, it's quite basic. It really shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to grab a nice font from https://fonts.google.com and remove the default sprites from the buttons, and maybe use a colour palette tool for some colours.

I loved the speed and size of the player's bullets in the first area, and the art really is gorgeous - in particular the background in the second area is just excellent.

It's also really impressive that you managed to add translations to a jam game! Well done, you should be pleased with this entry :)

Post links to your games made with BulletFury here, I'll give a key for the full version to my favourite 😁

Get in touch on discord theChief#0001 or via email - dom@wayfarer-games.com demand we'll help you out!

Get in touch and we can get you up and running again ☺️

Hey! Message me on discord theChief#0001 or email at dom@wayfarer-games.com and we'll get you sorted!

That has been fixed now, sorry about that! Give the page a refresh and it should fix it :)

ah looks like you've already submitted - that's fine, you should be able to upload again for the next hour.