You know, I was supposed to play more jam games today, but with games like yours, I can't play other games, I spent probably more than 1 hour, I don't remember, just playing yours. I don't like praising too much people, but this is my jam winner, and I hope this turns into something more complete later on, because I would honestly buy it.
It was super fun, the art was really good, but also very polished to detail, the gameplay was incredibly well done, and the two phases work together incredibly well, I can't describe it with words honestly, you made something very creative and that just works really well, the gameplay was amazing as well, the bullet firing, the effects, sounds, feedback, the enemies were really well done and balanced, there was not a single unfair moment, it felt like a full polished game, the cirno theme was also very well done for the game's mood. Honestly, I just want to play more, but it has no more content. The dash mechanic was also very convenient and fits really well with how the enemies shoot and the level design.
These are things I would add or change if you plan to develop it further:
- The tetris pieces are super fun to work around, like a puzzle and designing levels at the same time, I think there is a a lot of potential here, different types of blocks, not just fruits, that could work as level elements.
- Maybe rerolling tetris pieces could be nice.
- Maybe adding bosses after certain waves or different zones / stages.
Congrats, honestly, my favourite jam entry.
My score: 69210
Wyvern93
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This is very impressive for a jam, making a game in C is already impresive for me, I've always used an engine, but doing it from scratch? That's another level. The art is really great, and the level design is very fun, the cover art is also quite good, like one of those retro games from early 90s. I think the controls are a bit too slippery which makes controlling the ship for specially cramped places very difficult, and restarting the level every time is also a bit punishing, especially when the levels are long enough. Those two things are the only things I didn't like, but over all it was a nice experience, especially navigating the levels avoiding the walls, it was very fun.
Wow, gorgerous art, the music and sound effects are also incredibly fitting and well done, the kitsune japanese vives were blooming from every part of this game, even the transitions on the menus, it feels and plays like a Touhou game, which I love, I liked it quite a lot, and the characters portraits are amazing, with the little dialogues, I really thought it was like a full game out of Steam. I want to point out some things I found that I would take a look again if you want to update the game later on, these are my nitpicks, I like the game a lot already, and these are just my opinion:
The enemy waves feel nice, but the bullets are very difficult to see, it is possibly because the background is very bright, more contrast on the bullet edges or more color contrast could help. The boss is nice too, but the bullets are extremely fast and small, which are very hard to track, the difficulty spiked drastically from the enemy waves to the boss.
I like survival games like this, and the character art was nice, if I'm honest, I would've liked to have an auto-fire option and maybe something else to defeat more enemies, because it rapidly filled with them, and the health pickups always spawned on the same places, also the scream when you lose was basically a jumpscare for me xD.
My score: 515
Maybe that's why I died so much, I never use bombs if I can in these games, even if I'm going to die, I didn't know they were required to be used... I never played Darius Burst, so I don't know how they managed to do that, but every design comes with a solution, so maybe that game does something that tells the player to bomb or it is implicit in the design in some clever way. So yeah, you could do like I did with Touhou just trying different things to see how enemies behave and the different tools the player has. In my case, most of the balance of the game didn't come from just enemies coming and despawning, but enemy armor and a damage cap to balance the player's damage as it progress, these were things I learned directly from Touhou, but there are definitely other ways to do it.
Ey, I'm really thankful for such a detailed feedback! To be honest, balancing the stage was already pretty difficult and with the time constraints I couldn't think of more interesting bullet patterns like the boss ones, they had to be put together and with the shrink mechanic. It pains me so many people feel conflicted by the slowdown mechanic though, I put a lot of time into tweaking the speed changes and how it worked, and believe me it was slower on a previous build.
Like Zearoh said, maybe a tutorial would've helped, but in this case, I think making a focus button rather than when shooting would've worked better, but like other things, we didn't have time to implement and test them.
It is also the first time I make a stage of a danmaku / bullet hell like this, including researching... I would love to know more about these differences to make good ones, I'm mainly playing Touhou games, but I don't see much of a difference (on the first stages, the difficulty ramp quite high after stage 3 on those).
Anyway, I've read all your feedback and it is very much appretiated, I like critical feedback because it really helps understand what people see and think of the game, the game's problems and what needs revising or improving. It really helps me grow as a developer.
Thank you for taking your time writing this and playing the game!
Really, balancing shmups is incredibly complicated, we had a terrible balance during the first days in our game, I learned a lot about this during the jam, especially playing Touhou in a specific way (not shooting), I recommend you do that aswell, it is very interesting to see how enemies actually work there, I was surprised that none of the enemies in Touhou stayed on screen, they always left to give space for new enemies, and when we put that in our game it made a whole world of difference.
I think this was also why your game was really hard to figure out, the enemies stacked really fast and had to focus just on surviving and it was very difficult to figure out a path xD.
Thank you! Such a detailed comment, haha. I think the "slow" part is because of the focus shot, I definitely should've put more time into it, we didn't have time for a tutorial, so I think a lot of people missed the shoot mechanic. I'm glad you liked it, we couldn't do more for the time constraints sadly.
The art is gorgerous, the visual novel part was also very nice, and the shmup part it looks like a Touhou game, the tutorial also was a great addition, but I couldn't beat it at all, I tried several times and the screen always clutter too much to me before I can kill the enemies, I couldn't get to the boss, I tried yesterday and once today, I will probably come back because I want to see the boss, still, really great game, I think it needs quite a bit of balance though.
Very impressive, the amount of content for just 10 days is incredible. The aesthetic and sound of the game is also quite unique. I couldn't finish it (the boss with the golden shield was super long), but overall it was great. I fought a lot with the controls though, I lost track of the mouse every time I had to dash, I think moving to the player direction would've worked better in my opinion.
This was amazing! The gameplay was really fun and the room-by-room flow was really neat, the art is also quite good and unique, it reminded me of Enter the Gungeon in some ways, I think this game has a lot of potential, it looks more of a proper game than a jam game to be honest, I was a bit lost at the start but quickly figured out the controls and the bullet mechanic, the enemies were fun, and the game feel was very good, there are a few things I think that would benefit from more polish, but nothing major, the camera sometimes doesn't show the enemies on the bottom part of the room, I think a more bird-view camera would have worked better for that, and maybe a health bar for enemies. The boss also I couldn't defeat as I had to take the bullets dropped near it, but I always took too much damage xD, still really good game.
Honestly, really really fun, very polished, the tutorial helped quite a lot to get into the game, the shrink player mechanic is nice, but the painting mechanic was even better, it seems to me like another way of shrinking, the art is also very ell done, the bullets white painterly-looking, still were very visible, which is impressive. The game was quite balanced too, I will probably revisit this again to beat it.
Nice short game, the enemies spawning and keeping the challenge was nice, it was incredibly hard at first, because I was holding click to attack, I figured out later that you had to spam click to attack. If you revisit it, I would consider adding auto-fire (holding the button down), as spam clicking could be very tiring and is hard to balance (different click speeds or even auto-click breaking it), the hitbox of the player was also quite big so it was hard to dodge, but it was fun.
My final score: 144
Thank you so much. This was my first time teaming up for a jam, so it was a new experience, I honestly understimated how much communication matters when working on a team, I apretiate your praise, but making a game for a jam and making a commercial game is a very different thing, it is much more difficult and requires much more time, so it is not that easy than just teaming up xD.
Thank you for your feedback! I wanted to have a warning telegraph at some point but didn't have time to add it, and about the player speed, honestly, I've seen a lot of people mentioning it, but I'm not sure it is because the shoot-focus mechanic is not explained or the player is just slow, I didn't want to make micro-dodging too complicated either. For context, the shoot-focus is basically that shooting slows down the player, which I copied from some Cave games, I could however put a focus button...
Thank you. I thought the first days as I was testing the stage difficulty that different levels of difficulty would help different people be able to enjoy the game, especially because bullet hells are challenging by design, and I wanted most players to enjoy it. So every enemy was tailored manually for that, and the first stage waves we were testing were horribly balanced, after that, I figured that balance could actually make a big difference in how well or bad the game is, so that's why it is such a focus on the game. This was a really important lesson on game development during the jam!
Haha, sorry for the long text, I'm happy you enjoyed it!
This is one of my favourites, it feels like a mini-game bullet hell, which in my opinion made it very chill and interesting at the same time, the art is absolutely amazing, the girl's animations are cute too, the effects, game feel, the transitions, looks super polished, the music is also less energetic but contributes to the relaxing mini game style and fits really well, the shrinking mechanic caught me a bit by surprise because we implemented something similar! I honestly wanted to play more, the only thing I think this is missing is a harder difficulty, because it felt almost too easy, and despite that this is one of my favourites. Thanks for sharing your game!
Very nice bullet patterns and the difficulty was great, the art is amazing, it reminds me of Cup Head with the side scroll and cartoonish style, I don't know what the item drops did, it was very fun and I wanted to finish it but the game seemed very laggy and felt very difficult for me to keep track of things.
The intro animation and the 3d models are nice, I didn't expect a 3d game like this here, it reminds me of Star Fox, I finished it, I liked the space stage the most, though the 2nd part didn't spawn any enemies. To be honest I wanted to like this much more since it looks pretty unique, but more than fighting the enemies I was fighting the controls, especially when aiming, I couldn't play it with keyboard so I opted for gamepad, maybe it is different with keyboard, but the control scheme felt very unconfortable to me. This was the only issue I found, otherwise the game is great, looks great and the music and sounds are nice.
Thank you for playing! Player speed was a tough factor to balance since we wanted a good balance of speed for micro dodging and macro dodging so the main way to control that is to stop shooting as shooting acts like a focus, still, perhaps we should move that to a dedicated button, so the player doesn't have to slow down to shoot.
It looks amazing, and sounds really great, but the difficulty was really brutal, I couldn't figure out what was the gimmick or idea, from the controls I thought it was a classic Touhou experience, but the bomb mechanic seemed different? Still, I enjoyed it, the bullet speed almost made me jump out of the chair though xD.
I REALLY enjoyed this. How did you even make something of this quality in just 10 days? From the music, to the art, to the bullet patterns, the gameplay feels really great too, it is amazing to play, I don't know what level of difficulty thi is in comparison to a Touhou game but it was a bit over what I usually play, but it was soo fun to graze the bullets and build the hyper for the right moment, I think I will get back to play this and try to finish it without dying.
What game engine did you use for this? It feels like there is so much behind this. I genuinely would play much more of this.
Hey, I didn't expect to see some kind of incremental game in a jam like this, the concept is definitely different from the other games, and I liked it, gameplay-wise the idea of turning into your own bullet hell is interesting, but to be honest it ended up being frustrating to me, I don't know if it is because I was doing something wrong or didn't understand what I was supposed to do xD... Regardless, I still enjoyed it, though couldn't complete it because the game froze at some point and had to reset it.
Genuinely, the most unique concept I've seen on this jam, and I would dare say it is very unique even in the game dev industry as a whole. I enjoyed the game a lot (I got hit 37 times), it is brutally difficult though, the concept is strange and I didn't get used to it at all, I would've liked to have a more progressive difficulty or some way to get used to doing wraps around, in the end the game seemed to try to push me into that way but I wasn't yet used to it, still, despite that, it was incredibly fun, and looks like some sort of singularity / parallel universes and stuff which is mind blowingly cool. I also wanted to play it full screen since I have a big monitor but I couldn't see any way to do it.
The game is also very forgiving despite getting hit so many times, so I could enjoy the full experience, it also seemed like a puzzle memorization game, very fun honestly, I just got skill checked though xDD.
Concept-wise I think you will be first place, I still have to play other games but I honestly think it will be hard for others (and our game too sadly).
At first, it took me a bit of time to get used to the mechanic (shrinking seems to have a lot of depth), but the payoff was a sense of incredible satisfaction when using it at the right moment, and in diverse ways, I think the concept here has a lot of skill expression, the bullet patterns are also very well paced in difficulty, and the boss also has clear telegraphed patterns for the shrink skill, the hitboxes are really leniant too, the music and controls were also tight and great, so honestly, I can't say more than... Amazing job, seriously, especially solo, there is only one thing I would pick on and that was a bug that happened when I retried the 2nd time (after dying on the boss), where the stage music didn't come back when starting over.
Seriosly, great job, you nailed the classic shmup feel too.
Good game, the customer service and handling is good and fun, it starts easy and progress smoothly in difficulty, which made it much better to get used to the game mechanics. But honestly, the art style and evil mechanic didn't click with me at all, I guess it must be me since others seem to enjoy it a lot though. Anyway, good game overall.