itch.io

It's my favourite game) It has all the great things: beautiful music (love that acoustic to electric guitar transition), meaty sfx (especially muffled dashes), super smooth movement (YEAH), visuals and art.. There are lots of things to praise, really, so I'll move to others that didn't let the game be perfect or didn't click with me personally: slide-to-walk speed threshold sometimes wouldn't let me do Vs or circles (though ground movement is just so much better than in something like Daemon X Machina IMO. I love it), not being able to fly upwards without breaking aim and machinegun having Helldivers/WarThunder-like double crosshair + projectile particles (deadly combo IMO with ultra fast movement) and camera freeze on melee impact. Apart from that, it's an

12/10

Thanks for playing the game) Yeah.. I haven't put much thought into it. A lot of people find it challenging and it seems to me there isn't enough of a reward for that difficulty. But it also has some potential so I may return to it in the future.

Multiplayer was an interesting thing to tackle. There's much to be done and improved.

That's jsfxr stuff.. I'll try making better sounds and music next time)

Thank you)

Great game! I'm surprised how smooth character animations are. Also it's nice how camera emphesizes throws. I've managed to defeat the bot in a quite stressful fight only with the timer by a tiny margin. The punch-and-throw tactic helped a lot) Anyway, that was really fun!  Though it's unfortunate there's no sound, but I can clearly see where all the effort went )

that was IMO the cutest entry in the whole jam! Having unfamiliar control scheme added to that home-made vibe which is even better I think. The same goes for player movement, how you have to predict where it will land when the energy will run out. I didn't get very far but I can tell that it interesting and fun)

lol, I didn't notice you could jump, so I was sliding the whole game xD. Still beat it on the 3rd try. I thought laser attacks were unavoidable so you could only affect how many hits apart from the first one they deal...

Anyway, the art, atmoshpere and the single ending are super cool, they fit really well with the theme.

Though it did felt like gun shots weren't powerfull enough, but thats just a tiny thing.

That was a fun surreal experience. The gameplay adds to that) Art and sounds I think are the best parts of the game. Sadly I didn't connect with the story mostly because it was too short, but I get that it's still hell of a lot work for a two-wekk jam. Great job anyway!

I think all of my games from this point (so like.. all of them) will have on online component. Probably not an active one, like PvP, but at least a leaderboard.

Drawn right there - they are sprite stacks - literaly sprites drawn on top of each other with each layer shifting upwards 1 pixel at a time.

Found out about it from Project Landsword and Racing Gears Advance.

Legs rotate with the direction of the mech (not the input) which is a simple "currentSpeed + inputDirection * maxSpeed" vector addition (not moveAngle and throttle even though that's how it's controlled). Weapons have an orientation of the "atan2(mousePointInWorld - mechPos)".

If you need to know how exactly everything works, you can read the source in Dev Tools under "index.html" folder - it's not obfuscated. "mech.js" is responsible for drawing the legs, "weapon.js" - the turret and "graphics.js" for pushing tiles to the canvas.

The "spinning hat" of GM and fire flashes of RK are also stacks but rotated around center.

All of that was drawn in MagicaVoxel and exported as "slices".

Hey) thanks!

Well, the joke's on me because enemies do stop firing at the player after the dash. But the delay is just so narrow you can barely see it. I think it's 0.25 or 0.35 seconds, I don't remember.

It's the kind of game where balance is almost everything and I didn't do a decent job there :/

Thank you for the comment)

Thanks for playing it) I think of it more as a "finisher" weapon, but yeah, I haven't worked on the balance much.

Thank you for playing it! I know should've worked on the balance more, but I'm glad you still liked it)

Really liked how you had to knock out enemies and finish them off. Also player animations look quite nice and smooth. The city feels quite alive with all the chaos going on, tanks driving around (I tried to ride them but couldn't sadly xD - the mech would only levitate above them) and people (found out what they were by walking over them o _ o). Also UI style is really interesting to look at. 

Though strafing and aiming with mouse was a little uncomfortable. I guess it was designed for controller but I don't have one 😥

Anyway, great game 👍

I really liked how you could move both camera and units freely. I think it's much better than a grid-based system. The units are also quite cute)

I should say though that it would be more comfortable to know what units will make the turns and when. Also I couldn't quite tell how much damage exactly everyone would take or deal.

But apart from that it was fun) A solid entry 👍

Well, the game is just awesome: music, art, the 2D/3D lobby, how HUD would jiggle when you turn. I'm astounded how well everything turned out. I mean I'm speechless. It's really cool)

Though, sadly, I couldn't go past the first enemy because it was just taking too long: my video card did not support DX12 and when I switched to OpenGL it started freezing for minutes on every scene load or some kind of new visual effect. Some textures were black - had to navigate out of the first room by minimap alone. Still from what I've seen in it's obvious it is a great game. 10/10!

Hey, thanks for the comment! Glad you liked it))

Yeah.. It had support for gamepads at some point, but I don't have a gamepad myself and emulating one seemed like too much trouble, so I abandoned the idea. I can't even remember what state it is in right now. But yeah, this kind of game should support it for sure.

I'm slowly starting to rewrite the framework I used for the game and maybe at some point I'll remake it in a new codebase with less garbage it's accumulated. If that moment comes, I'll try to make a proper polished game)

I wanted to make a sailing game (had some experience with it in the past and it still doesn't let me go) next, but I'll think about)

Thanks! My setCamera function already has a zoom parameter but I never touched it xD Didn't thought about it, thanks for suggestion)

Yeah, unlike Landsword, which is easy and currently more of a sandbox with guns, I wanted to make something that would feel and play more like Quake or similar games. Sharp and competitive.

But I didn't balance much so the mission turned out to be what it is now - playing from the cover. I guess I shouldn't have added 5th and 6th bots, it's just too much pressure on the player if he picks up more than 2 at once.

Playing on mobile turned out to be much harder than on PC so yeah, it's all over the place.

Thanks for the comment! I'm glad you liked it)

Yeah, I guess online duels/raids is too much to ask for small game jam. I think I'll steer towards more of an "offline" multiplayer, like racing games with ghost replays of other people or just leaderboards.

I would say it partly is and isn't the case at the same time. For me playing on PC is a breeze even with SG/RK (weakest combo IMO). On the mobile though, aiming gets significantly worse especially with low polling rate touch screens. It bugs me that I kinda have to balance the difficulty for two very different player experiences and I don't yet know how to fix that. Though I must say I can still finish all of the bots in less than 30 seconds with MG/GM setup (currently the strongest) if I pick them one by one.

Also what might add to the issue is that if you start run around you pick up second or a third enemy and it's 3v1 which is difficult even on PC. 

So yeah, it's not obvious to me how to balance this. I don't want to decrease difficulty. I thought about making the bots slower and make them move more predictably but I haven't trued it yet.

I'm thinking about single/multi as two separate things, idk. 

My idea was to make a faster Project Landsword and it has these kinds of roller tanks. It's not a humanoid robot, but I'd say having only that kind of characters is too limitting. Plus making a spritestacked roller look OK was easier than a spritestacked robot (I thought about that in the beginning but my first voxel model with 2 legs seemed off and I abandoned it).

Yeah, I gotta make music for my next entry (*´∀｀)

Thanks)

Thank you) I'm planning to keep this project as a foundation to build upon with my future games.

Now that you pointed it out, making a bigger sequel is super ambitious and cool goal. I didn't think how difficult it would be.

Yehehe, I'm glad)

The mechs were, in fact, 3D models, just in MagicaVoxel. Exported as slices.

Idk, maybe it's not hard but unnatural to something like Unity. There you're used to work with materials and meshes and objects etc. Here, in the wild you just render images on top of each other and they look pretty)

It's not really. I have a folder with all my sprites, dev server packs them into an atlas and also creates name-rect JSON dictionary I access in code as "assets.textures['texture-name']" and its just a region in the atlas. I just checked and it's 870x1130. I was cautious of the atlas size because I wanted the game to be playable on phones where WebGL has a limit on maximum texture side length of 4096 or so, at least on my phone, and I only have 1 texture (and as a result everything renders in a single draw call). I know that cause I reached it once and couldn't tell why the game was crashing.

I think it's not as complicated as it sounds. I'm doing (and know tbh) only the basic things in the area or the way of writing a game that I'm choosing (in short - not using any engines or libraries) and when I hear that it's "too technical" (what my ego hears is "cool") I get impostor syndrome and feel like a fraud, but that's just a character issue. It limits my tools and forces me to spend most of the time typing. Maybe it's like making notes on paper instead of a laptop - it's less practical or efficient but makes sense if you like it that way. And for now I think i prefer that more - learning what menus to click or what esoteric (compared to general programming) APIs to use just doesn't give me satisfaction. I also may be in that "wanna rewrite it from scratch" phase and some day will outgrow it (as in grow into something else, not necessarily from something worse to something better). But again, on my laptop Unreal crashes and Unity is barely usable. Godot does work but I havent' given it much attention.

FFmpeg is easy when you you don't have to read its docs and can just ask google search thing what arguments to give it. For me it really is just a thing that converts anything into anything else. I'm using it to resample WAVs into mono 22kHz to save space, then concat everything into a single MP3.

Like hell I'd animate its legs xD

About Landsword... I did count the sprites. I was that one excited idiot who posted game's source code into project comments suggesting the dev to render buildings as single prerendered sprites without realizing that each of the layers tilts relative to the camera mimicking 1-point perspective... yeaa. Still amazed by it. Though I'm afraid it will be forever a prototype because the author was spending time on weapons and maps and not core gameplay or like, the plot or the thing I can't name that brings the levels and weapons and enemies together into a cohesive experience or makes it appear like one. But maybe it's  good for it to be abandoned at some point. It would look great in CV I'm sure.

It's not like thousands of sprites is an issue, I think the problem is the legacy version of GameMaker the dev is using or even the fact that they're using GM at all (my personal feeling).

Yeah, I believe this form has potential. However I'm not seeing anything like it so maybe there's a reason it wouldn't work. I don't know enough about networking either) I only read a few articles and what google search AI thing spits out. Gotta work on that.

Well, luckily programming doesn't require judging by the gut that much) Or training the eye.

I think there's more to find in the idea of aiming for doing 80% with the 20 that you personally are capable of and it doesn't require a lot of hard skills, just using them accurately. At least that's what my idea of "how to make games when I can't do sht" currently is. I think a good example of that would be Curse of The Arrow or really anything made with PICO-8. It's a constraint the point of which, I guess, is to free the energy you would spend on art or programming and make you spend it on things you wouldn't normally give enough time to so that the game overall is more complete and round and therefore enjoyable.

Nah, It's probably because people think it's too complicated for them. We can do really cool stuff, just gotta know where to put the effort.

Well, I couldn't tell you aren't one)

Absolutly not, it isn't. I had an issue with performance but it's Godot and my browser, nothing to do with the game. I did leave some notes on potential (from my POV) imporovement though, but it might be totally irrelevant if you did decide not to focus on things I was talking about. I did find it fun, especially the bossfight).

Hey) There are multiple things I really liked about your game:

First, and I think the obvious, is the music - it rocks. Were you aiming for the Doom style? Because if you asked me I wouldn't tell if it was from Doom or not. For real. It fits in with the overall retro PSX look really well which is the second thing I really liked, kind of reminds me of WipeOut. Having power-ups around the map is also a nice touch - makes you want to run around and explore it. Boss fight, of course. Though at some point I couldn't quite tell if I was damaging it or not. Likely, I found the mortar which solved the problem). Cutscenes really do make the game feel more polished, especially the boss death one. I had my "wow" moment there. 

If you asked what IMO there was to improve, I think it would be projectile trajectories, because they kinda felt too short and a unfocused. It made me feel like hoping that the bullets that weren't flying around and actually hitting enemies would deal enough damage so that I don't get killed while spraying the enemy. Maybe also the  scale and filtering on the floor texture - it did catch some attention. Having variaty and replayability I think is very important. Multiple objectives or points of interest, like killing enemies and destroying towers, is great. There are already many pilots, but maybe having just two with unique features that would change the gameplay would be awesome and for me personally bring the game to another level. Maybe something like having ability to put frontal shield or even break gates, why not? Or charge something from generators before destroying them? Idk.

I know that there just isn't enough time but maybe next time going full "vertical" (idk, not inglish), as in making one super memorable moment or experience instead of investing in scale, no matter what would be better? wdyt? I don't really know where would you want other people to look at and what was your ideal you were aiming at, but these are just my partly random and unserious thoughts.

Though I'm not sure if you can really consider my feedback about the game feel to be correct enough because my laptop couldn't handle Godot's baggage and the game would begin to stutter a lot when there were enemies on screen. Even worse, audio system would die after 30 seconds or so and won't let listen to the music. So I'm sure I wasn't getting the intended experience. I'm also borderline clueless in art stuff, so I can only give my vibes, sry xD

Btw, I noticed, when you shoot stationary targets and sometimes flying drones, the bullets would ricochet and fly directly upwards into the camera which was a little funny.

Overall, walking around, doing objectives, killing stuff and watching it die Í̵̫̳̓N̷̙̲͍͆́ ̴̺̭͉̍̋̒̈́͠F̸̲͚̦́͑̓͝L̶̙̮̊̿̊͝A̸̭̙͖̺͕̔̈́̕M̵̛͕͇̌͌͘Ë̷͉̦̪́́͑̏̇S̵̻̠̦̱͚̉͑̄̎̓ was fun 👍

Duude, thank you for the comment! I appreciate it very much)

I chose these visuals for multiple reasons:

First, it's 2D which means I can get away with ancient level of tech (the graphics module for example can only output textured 2D triangles - not even tinted and only from a single texture and the math in gameplay is super primitive compared to what had to be done for 3D) and the cost of asset creation, processing and importing will be near-zero (all had to be done by hand in Go in which the dev server was written. I did not want to spend too much time with it and also doing full rebuild is instant - currently its under 200 ms for ~1000x1000 atlas. I had to cache sounds though 'cause I'm using FFmpeg for resampling and it takes ages for a single file). I think hot reloading was one of the few things that helped my significantly during the jam and kept me sane.

And second, I was fascinated by Project Landsword - it was the second time I've seen a game that was that good and used sprite stacking. It nailed the idea for me that this kind of game can be really cool. The first one was Racing Gears but it's a GBA game and only the cars in it were sprite stacks. What's interesting is that the cars would tilt when going over ramps which was appearantly done with 2x2 matrix transformation for all layers. I don't know any other game that used this effect. And also Landsword uses sprite stacks for almost everything: mechs, buildings, signs etc. It also has sh*t ton of particles. That accumulates to 1000+ sprites on the screen at each moment which my 10 y.o. laptop can't handle for some reason. Still that sparked that "I can do that myself and better" thing which helped with motivation.

By the way, the "smoothness" was sort of an issue for me: it looks good for objects inside the game world but not for UI. There are no labels for bars in the HUD, like HP or EN, and the bars themselves are rectangular and not triangular  (with 1 pixel cut out at the top on both sides of each bar) because the renderer did not support single-pixel precision / integer positioning (or like floating point truncation for UI layer) which meant I could not draw anything 1-3 pixels wide consistently - the lines would randomly get stretched or squished.

Additionaly, in the early stages there was a problem with texture bleeding when tiles would have their edge pixels sampled from a neighbouring texture. So I had to add padding and repeat edges for all textures in the atlas.

About the game feel: I wanted to make a twin stick shooter that was fast. Like as fast as AC4 was compared to the previous games. I tried to find these kind of games on steam but couldn't. I think it feeling too fast is the issue primarily with the map being too small and not the controls themselves, although they are not that great, especially the dash - it's just a lerp between the start and end points which is too primitive IMO. Also maybe the game resolution is too small for these speeds - only 240x160. At the start I wanted to add a 3rd mode of movement - boosting so you could simply roll around, release D-pad, press dasg button and press the D-pad again to slowly (compared to dash) accelerate to higher speed. Like walking, dashing and quick dashing in AC6 (from what I could understand, I never played it). But my programming ability let me down and niw the game only has a crappy dash.

Yeah, the bots were worthy of more attention) At some point they did shoot you only if they were on screen but that felt too easy. I wanted to fix them shooting at you from far away being a surprise by adding markers at edges of the screen but didn't have enough time. But yeah.. I don't know yet what to do with this.

And oh yeah! Before I nerfed their bullet speeds, they would annihilate you immediately if you weren't going in circles)

Swapping weapons was from AC1 (I only played 1st gen) and Nuclear Throne. Kind of have to have it when the whole mech thing is mainly about customization and variety. I tried with the time that I dedicated to that to make the weapons different from each other, especially with GM (series of shots and the spinning radar). I'm glad it was fun) Actually I wanted to add repulsion for enemies but forgot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks man) It was the main selling of the original idea: ~ online PvP duels ~. But I failed miserably again with trying to implement movement smoothing. Plus the way I chose to transfer packets was sending them over WebSockets which I was afraid would suffer from flooding which would baloon RTTs. So I'm sending them in a ping-pong fashion: the server sends game world state only after recieving a packet from the client. The same goes for the latter. I don't know actually how much of an issue it is because the raw ping itself is pretty bad - around 150-200 ms. I will try to use WebTransport, i.e. UDP for websites, for my next project - a proper competitive sailing game in the same style, because alwaysdata's proxies that handle SSL for you makes life just so much easier (you would have to have a domain and your own signed certificates for WebTransport to work IIRC). But I haven't tried it yet so I don't know for sure.

Actually, setting up a simple game-server connection over websockets is almost trivial. You really only have to check the origins but apart from that it's just the example code everywhere. Now I wonder why there are so few online projects when it is so easy to set up one. Also making a single-command deploy was a little rough on the edges, but not something complicated either.

I wish I could do music too! But I am a total zero in that. There is sound in the game only thanks to jsfxr xD. I really do find anything creative much much harder than programming - I get completely lost and demotivated. So I try to compensate with the number of lines of code)

Sorry if my english isn't pleasant to read. Thank you again for the review. That really makes me think that all of this was worth it.

As a sidenote, I've seen your entry before the deadline but haven't played it yet. Will fix that when I get back from work)

Thanks) I'm making some progress, I'll figure it out :P

Looking forward to seeing your entry!

Hi! I'm in the boring stage right now - doing menus:

Then, probably, will have to untangle the code spaghetti I've accumulated. Honestly, the further I get the more I feel kind of dissatisfied. I mean, I wanted to do more. It's an issue of expectations ig. But I'm still going.

How are you doing? Did I miss your posts in #work-in-progress?

The way the game develops from one release to another amazes me every single time. Just WOW! I'm sure this will be hit.

Also the link to twitter seems to be broken (opens "https//x.com/sysmainframe) for two releases in a row already, so I wanted to mention this just in case :D

Absolutly loved it ) and the thing that you can let it run in the background. Also the music is beautiful. I wish sail sheets were visible though

And also the flamethrower seems to be aiming a bit off target. I don't really se the point of keeping its offset from the body because its the main weapon.

Maybe it would be better to make it slightly turn towards the cursor?

Same thing with autocannon:

And maybe even minigun:

But rockets seem OK: