| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #6 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Creativity | #6 | 4.619 | 4.619 |
| Entertainment | #10 | 4.286 | 4.286 |
| Visuals | #10 | 4.571 | 4.571 |
| Skeleton | #26 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Theme Use | #41 | 3.952 | 3.952 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback is anonymous.
Who worked on your submission?
bnanasmash
How does your submission fit the theme?
Press space to become bald. Bald/hair is used as a polarity mechanic (like Ikaruga) so Bald bullets can only hurt Hair enemies, and vice-versa.
incredible score, nicely done!! i doubt you're having any skill issues, there's just genuinely more work to be done on making bullets more readable. in particular, once they cross the player's plane, i think they need to get dark immediately instead of just semi-transparent. i also think the enemys' habit of directly shooting through the screen origin, especially salamanders, is not an ideal bullet pattern, kind of a worst-case for readability actually.
i'm glad you got into it enough to discover that speed strategy! i'd love to see a video of it if you happen to have one on hand (you don't need to go too out of the way for it though). you're one of the most valuable types of playtesters if you can find exploits... though it's not an exploit if it's fun! my thought, just from your description, is that enemies should fire at least a small volley of bullets before exploding to a combo shot -- that way you can't remove bullet dodging altogether via mouse flailing alone (if the game is updated later this would be combined with better bullet readability). would you agree?
Congrats, you finally made me create a YT channel! (I've been procrastinating on that for awfully long time, don't ask why, I don't know either at this point).
Since I did not record my original run, I had to finish the game again. Video includes all attempts done in one sitting, without any cuts.
About enemies exploding into bullets on death (or shooting on death): wouldn't make much difference IMHO. Right now the challenge of "speedrunning" is more about just avoiding any and all bullets or obstacles because getting hit resets your speed. You could theoretically get much much more silly times than the one I got if you were to skillfully dodge the bullets.
As you can see in the video, I constantly get hit. It's just that my strategy relies a lot on invincibility and checkpoints.
It is still fun as it is, there is still some degree of challenge. I have not trivialized the game to the point where it's not fun to play, so it's all good.
that was crazy, thanks so much for posting!! this’ll be a valuable resource when i come back to the project. i’m already thinking of ways to make high level play more fun. for example, max speed could be conserved when you let go of the mouse button, only resetting when you get hurt, which would basically just let you go even faster if you can avoid getting hurt. i also think that when you have the laser charged, each targetable enemy should have a little icon that goes on top of everything, along with an icon where the laser intersects the enemy plane, so you can easily do lockons without having to flail around.
it would be awesome if you were willing to playtest for other games in the future! i’m ultimatewalrus on discord (cool sun icon) if you wanted to friend me!
that sounds odd, thanks for the report! i’d be interested to get to the bottom of this, i’ll let you know what i think happened and tell me if it checks out.
you launched the game and entered your name. if you truly never started the game im not sure what happened as you shouldn’t have a profile, but let’s assume you actually did play the game at least once before going to your profile. once you did, you changed the name to johngaming.
meanwhile somebody else also entered the name johngaming. you are allowed to do this in arcade2000 games with “frictionless” usernames enabled, and i remember seeing johngaming on the charts with an asterisk clarifying that the name was already taken and their actual name was johngaming-baldhairier (arcade2000’s solution for name collisions). so, this might all just be confusion caused from two people choosing the same name? hopefully, your account should be usable as normal. you might have to wait 30 days before changing username again.
I launched the game, entered my name. I did not start the game. I saw customization, immediately went "oh, neat" and picked that option, which opened the browser, and there was the profile.
I do remember the johngaming had my nick after it with an asterisk (so it was something like "johngaming(*enonigmus)"). For clarity, I never entered any nickname as "johngaming", I only entered "Enonigmus" when prompted for a name to pick.
Also, I have now tried the game on a different computer. Also entered name as "Enonigmus". When I tried to open high scores/profile customization, I got an error from the site this time though. However, after actually doing a run, it did work and I could link the created "enonigmus-baldhairer" account to the other "enonigmus" account I had by renaming the account mentioned earlier. So, I guess this time it went normally according to what you described.
I guess if all the site tracks is a best score and some other achievements, then it's probably not a big deal I accidentally hijacked someone else's scores. It's just feels a bit dirty, and over all it's a bit odd. I don't mind my account being reset if it's required for fairness sake or whatever reason.
that is super weird that you never entered the name john gaming! my only guess is that Godot must have given you and another person the same device ID. i’ll have to look into it, maybe for whatever reason multiple people got an empty ID or something and that’s why.
if you linked the other account, and it’s someone else’s account, they can still submit scores as you, but they won’t be able to do anything else if you own the parent account.
i’ll look into it. thanks again for the bug report!
awesome!! i’m glad you played it to the fullest, and i can see that you beat my score! don’t forget you can set your banner image/PFP/homepage on the charts if you want to, and pin your rank to brag about it in other arcade2000 game charts.
thanks for the kind words! the visual style and funny writing is all thanks to bnanasmash! i’m sorry about the motion sickness… did you try windowed mode? i have no idea if it would help, but i wonder if i could make a motion sickness mode by overlaying some static sprites or a grid or something to give the brain a better frame of reference.
thanks for the kind words! to clarify, the online scoreboard site arcade2000.io has been a years long project for me. i have it set up so i can quickly and easily integrate it into a game, so i use it for gamejams. i actually opened up the API prior to the jam so anyone could use it, but i don’t think anyone’s tried yet.
as for the boss, i’m wondering if the main problem is that it’s still too hard to judge depth. i spent a lot of time on shaders trying to solve this problem in a stylish way (dithering + sprite size snapping). we’ll need to find a way to make it clearer. thanks for the feedback!
thanks for the kind words! sorry it was too difficult. the game is intended to be one where you die many times before getting good enough to beat it, a type of game i really like, but it’s not for everyone.
some general advice i can offer on the beam mechanic: it’s much quicker to kill enemies with the beam once you have a charge, and if you lock on to 3 enemies before you switch polarities, that’s how you combo (your beam will just refill immediately)
for the boss i think it’s most important to focus on survival. the beam does decent damage but you don’t need to worry about it too much about it, just focus on hitting the eyes with bullets. if you change polarity for every blast from the background, the only precision dodge you have to do is from its combo blast which is one in every seven blasts i think.
thanks for the kind words! there will almost certainly be at least one update. we actually had a much longer level made before the deadline which you can see in v1.2, but i wouldn’t recommend actually trying to beat it because there is some kind of floating point precision issue that makes the bullets actually impossible to parse. they did say bugfixes were ok during the judging period so i’ll try to fix that when i have time so we can properly show off the longer level.
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