Play game
Spinning Bullets's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #208 | 3.964 | 3.964 |
| Visuals | #281 | 4.205 | 4.205 |
| Overall | #335 | 3.814 | 3.814 |
| Audio | #335 | 3.675 | 3.675 |
| Seriousness | #403 | 3.880 | 3.880 |
| Creativity & Theme | #1353 | 3.349 | 3.349 |
Ranked from 83 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game Engine
Other/Custom
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
The bullets travel very fast, making it easy to aim at opponents. It’s a nice touch that healing points are placed randomly throughout the map. I especially loved the character design and artwork. it’s fantastic!
I utterly suck at this game - but it's so good I keep coming back to it.
This gives me the same kind of vibes as Ultrakill, but 2d - enemies are quick, and unforgiving. It's tough - but when you come out on top, you feel like you achieved something. Learning their skills, their patterns, and reacting accordingly. The sound design is pretty well put together, and the art aesthetic and style is also really well put together and cohesive.
I think the core loop could do with some polish only with the damage you take - I found myself a little unsure if I had taken harm, but that could also just be a skill issue on my end.
The ending was fun - I was down to the wire, as was the boss, and I pulled the trigger at the same time they did. Returning to the main menu left me wondering if I'd won or lost - which while a proper win or lose screen of some kind would be cool, almost felt a little poetic.
This is a really solid proof of concept - you could make a cool deckbuilding style roguelike out of this, maybe with extra bullet types and upgrades to go alongside?
Loved the art! Had a blast playing this one. Couldn't beat the boss but still had a great time! Good work!
The gameplay of this is fun! I found myself wishing it was longer but this works perfectly well for a game jam.
My critiques are just things others have already mentioned (namely the UI; health bar not appearing unless in shop, coin count being unreadable in shop due to being on top of the white arrow, some item descriptions are too long so the text becomes really small) A win/loss screen would be nice too, I played through twice to see if I had won against the boss or if I died since it's not very clear. Also a clearer indicator that you've taken damage (maybe a hurt sound?) unless this is fixed when you can see the health bar haha.
The boss also seems like it's a sharp increase in difficulty compared to the normal enemies you encounter, but maybe that was just me not having very many encounters prior to the boss.
I really like the selection of bullets and the randomness in the order you receive them, though since you're shooting them all as fast as possible while dodging, the order doesn't seem to matter much. (As opposed to something like Peglin.) I can't really comment on bullet synergy since it's too short to get a good feel for it, if you're trying to make players curate their "builds." The wind bullet is particularly interesting to me though since it also pushes the player back, so it feels like your choice of bullets has more effect on you and the environment. It might be fun to have more of those trade-offs, like the flame bullet being really good at killing a bunch of enemies at once but it also burns you if you jump in the trail.
Wow, that throws you right into the gameplay! I'm really glad it was click to shoot, space to jump, WASD to move, because I didn't see any controls on screen and all of a sudden I'm being attacked and I had to react!
I didn't make it vary far, and I didn't see my health when I played through just now. I know I "recovered 6" at at a campfire, but I couldn't tell in-game what my health looked like or if there was anything I could do about it.
If you continue tinkering with it, if I just overlooked a visual health indicator, it would be nice if maybe it was on the character and/or if the screen had that "closing in" effect some games have where something creeps into the center from the edges of the screen as you get hurt. It's just too fast-paced for me to stop to look to the edges of the HUD for information while I play.
I can tell you put a lot of work into it though - good job!
Thank you for the kind words! there was some other stuff planned like a tutorial, win screen and more content, but I was in a crazy time crunch and just kept the bare minimum. As for health, there is in fact a health bar, but I made a huge mistake with making all of my interface in absolute sizes rather than relative, so it looks wonky on different monitors than my own.
This has the bones of an excellent platformer and just needs a couple of small tweaks.
Firstly, where's the win screen! It took be quite a few attempts to win and it was a bit anticlimactic to right back to the menu (unless it was a bug). The boss is pretty tough, near impossible to dodge or play around, but I had a run with a sniper and explosive bullet and they absolutely shredded him.
The audio & art is fantastic and there are a lot of animations here which I guess can go unnoticed sometimes, but I imagine that took an insane amount of work. I enjoyed the 'deckbuildery' bullet mechanic too, but I'm not sure I worked out what the cookie cutter strat was.
I had a great deal of fun with this, even if i nearly loaded the wrong game initially!
Thank you! Indeed its rather lame that there's no win screen, but I ran out of time and just had to call it quits and have it take you back to the main menu, there's lots of things I wish I didn't cut but I am thinking of updating the game in the future!
Oh I totally understand, it's the reality of a jam, but I think an update and a balance pass is a wonderful idea, there's a really great base here!
great game very nice concept 5/5
this game is very good, my one big issue is difficulty tuning i think. it's very hard not to take damage, especially against the boss where the bullet patterns are impossible to weave through. but i really enjoyed playing and i like the creativity with the theme. this with some work and more content could be a really good roguelike game.
Conceptually, this game is a 10/10. The music, sfx, movement, theme is great. It just needs a little bit of QOL for UI/text stuff at times.
This game is lowkey very good but only needs a few tweaks sadly
I personally LOVED the motion and it was so smooth and fluid, the dash ability was good, I played like 12 times before i won but i was enjoying them all, the bullets are also very good i tried slime wind and fire and sniper , my fav was fire tho
the only sad thing is ui being cropped like money / not shown like health but ill let it pass since i enjoyed it
Boss could have been a bit easier since it's very hard to dodge the stuff but i spammed him with bullets quickly
I also liked the sfx and music , good job
Awesome game
Honestly, the only issues I have with the game are quality of life things, such as text/UI, feedback, information (like how often I can dodge/how much damage I do)... The game itself is very fun, I love the StS like progression system, always a winner, love the roguelite building of your layout, I didn't expect real time action as the gameplay since you don't usually see that with this type of branching progression which felt pretty fresh. I think you did a really good job and there's room to grow this, and by this I mean not just adding more bullet types but I think there's more depth to be explored, whether it comes from movement, progression or something else.
One small thing, I don't know if it's just me but during the boss fight when they shoot a bunch of projectiles it made my game lag.
Quite fun! Very hard but very fun overall! Some map variety would be nice but honestly this is pretty good and fun as is! Shooting feels good as theres quite a good bullet variety, great work!
this mixes a lot of the stuff i like most in games. deckbuilding with bullets is awesome and is something id love to see more of, the bullet hell boss design was great, and charming artstyle as well! good stuff all around
I like the combat a lot, it reminds me of terraria.
Things I think you did well:
The general atmosphere of the game is simple and nice
Again, the combat is fun and while is difficult, I enjoy difficulty and I'm accustomed to similar games so my view might be different than others.
Pretty easy to grasp, and i like how you can sort of control your path like Inscryption.
Now before I go onto the suggestions, I want to say that I don't think there is anything really big that the game is messing up, its more so some polishing and minor problems.
UI feels a bit tweaked, some stuff is cut off and text is difficult to read.
Tutorial perchance?
I think there could be accessories and other options to customize your character further.
Overall I love the idea of this one. I think it has a ton of potential especially for a player like me who enjoys these types of games, I'd really love to see you polish this one!
Thank you for the feedback!
When the game was published, a singular line of code hasn't been changed that messes up the UI for some people! We noticed late after getting reports about it, after the jam we do want to push out a quick bug fix, and if the game is well received we might make a sized update with ui improvements, balance tweaks and cut content that couldn't make it in due to the deadline
I enjoyed playing this, I like that the bullets revolve to different options! I do think the difference between the bosses bullet and other levels is too vast, and there's not many good ways to evade bullets.
Thanks for sharing, was happy to play this on stream with you.
some notes:
- UI responsiveness is an issue as you know
- Love the artstyle, the mechanic of having each bullet type take its own slot in the revolver is a *fantastic* idea that should be expanded on.
- Good use of 2D for bidirectional enemies and I like the variety on display
- Cool to have different bullet types and a boss fight and I'm predisposed to good bullet hell so great to see - would like to see the bullets maybe have a light trail so can see their direction
Glad to play it!
Well this game is way too hard for me, I tried 5 times and only made it to the boss once X)
But it works well, the art looks great and I also love the Inscryption style map you choose your path on!
gg very nice!
This is one of my favourite ones so far, I love the tree for choosing your path (i love sts), the gameplay and the artstyle! I think it's a little too short, but I think you have something very nice to build upon if you try to make it into a longer game! Well done!
Cool game!
Damn the art in this is crazy! though uhh i dont know if its just me but it seems like.. its kinda stretched? like the game window doesnt seem to have the right aspect ratio, and the ground is also like stretched like the rock floors and walls ( which kinda did piss me off but really thats just my stupid nitpicks) , but gosh i love the characther arts and the little sprites for when you go to a campfire or like the shopkeeper, its such a good style!, i like the rougelike/ slay the spire inspiration! this could be a full game tbh! great game!
Hi thank you for the kind words ! I have screwed up by making every UI element be absolute size and not relative to screen size, so they all look weird on anything but 1080p monitors, and its my biggest regret with the game. I do have a lot of content I cut out due to time planned for the game, and seeing as a lot of people are interested in the game, I might update in the future!