Melee vs ranged was nice in that it felt like it created a lot of 'combat-based-decision-making' which is something that a few of my trashed projects lacked; the issue is that it results in some encounters feeling pretty punishing. I agree that health pickups would definitely help alleviate some of that pain especially in a run-based game.
I feel like the melee felt really good and has a lot of potential; the art style was also a lot of fun to work with and seemed generally well received. I've started working on another project that's using the same art and am keeping this one in my back pocket for now; the hope is that it lets me build out a sort of asset library overtime. I feel like the game could serve as a solid foundation but it will need a lot of tuning and probably some rethinking of the magic system to feel genuinely good so I want to revisit it with fresh eyes.
TheMimicMouth
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Really clever interpretation of the theme, fun, and well executed. Art is incredible, sound was good, overall awesome submission.
- Really fun core mechanic that led to some secondary base-building-adjacent gameplay as I decided how to build up my deathball - was a unique twist on the 'consume the world' fantasy. Honestly, I think the fantasy is compelling and has a lot of potential.
- Art was cohesive, clean, and (for lack of a better term) fun. If you made those sprites yourself then all I can say is you should consider posting them for sale (unless you want to save them for yourself) - they look amazing.
- Getting to swap starting ships at the start was a nice touch, definitely didn't expect that for a gamejam but was a very welcome surprise and added to the game having a really finished feel.
- Controls felt awkward on keyboard, I'm sure they'd feel better on controlled but I don't have one haha. I think it was that there were simultaneously tank and standard controls; normally, tank controls imply (in my brain) that 'w' goes forward, whereas in this case it always went up. I think separating the turn and the drive to separate hands would've potentially made it a lot easier for my brain to untangle - (That could definitely just a me issue but despite playing several runs, I still found myself pressing the wrong buttons.
Fun game! The limited color palette was fun and visual/sound was well executed:
- It honestly felt very polished, especially for a gamejam; I wouldn't have guessed that you did it in only 40hrs if you hadn't said it in the game description - massive bravo for that.
- Game was really thematically consistent and generally really enjoyable
- I would've liked to have had a timer while picking out coffees for the customer as well
- Being able to sell beans would've been a nice addition - between limited time and balance impact I can appreciate why you didn't - but would've been nice to have something to do with all of the reject beans I'd collected by the end.
Overall fun game that took me back to the n64 goldeneye days.
- Very 'MERICAN vending machine art - got a chuckle out of me for sure. Same goes for when I it gave me an anvil that just strapped to the gun; overall loved the humor - felt akin to the "attach a sniper scope to the knife to increase range" bit.
- Really liked the minimap up top, helped make progression feel meaningful and keep my bearings.
- Audio or visual feedback on the heart pickup / money gain would've been a nice touch. Enemies having a delay before instantly locking on would've felt better.
- Auto-reload when out of ammo vs forced pressing R would be a small QoL thing that I would've appreciated; maybe that's just a personal preference thing but I don't think it'd hurt to include.
- More varied enemies, more impactful terrain, more variety would all add to the game but at the end of the day it's a gamejam and I'm sure that you already know all that. Overall the bones of the game are good and I had a lot of fun!
Overall a really impressive and cool game - great visuals, great gameplay, really impressive and sets the bar high. Please don't take my notes below as criticism on the game - I frankly aspire to get my future games to be as well made as this one. You provided me a lot of really valuable insight on my review so I'm just hoping to return the favor.
- Starting off with the biggest issue: The game froze and crashed right as I beat the final boss which was a big bummer. HP hit zero, he did his little death wiggle, andddddd the game froze (music continued but projectiles froze and I couldn't move - gave it a few minutes and it never cleared).
- Thumbnail and narrative intro made me expect a very different game than it turned out to be. Fine for a jam but if you intend to go commercial at some point, something to watch out for.
- Took me a second to realize that the player hitbox was the little node in the center; definitely helped the sprite/hurtbox disconnect but it did feel awkward that the main sprite could get hit pretty directly without issue. Maybe make the hurtbox visual even more distinct.
- Boss battles had me absolutely blown away. Projectiles felt good the whole game but that first boss battle had me blown away with how good it felt. They were simultaneously massively overwhelming while entirely manageable and felt fair.
- Card fusion page seemed a bit buggy (that or I was misunderstanding what was intended) - if I tried to select break on a top row card then the mouse input would go to open the card slot below. Also visual preview in the top left sticking around and not clearly properly.
- Card fusion was a really cool and fun concept, I feel like card fragments were almost too generous and not varied enough though. After the first boss I had enough to fill out all 6, and after finishing the second boss, the time to sort the cards to minmax felt like it would be more of a hassle than anything. I think there's potential there but in the current state it just felt like friction.
- "Rate shoot" was confusing me for longer than I'd like to admit; I was expecting 'high number = better' and was wondering why it was going down as I added cards (to the point that I thought it was a bug at first). Instead of reporting it as the cooldown between attacks (I assume that's what the number represents), I personally find it more intuitive to have attack speed numbers coincide with attacks per second. Maybe just a personal preference things and I could just be biased since that's how games like League of Legends report it but I have to imagine they do it for the intuition factor.
- Soundtrack fit the drum theme really well and was welcome without getting distracting.
- Not sure why but the animations on those little sun guys in particular felt super fun - was always a joy to see them.
Really appreciate all of the feedback here - I don't think my reply will fully capture all of the insights I got out of it but please know that I got a lot of takeaways from it that will hopefully make my next game that much better - to touch on a few:
- I hadn't thought of the small, but in-hindsight, really simple/powerful approach of varying the existing enemies (things like varying skeleton projectiles). I was struggling with "I want way more enemies but this skeleton took me half a day to draw/animate, no way I can add much more within the timeline" - I think this would help that immensely and hits the nail on the head of "low effort, high payoff"
- Elements were one area that I was really struggling on "these don't feel good, I don't know how to get them to feel good though" - I think I was focusing too much on the element itself vs looking outward at things like carrying over, spawning sooner, etc like you mentioned. I expect that you're right about attacking that problem from a map/general mechanics standpoint.
- Looks like you caught a couple bugs, I had hooks in place to pause using esc and decided a pause screen was an easy scope-cut choice - clearly I should've removed those hooks haha. Also seems like I should've spent some more time on cleaning up audio; I'll need to be better about leaving a spare day for little cleanups in my next jam. I also hadn't thought of / caught the 'backdoor to starting room' trick - that's a funny oops that I hadn't thought about.
- Appreciate the commentary on potential; I'm waffling a bit on the game concept: I think there are some solid parts but also some core flaws that would be hard to get around - at a minimum I did really enjoy the art style / tone so I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed it because I think I do want to keep exploring that for sure!
Parry mechanic felt good - it was a good balance between hard to execute without feeling frustrating. Boss was fun, attacks were similar enough to previous enemies that I knew what was going on while still feeling novel - that can be a hard balance to land! Second phase was a fun touch, especially fun to see in the context of a gamejam.
- I would've liked to see the fusion play into the gameplay a bit more; it felt like a missed opportunity to have a fused double-headed player character that had no real advantage to the mutation (arm vs sword but you could get that with a generic knight).
- I found myself just jumping past most of the enemies rather than fighting; something I've discovered in my own gamedev journey is that more health doesn't always mean harder, it just means more tedious for the player, and that's about how this felt - I think it would've felt better had it been less health on enemies with faster attack animation; slow animations + more HP makes the game feel like it's running in slow-mo
Fun game overall - I really liked the visuals, the minimalism executed really well and the game felt smooth. I had a bunch of close calls that felt really satisfying to narrowly avoid. A couple easy tweaks that I think are worth keeping in mind for the next one:
- Consider lowering the alpha a bit on the particle trails (or other visual effect to make them distinct); basically just some visual juice to add clarity, my eyes got used to it but at first it was hard to distinguish subconsciously between "this is a particle that will hurt me" and "this is a trail that i can move through".
- Make difficulty ramp faster/more, fewer max lives, more objectives to get. Maybe even dont make them respawn. I didn't get hit until 5 minutes and then realized "oh wow I still have another 7 lives." I get that difficulty scaling isn't always priority in a jam but figured I'd note my experience.
- I know you said it runs better in download than browser so I'm sure that's part of it but lag in audio started around 2-3mins, 5minutes there was clear visual stutter. I'm guessing either particles weren't clearing or else they weren't being offloaded when well off the screen. Similar to the second bullet: I fully appreciate that optimization isn't the top priority in gamejams but figured I'd note it just incase. I think better optimization would allow the heat to get turned up a lot higher which would add more of those cool "how did i manage to escape that" moments.
Appreciate the feedback! Agree that the element fusions were pretty underwhelming and I should've been clearer about the buffs applying for melee. Hadn't initially realized the audio wasnt looping, clearly other people were surviving longer than I was haha.
Lag on initial run is only present in the web-based version which is why I didn't realize it until after posting - there is a fix so not a necessary evil, just need to get the fix implemented.
Really liked the art and general vibe - the projectile mechanic felt like there was a lot of skill expression potential that my smooth brain was failing to optimize for. Destructible blocks on the 3rd level were a little hard to see. Took a little while for my brain to adjust to dash and jump being on the same button. Overall really cool game