I finally have some time to spend with the jam entries, so I’ll be posting my thoughts here as I get through them. Edit: Seems I can’t have more than three consecutive comments, so I’ll be adding further reviews to this one.
- I’m not a big fan of this circle-shooting genre, but it was fun.
- I am definitely a fan of the presentation, though. The retro graphics are awesome, the sounds even more so. I love the little details - how the enemies flash when shot but not killed, how the purple thingies jitter nervously as you blast everything around them, how the menus fade across one another… everything is great.
- There doesn’t seem to be much point to spacebar enabling/disabling shooting. As far as I can tell, the only scenario where you’d want to stop shooting is after all the dangerous enemies have been cleaned up and you want to keep some static purple guys around so you can collect powerups in peace. I think it would be better if powerups persisted across levels and shooting was fully automatic.
- About powerups - maybe they should disappear after sitting on the big circle for a while?
- Greater variety would be nice: +attack speed, piercing bullets, bigger bullets, temporary shield… and maybe even some negative ones you’d want to avoid?
- Energy and score are way too far from the action. I can only just about make out energy in the corner of my eye, but not how much of I have and it’s a little bit distracting. Score is covered by unfortunate placement of the itch.io overlay, but even without it it could be a bit closer to the centre and a bit bigger.
- Pause key! In a retro game like this, I sort of expected it to be there.
- Like the high difficulty. Continues are a lifesaver, obviously, and losing all the powerups isn’t as much of a hit as you’d expect. Still, level 10 took me quite a few attempts. In the end I beat it in y run where I didn’t pick up any speed-ups. I think it helped me dodge better?
- The boss is great. Later attack patters are mesmerizing and the whole spinning mass looks immediately threatening. When I first saw it I kept thinking “please don’t have a lunge attack, please don’t have a lunge attack” and… it doesn’t. Phew. It would be cool, though.
- What I’d love to see is a damaged stage of the boss with new attack patterns, but of course, there probably wasn’t enough time for that given the excellent polish of the rest of the game.
- The start of the game is bombastic. The title screen sets the mood of the game immediately (the mood is weird) and the yellow/black colour scheme looks loves.
- The debris you have to avoid is awesome. I imagine that at some point during the making of the game someone said “let’s put some eyes in there” and that was possibly the best idea they could have had at that time.
- The click and drag controls took me a while to figure out and were uncomfortable even after that. Why not just have Petra follow the cursor at all times?
- I played until the music reached the end (with tons of restarts), so I’m not sure if the game has an ending, or if everything just keeps speeding up until you can’t keep up. The “story” kinda makes you want to reach the lost page, but since all you do is avoid death, the gameplay felt kinda depressing.
- Did Petra like the game? Did anyone get fired or promoted for this? =P
BlockOperatedSnakeSystem by @sven
- I think this is potentially easily the best game in the whole jam, but I have no way to confirm that hypothesis right now. Back in the day I somehow managed to beat the two-player mode of Ugh! by myself, but this game is just a mess. I have no idea what’s happening, why it’s happening and how to use it to kill the other snakes. I find that this kind of confusion is perfect for this type of game, so I have high hopes for it, but for now I have absolutely no idea if this is the best thing ever or complete trash. I’m leaning towards the first one, though.
- Love the music. Reminds me of Neverhood. It’s Kevin MacLeod, I presume? Works perfectly with the trippy visuals.
- I’ll get back to this later, once I pressure some friends into playing with me, even though it’s probably not going to replace the best couch multiplayer game ever.
E Street Fighter Band by @jhonny.goransson
- This is all kinds of hilarious, shame it’s unfinished. I tried to play it against myself a bit, but that’s no fun.
- I would love to see this as a side-scrolling beat-em-up.
- The music gets very annoying after a while, which might be the point, actually. Not a big fan of Springsteen myself, so I didn’t last long.
Pixel Art Witchcrafter by @Pawel
- This is quite ambitious for such a short jam.
- Kinda hard to figure out.
- Using an ability when low on EE freezes the character, which caused me to die quite a few times before I figured out how to refresh it.
- I like how the boss can be beaten by jumping over his attacks with careful timing. However, you can just buff your health to arbitrarily high value and then just chop at him without a care.
- I didn’t really have the motivation or space to try out all the different spells. Recharging EE is easy, but annoying and there’s only one standard enemy to target anyway.
- For the demo, I think an endless wave of weaker enemies would serve better than the one boss, so that the player could play around with different options and playstyles.
- The graphics are fantastic, but the sounds could use a lot of improvement. This is slightly off-topic, but I’ve found this interview very interesting. tl;dw: Abe’s Exoddus has such a good sound design that a blind guy managed to finish the game through trial and error. Impressive stuff, both from the player and the developers.
- I feel like W would be a better key to jump than space. Maybe it’s just personal preference, but I feel like platformers should default to “up” being jump if the jump is vertical (unlike say the horizontal jump in the first two Oddworld games) and there isn’t any other function that would make more sense for that (such as looking up or activating stuff).
- Soooo cute! Plus when I first launched the game, a small smudge on my monitor happened to be in exactly right place to look like a little mouth. Good developer foresight on that, no idea how you knew =D
- Those gray boxes on the foreground look great! I kinda want to have all kinds of much bigger crap floating in front of the screen now, visibility be damned. Kinda makes me want to play it with a VR headset.
- The horizontal movement speed when jumping increases way too fast for my liking, but then again, maybe that’s intended as a part of the challenge.
- I spent the first half of playing with this game terrified that I’d fall off the map and the second half disappointed that you can’t fall off the map.
- Overall it looks like a good basis for the kind of game that’s a pleasure to watch speeduns of.
- HAHAHAHAHAHA!
- Oh man, this is great. Forget what I said above. This is the game I want to play in VR. So I did.
- I was going to complain about FoV being set too high, but it’s actually perfect for VR. Plus it doesn’t have any pesky interface so it works really well on my setup (which is a V30 phone forcibly insetrted into a GearVR headset, held by rubber bands and supported by Trinus and ReShade on the software side… it’s still a work in progress).
- The mouse sensitivity is way too low though. I increased the headtracking sensitivity so it nudged me to “turn” by turning my head rather than just using a mouse like a chump. So it actually worked out pretty well.
- Screw Jane from accounting. She can organize her own birthday!
- Crouching being instantaneous is very jarring in VR, especially around the filing cabinets.
- homerdisappearinginbushes.jpg.
- Oh yeah, this is officially the first game I ever played in VR start to finish. Yay!
- The work drops so fast, I had to take a screenshot to see what it says (until then I read that as dooooM for some reason). Maybe it would be better if is started slower and accelerated towards the player. It would also make the game a tad easier.
- Since the work to be dodged and coins to collect are random, this is actually more fun than the otherwise more polished Lost Boss.
- More stuff to collect would be nice. Coffee to increase speed is an obvious choice for instance.
- I have a feeling that this game would be a lot more fun played at work. I’ll report back on Tuesday.
- Love the boss sprite. The player character actually looks like a kind of an insufferable dork and I’m not even mad to see him crushed under the work thrown by the boss.
- The black and white pixel theme looks great on screenshots, but is ultimately quite confusing during the game.
- The vegetation background sprites are mostly to blame. Compare them to the minimalist background found in Nanowar.
- Standing too close to a respawning boss can mean an instant death. That’s no fun.
- Speaking of which, there’s no reason to ever go closer to the boss. Actually, you can kill everything just by pressing spacebar, and it doesn’t even have to be that rapid. The skulls in the last boss version are (I think) the only thing that can touch you if you stay back, but they get destroyed by the swords as they spawn and take way too long to get in range even if you don’t try to dodge them.
- Dialogs dismissed by the same keys you’re frantically mashing during gameplay - not ideal.
- I like the little explosion effect when something dies or is hurt, but they kinda break from the rest of the ar direction. I think something more pixely and without shades of gray would ultimately look better.
- This is FUN! I’d say that this game has the most enjoyable gameplay out of the whole jam.
- I like the offbeat music, which helps a bit to alleviate frustration, which is bound to be present in a game like this.
- The music doesn’t loop, though. After a while it’s just silent.
- The bombs should be a different colour from the level exit. Because… uh… no reason.
- What could use a lot of improvement is level design. The levels go way too fast from easy to cruel. The player should be given a smoother learning curve to get used to the control before the game starts trying to outright kill him. The speed boost beams pushing you against bombs are especially petty and hard to get through without being lucky even if you are beginning to understand what you’re doing.
- The levels should be shorter too, and more features would be nice.
- Overal the current version is short enough to make me want more. It’s hard to say how long would this kind of gameplay remain interesting, but I really like it so far.