A lot of fun and very impressive amount of content/polish for a jam game! Stacking power ups until they melt bosses (and the framerate) is quite satisfying. A bunch of gripes though :
The dashing is far too powerful, it has no cooldown and, as far as I can tell, too many iframes while the basic movement is too ineffective. The inertia makes precise tap dodging feel clunky, while the top speed is too low to really give a good sense of control.
The enemy designs don't mix too well with the graphics and constantly get lost among all the other clutter, the power ups look too small also.
Besides that, the difficulty (and fun) difference between not having upgrades and having a lot is far too insane, and what's more keeping the upgrade stack refilled never felt like a challenge so once you get a bit of momentum going you reach god mode. The hit detection on a bucnh of the enemy attacks also felt very off (sword boss for example) but I imagine both of these gripes are the results of not having enough time.
Also despite the gripes being dominant in my comment, the overwhelming impression and rating are very very positive!
Viewing post in Bad Day on Majoris VIII jam comments
The biggest thing I've heard from people is that the enemies should be bright easy to recognize colors, whereas the background can stay washed out and dark, to allow for easier vision. Originally the dodge wasn't as overpowered as it is, but we ran into issues trying to get it to cancel out shooting, and this was the best solution we could come up with on short notice.
As for the difficulty difference between having powerups and not, that was kind of the idea, although we did want to make it so you could go back and get powerups if you weren't happy with your powerup loadout, or explore different avenues, but uhhh.. Yeah time restraints ahahaha. Right now all you can do if you get a subpar loadout or lose your powerups too soon is die to the boss and restart, which sucks.
Thank you for the criticisms. They're necessary if we want to try to improve the game, my ego loves the words of praise, but the criticisms are what are really important with a project like this.
Yeah they should be bright but that's not the only thing, right now a lot of enemies aren't too much bigger than bullets or random debris, and the colors themselves don't stand out TOO much from the bg. During normal gameplay it's not a big issue but once you get a huge loadout and start seeing bullets ricocheting all over the place, or are focusing your eyes on boss attacks it can be very easy to miss enemies. I'm not sure there's a very clean solution to this besides maybe something sloppy looking like outlines/auras, or redoing enemy designs to make them bulkier so they're more clearly visible in the heat of the action. Nex Machina is probably a good reference since it's a very visually busy game that has no problems with visibility.
Regarding the loadouts, I'm spitballing but maybe make the player lose upgrades one at a time instead of all at once if the time limit runs out, while lowering the extra time gain from picking up extra upgrades? Potentially that could add more pressure & challenge forcing the player to be smarter about timing pickups, without being overly punishing. Being overpowered is cool, but I feel like it's good to make the player work to sustain that OP state a bit
Thank you! Yeah, these are all pretty on point, and stuff we'd like to maybe fix up after rating finishes :)
Some behind-the-scenes: The dash is implemented in the same way as a stun on bosses or enemies, so it has no cooldown, but allows you to cancel out of shooting with it (being unable to cancel shooting felt... very clunky). I had an idea for an input priority system but it was too late to make any changes by the time I though of it haha.
I didn't do much tweaking of the movement values, but you're right - it probably could use some tightening.
Poor CRU5H-3R was the last guy we implemented and never even got particle effects :(