itch.io

The jam is thematically about switching engines to greener pastures but is more specifically about playing with something new-to-you. Finishing a tutorial is very different from going through the motions of creating something from whole cloth so go for it. It's a month long jam to give time for learning, so going through one tutorial isn't going to give you an unfair advantage.

A nice idea and interesting bullet patterns. I like the "stay in a zone to progress time" mechanic but I'd rather have it be zones spread around or moving. Being near a spawner can feel pretty random when you get hurt and it feels like the rest of the screen is just wasted spacee.

Great visuals and audio but kind of simple mechanically. The way AI works alongside the exploration structure makes every encounter seem trivial, just shooting from the doorway at whichever threat is closest. Maybe with the use of ghosts you could have ghosts "trigger" and appear when a player gets far enough into a room so that the player is surrounded by ghosts instead of always having enemies in a fixed direction.

Cute game. I like the idea of drafting powerups and abilities but the 10s constraint makes for context switching too often, pausing the game every 10 seconds to cash out my energy.

Very aesthetic and good bullet patterns. Unfortunately on my browser (chrome on mac) I think something with the scaling got messed up where the play field took up about 1/4th of the game window, so I could move far away from the boss to dodge a lot easier than I should have.

Cute gimmick with fun patterns. It would probably help to fade out characters in the player's immediate vicinity more or give the player a more pronounced outline so that when many players stack up in the same areas you don't lose yourself.

Really stylish and plays well. I had trouble with properly escaping danger after getting "hit" into the iFrames dimension but the enemy designs are great.

Very cute idea but pretty challenging to push things around, especially near the edges of the screen. Perhaps if enemies and walls were bouncier it could help so that enemies don't stay near walls where it's hard to funnel them in a particular direction fast. Also locking the mouse to the game screen in webGL would help me not... accidentally hit right click outside the game window. Oops!

Nice graphics. Enemies are kinda just bullet sponges tho and the basic-chase AI makes kiting fairly trivial.

Cute additive system and works well with the bullet patterns you chose. Challenging but I didn't feel incentivized to really attack for a higher score and would have been content if it was a dodging only game.

I may have ended up using my drugs just so the screen effects would give me enough visibility to find the doorways... oops!

Yes it's physics based. I probably could have given the player some more friction but I think bullet spacing keeps the slideyness acceptable for now.

There's a lot of enemy variety because the bullet patterns are procedurally created. The colours are pretty much random and not representative of the enemy abilities. It was on my todo list but I only had time to make enemies into colored squares at the 11th hour.

Very polished and fun with a lot of juice. Sometimes found differentiating floors from the abyss a bit difficult especially in the heat of the moment near a sneeze. I also wish that sneezing pushed you in the direction opposite of your aim instead of a random direction, but maybe that would be too abusable.

Amazing graphics. Fairly by the book in terms of bullet hells from a gameplay standpoint but the patterns are good. I would love if some of the bullets had better visibility but beyond that a strong game.

Neat idea but with some conveyance issues. I wish I didn't need to use the map to find the next combat zone and the modal switches between your normal engines and the locked in place but can teleport feels odd. At the very least I'd want both motion controls to be mouse controlled, or just have teleport always be the control scheme for movement, especially when there are enemies you can't kill without it.

It's cute to have the open world but I didn't realize right away that I didn't need to actually fight things outside the combat zones.

Very juicy but sometimes hard to measure the distance of shots from enemies because of the fadeout vs an effect like shrinking the bullet size. Also some language issues with tutorialization where things weren't "quite" clear until I reread it after a few attempts to play. Put an arrow on the start screen so I know to go offscreen up to start as well.

Fun mechanical inversion. one thing in particular I would consider is giving more of a windup visualization for when enemies are about to shoot, as it is quite hard to predict if the enemy you're about to collide with is also about to shoot directly in your face right before they die

Nice job! A bit "by the book" in terms of the genre but represents it well and has interesting bullet patterns. I sadly am in the camp where Im too much of a scrub to reach the boss! :(

Great game. Very neat mechanics.

Wish there was a way to instant restart when I know a level is going badly. Dash was finicky and I really wish the way to see its recharge or if it was available was attached to the player instead of in the corner. Really started feeling like a proper bullet hell in level 5, but wished more and more that data associated with the player was on the player and not in the corner because that's where I want to keep my visual focus. I think the super-hot-ness of how time is treated makes this less of a big issue though because I can always take my time to look if I so choose.

Sadly I couldn't play as much as I wanted, as the game was softlocking on my machine once things got more chaotic where either the game would stop at a random point or when the menu was reached to restart a level no buttons  were clickable.

Nice job! The life system takes advantage of the theme in an interesting way and the enemy types and patterns make it proper challenging as it ramps up. One thing I'd probably like is a focus key as things get more chaotic to be able to thread the needle.

Very polished and challenging! Reminiscent of the impossible game but the time constraints make it extremely punishing!

With the short level time and ease of death, I kinda wanted an instant restart key just so I didn't need to wait on the transition effects every time I took a bad hit on the more chaotic spawners. Also, not being able to use the arrow keys is a "bit" annoying, but that may just be down to my preference and the fact that the keyboard I use has a bad key that causes issues.

Some tools like the laser I felt challenge to utilise well within the time limits. Maybe if shift was a slow time instead of just slow movement so I had time to aim things it could help, or maybe I'm just a scrub. I think I most enjoyed levels where I didn't need to aim or aiming was always in one direction. Because levels start by zooming on on the avatar getting the "Right" aim was sometimes a challenge.

Thanks. I think a free mouse would be fine if the camera chased the ball like you suggested, but using a static camera (or even a cinemachine cam) makes a free mouse kind of confusing because it relies on tracking the mouse relative to the ball then. I think a better solution would be if I had made the direction marker more sensitive and have more range for games that needed it, like golf.

Fun game. I think I hit a soft lock bug tho after the big leaper. Ended up being unimpressed, but went on to "all our fighters" but then no one entered the stadium.

Very stylish and a great aesthetic.

I also really like the idea of kind of managing memory of the OTHER horses placements, where it's not about speeding yourself up but tracking everyone else relatively to keep track of where others are relative to you which I can see a few ways to twist that in interesting ways.

Cute combat system. Not sure if the squire commands are really necessary over traditional movement keys as it just felt like I was doing movements with a less efficient mouse motion. I could see a faster and more controllable hero with enemies that keep the same fun bouncyness, though maybe an upper bound on their speed.

The knockback movement system feels like it could be fun if the player was a bit bouncy  and added some verticality to it. Also the aiming is a bit difficult near screen edges. Difficulty peters out pretty fast (or doesn't increase fast enough) where bullets are easy to keep on hand as long as you take some healable damage, ending up with a reserve large enough that I don't even really need to conserve. 

At one point I hit a soft locking bug doing a wall jump. Essentially i was on the ground but stuck in the jumped state so I couldn't jump again. It happened at the end though where I was just trying to cheat to hit the target number of deaths for the secret path.

Interesting idea, reminded me a bit of Super Time Force Ultra. I think you could increase the player speed and accomodate difficulty in different ways. Having the player speed the same slow speedd as the enemy can feel a bit sluggish.

Good job. For the burndown mechanic I'd advise a way of visualizing how much time you have left until the corpse is "activated", and perhaps increase that time so people have time to puzzle solutions rather than having to rush ASAP to a target location. 

Nice "juiciness" and a clean style. Would like more varied obstacle patterns but a nice proof of concept in terms of getting the core idea out there for a jam.

Very stylish and fun to learn everyone's personalities, as well as their different kinds of responses. In terms of mechanics I'm struggling a bit trying to figure out if I would prefer to have a meter to know how liked/disliked I am by an interviewer as I found myself a bit surprised when Angelo and Greg liked me in the end. On one hand it's useful to be able to aim for and see how poorly I am doing, on the other I think knowing right away if I'm doing well in the interview removes a lot of the tension and mystery, and with this game being more narrative focused I think that tension is more important than pure informational clarity I would get with a meter. Great job overall. An amusing experience getting to interact with these managers

Thanks. You're probably playing it right. You get 4 poses (1-4 buttons) but choosing the 4 poses available can give better or worse results but in general it's hard to actually give deliberate "direction" even when you do get good poses from the lobes/neuron selection.

I think you're right that this could work much better in a zero gravity environment. It could make the pace slower which would make actions more deliberate, and trajectories more predictable. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hey! A fellow physics game jammer! I always love these sexy-hiking style systems though I did have a lot of trouble getting stuck in concave objects such as the minecart on the left with the branch. Getting jammed in places kinda hurts the enjoyment of playing with these kinds of control systems. Unsure if it's because of the level design geometry itself having too much deep concave spaces, the shape/size of the pick, or the range and gradation of the pick's motions but those are all aspects that may be looked at to help make it more accessible.

Thanks. I had trouble with puzzle-generation and I think it shows in the early levels a lot, and would have liked to make something more friendly to smaller dimensions of boards. Essentially I make a bunch of buttons, and then run a script that clicks random available buttons a lot (later levels scale up the number of clicks simulated) afterwards choosing a set of buttons that were clicked an odd number of times as solution buttons. Part of the reason the difficulty scales up in later levels is also because the pillars get upgraded to being able to have more than 2 states, so you start having pillars that can be 2 blanks followed by a button, or 3 different buttons on a single spot.

Love a good swinging mechanic... now if only I wasn't constantly hitting spikes and falling into ultra-slo-mo ;)

Good wave variety. I'd consider putting a bit of a directional line outside just the gun highlight to make which gun fires more readable ahead of time.

Please stop dying at the package delivery chute little delivery pals. I need to put boxes there.

I know this may sound extreme but... what if there was *more* knockback and *faster* fire rates...

I grabbed a book, took it close, and noclipped through the floor. OOPS!