itch.io

Thanks for trying the game! There's a lot of insight into how it feels to play here. I see that the difficulty curve is still quite steep even with multiple retries. I'd certainly need to do more balancing was I making a full game.

Thank you! Yes, this would have been a lot more hairy had all the data not been in a single place. I had the freedom of starting from scratch, but integrating it into an existing project could mean a lot of kludges or even, in the worst case, rewriting everything, if your previous architecture was particularly incompatible (e.g. lots of global state, interconnecting references everywhere, etc.).

The balancing problem is very real. Truly, it's a very delicate process that requires a lot of time, which is in short supply during jams. Rewind was the main gimmick of my game, so I decided to spend some time to make it look and sound just right. The rewind SE is produced using a turntable plugin and some samples I had lying around. I'm glad you liked it!

If I do make a more polished update later, I'll be sure to post here!

There is a way to extend the rewind limit with this method, too, that I didn't have time to implement:  packing older chunks of state into the form of base state replay, and unpacking them on-demand on a second thread. This way, the rewind period can easily be extended to the entire stage and more, all while requiring less memory footprint than the current 10s (actually 20s internally) implementation, at the cost of some CPU time.

I decided that it isn't really worth it to implement for the jam, though. I think that was a good decision.

I'm not sure if I'll be making a update to RSP this soon after the jam, especially with my LD48 game in need of an update too, but I might come back to it, some day, depending on the interest.

Thanks!

yes

It’s said in the submission page, but I want to clarify again that I did make all of this myself, with the exception of fonts that I listed. It’s very flattering that people sometimes mistake me for more than one person. You may check my other jam games on itch to see if this one is an anomaly :)

I agree that my implementation of the theme isn’t very good, mostly because I struggled to think of a good interpretation of this theme. The idea of rewinding a random amount every 10 seconds doesn’t immediately make sense to me, but perhaps I should give it a try!

Thanks for your feedback!

Creative and funny game with a lot of content, even though it's not much of a bullet hell and is probably a better fit for another jam. Had a lot of fun, though. Nice game!

Yes, on CURSED. Thanks for a good game!

Again, I played it many times because I liked this a lot! Those did not have any effect on the ratings :) Anyway, I guess I'll call it a day at 178m. Looking forward to a post-jam version!

Everything in this game is extremely polished. Very impressive! It was very fun trying to figure CURSED mode out. A few personal impressions about the stage design:

- Making the mini-boss completely immune to the 10s beam is a bit counterintuitive given that the actual boss is extremely vulnerable to it. Makes the boss fight feel anticlimactic, and also felt like a cheap way to take ~8 hearts away from the player. I don't know how to fix this within the framework, though -- perhaps the boss fight can be reworked to involve more regular enemies for healing?

- It could be made more obvious when the player dies to the 2min timer. The first few times I died to it (see immunity to beam above), I was completely oblivious why.

- The player shouldn't be able to gain as much life as they do right now from using the beam, as it renders the early sections completely irrelevant for survival -- simply beam the enemies before the mini-boss and you're back to full.

- I never really understood how scoring worked. I see that there is a multiplier but there is no indication what made the number go up or down. This should probably be explained somewhere. In the end, I got 125m (or was it 129?), which I assume is a pretty low number, but I have no idea how should I go about to improve it. Ah, I figured it out! It's just the level of your weapon. Up to 170 now. Regardless, I feel like this could be explained in the game description.

Those are just my personal feelings, and by no means criticism. This is a wonderful game for a jam regardless of all the points above. Great work!

I like lemons

As many other commenter have pointed out, adding music and sound effects can go a long way in improving the feel of the game. You might want to pay attention to your viewport size on itch: right now it isn't pixel perfect, and there's frequent flickering on the floor due to aliasing. This is especially grating in the later levels, as they're quite challenging.

Simple but well polished, a recipe for a good jam game! Pretty fun to play, although it confused me a little bit at the beginning that clicking with the mouse will bring me back to the main menu. Other than that, I don't think there's a lot that need to be said. Great job!

Thanks! The source is really messy, mind you. It contains innumerable kludges, hacks, and unused code from my jam template. It's only published due to Compo restrictions, not because I'm proud of it. Speaking of which, you can rate it for LD48 here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/redeeppedeer

The music and audio-sync is very nice. I wish the boss fight was a bit longer though, so I could hear more than a few seconds of its BGM!

Thanks for playing! I agree that an online leaderboard would be great. Perhaps one of the first things I'll want to build if I'm going further with this! dreamlo looks great for ad-hoc use in game jams, although I'm not sure if an unverified leaderboard would be suitable for more serious projects. The code I'm using already has replay support (that I was going to make an in-game tutorial with), so I might just go ahead and invest in a custom solution with replay sharing and verification instead (that is, if I'm going to)!

Very nice game all around. The difficulty ramps up smoothly, though notably heavier on the base reaction side due to the randomness. From mid-game on the enemies get a bit tanky, so some way to increase firepower (at the cost of time?) to suppress specific enemies in your way / covering the target might have been great. Good work!

An interesting combination of bullets, crabs, and tower defense. Nice 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

Oops. That block of gibberish was written by a sleep-deprived me. Hopefully it's much clearer now!

Thanks for playing! The difficulty does go up quite a bit in the later half, and the "mid-boss", while indeed intended to be a mid-boss originally, actually got promoted to boss status because I wasn't able to finish making the actual one. There is certainly room of improvement for the game balance, and you did pretty well!

There's a second gimmick to the rewind: it also serves a purpose in scoring. When you trigger a rewind while fully charged, you get to carry your current score and combo count back to the past, and gain score from that section again. I did put this information on the store page, but ideally, this should really be explained in an in-game tutorial (that I didn't have the time to make).

Reading this have made me aware that there's an accessibility problem inherent in the mechanic, though. Scoring isn't really useful when one is struggling to survive, and indeed the mechanic provides no advantage over a life stock for survival. There is definitely more to think about it later. Thank you very much for the feedback!

I'll surely post something on the implementation after LD!

I like the idea of how dynamic difficulty works in this game: instead of hidden metrics, you give players the agency to make conscious choices! There is, however, a problem with the presentation: the background is too bright and saturated, making it hard to tell enemies and bullets apart from the environment. Even so, the idea itself is very creative. Good work!

I'm glad you liked it!

Thanks. A tutorial is definitely the next thing I'd work on if I had more time at my disposal!

There's a story going on! The characters are likable, and so is the art. It'd be great if the protagonist's equipment was visible in her sprite, though. I have a... thing for that. Otherwise, one little thing -- the audio is too quiet! Perhaps my desktop was too noisy, but for the first playthrough I didn't even notice that there were any music or sound effects. Make sure you check your mixes at low volume as well!

Great to see a well-executed orthodox STG here! Is it just me or are they surprisingly hard to find for a bullet hell jam?

RBG is nice looking, and overall fun to play with few quirks. The music is great on its own, even though I'd have loved it more with more integration with the level design. The early stages of the boss fight can be a little bit irritating with the boss moving around the stage much faster than I can possibly follow, making it hard to deal damage, but the later stages get better. Above all, it's amazing that you managed to put all those content together!

> How does your game implement the theme? (If your game doesn't use the theme ignore this field)

Should have been "The player could reverse time for up to 10 seconds".

I have encountered some roadblocks when trying to compile GDNative code on Windows last minute. However, I wasn't aware of the possibility of doing a late submission, and as a result have continued to work for over an hour on the game itself upon realizing that I won't be able to meet the deadline. As a result, I'm not fully sure if it's appropriate to include in the jam, but Discord suggested that I post here.

https://toasteater.itch.io/redshift-prototype

The in-game tutorial was a bit rushed, so here's a detailed guide:

Potential spoilers depending on how you'd like to play!

Objective

Your instruction is to keep the jellyfish alive (for as long as possible). Your objective depends. If you'd like to stick to your instruction, ignore any devices with inscrutable purposes, exorbitant repair costs, and/or ominous-sounding interact options.

Food

The jellyfish can stay alive safely without food for roughly 1 day. For every hour that passes beyond the safe threshold, it has a probability to die that keeps increasing until eventual starvation.

Feeding the jellyfish with Dry Food or brine shrimps resets the timer.

Brine shrimps are an alternative to Dry Food items as a food source. The amount of brine shrimps that can hatch from a single Dry Food is random, but is strictly better than using Dry Food to feed the jellyfish directly. It comes, however, at the cost of time, energy, and maintenance. It's important for the player to decide which food source to use depending on their situations.

Oxygen

The jellyfish can stay alive safely without fresh oxygen for roughly 2 days.For every hour that passes beyond the safe threshold, it has a probability to die that keeps increasing until eventual suffocation. This probability stacks with its chance to die from lack of food.

The Oxygen Pump device may fail over time. Repair it and turn it on to restore oxygen supply.

Energy

Some devices constantly consume energy. When you're low on energy, other devices will be forcefully turned off, until there is no more energy left for even yourself, and the game ends. Energy can be obtained in two ways:

- Redeeming Batteries at the main generator. You may gather batteries from expeditions.
- Repair the main generator and turn it on to continuously convert Fuel into energy.

In any case, it's necessary to venture outside to obtain the necessary items.

Potential spoilers end.

Had a lot of fun interacting with everything and talking with UNREASONABLE RATS. Nice story!

I have been following Merly's WIPs of the character and UI elements on the GWJ Discord since before the jam even started, and I liked them a lot. It's very exciting to see them in an actual game!

The mechanics are straightforward, though the down-arrow "tutorial" did surprise me a little bit: I thought I was supposed to go down that pit, because nothing happened the first time I tapped "down" (the character was still in motion due to inertia).

The way the story unfolds feels fresh, and the story itself is very original in its adventurous choice of subject matter. John's music works well with the narrative, with different arrangements for the two forms.

All in all, very nice game! I'd certainly like to see a longer version of it, but what's here is well done for a jam!

Thank you! The description is reworded a bit. Hopefully that will make it clearer!

This bug has been fixed in the latest builds: https://aemetta-toasteater.itch.io/lavakinemat-inc/devlog/82123/fixes-to-windows...

Note that your progress will be lost if you don't copy the safe files manually.

Your gun animation is very cool, at least!

I'm sorry I've got the wrong impression, but still, I cannot reproduce this on a normal environment.

EDIT: This bug has been fixed in the latest builds: https://aemetta-toasteater.itch.io/lavakinemat-inc/devlog/82123/fixes-to-windows-specific-bugs

Game is named Demon's Deep so I guess it has something to do with the theme, but the graphics and mechanics don't really scream "underworld" either. It's possible to move around and shoot, but the enemies do nothing at all so there's no reason to bother beside the cool animations. The levels also seem to wrap around after the one with tutorial text for slow motion. Slow motion doesn't seem to have any purpose, too. There's also no music. I'm afraid this feels more like an undercooked demo and is far from a playable game, sadly.

The user data folder is managed by Godot. We only used "user://". Please report this to Godot Engine instead.

Did you force filtering off in your video card drivers? Because it looks like you don't have texture filtering. We have filtering on in import options so this is not a problem with our game. Please check your system configurations.

The graphics are looking nice despite the simplicity, and I like the juicy animations. The music has good mixing but is a bit unsettling harmonically. I'm not sure if I want to listen to it throughout the entire game.

Granted I'm not a very good platformer player, but I find it too easy to slip off an edge and end up bouncing around a gravity line in the middle of nowhere. The game also punishes players for trying to go back and get a missed coin because that will get the player stuck. I feel these combined with the lack of checkpoints made the later levels more frustrating than fun for me that I just gave up. But overall this is still a good entry and I can see why diehard platformer fans would like it. Nice game!

Nice attempt at combining card battles with turn-based strategy! The graphics are well done given the time frame, although I feel the light flashes can feel a bit annoying. I would like some music to go with the experience. It would also be good if you allowed the game to be scaled beyond phone size.

The gameplay is fun at times, but I feel the ability to see enemy stats is seriously needed, else the first run through any map is mainly guesswork. It feels especially cheap on level 3 where the "werewolves" can attack your base from halfway across the screen, because (for me, at least) werewolves trigger the image of savage melee warriors, not lightning bolt wielding sparkmagi. Aggro also seems to be the only viable strategy because the enemy is able to spam creatures endlessly, while your deck (that consists of only creatures) is very thin in comparison.

The game is easy enough to figure out but I feel that the process would be a lot smoother if there was a tutorial.

I think the idea has potential but this is probably not it's best execution.

Thanks for your feedback.