itch.io

Made a feedback / first-impression video for you.

Made a feedback  / first-impressions video for you. Pretty cool start and hopefully this helps!

Thank you for playing and the feedback! 

I've definitely been iterating on the initial player experience and should have a few fixes in the next build that will help players avoid the slow start that you describe from your play-through. Thank you for the specifics on that stage of the game so that I can attempt to target balance better.

I'm sorry about the lack of messaging right now about how the prestige system specifically works, but that's a high priority in near future builds as others have also been upset by a similar experience.

The "mini lore info" should be more reinforced by other elements in the game once they're put in, but I'm glad that you found that interesting for a theme/context.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

I agree on the economy side of things. The scaling of costs is currently too harsh so it's difficult to get enough for continuous upgrades each new round. That likely also heavily contributes to the "grindy" feel as things progress so I'm glad that your feedback further confirms that.

Show exact stats and the exact updated value of stats is definitely a good idea and probably a necessary quality of life update so I'll add that to the plans for sure.

Glad that it was helpful. I remembered your game from one of the Indie Game Clinic videos and just looking at its current state it's obviously had some revs improve so far. Keep it up!

Thank you for playing and the feedback!

Without seeing your play session, it sounds like you might have run into an issue with the web player not scaling nicely to your monitor resolution (at least as far as not being able to earn any resources via the pickups and the cut-off).

I'm super torn on the "click to shoot" UX decision rather than just mouse-over and auto-fire. I agree with you that it would feel more tactile and give the player more feelings of agency over the shots, but the game is going to ask you to shoot likely over 1000 bugs across a few hours so I don't want to cause players fatigue when they need to click that many times to do the basic interaction. Mouse-over has been a common trend in a few incremental games I've played recently so I'm trying to follow suit with that design pattern.

Your feedback combined with others solidly points to an issue with players not feeling good about the basic laser firing mechanics though so I'm brainstorming ways to make that feel better.

Made a first-impressions video for you. Hope it helps!

Made a feedback video for you from my first-impressions playthrough. Hopefully it's helpful!

Thanks again for the feedback on my game! I made a first-impression video for you as well. Hopefully it's useful for you and keep up the good work!

Thanks so much again for feedback on my game. I made a first-impressions video for you as well. Hope it's useful for you and keep up the good work!

Messaged on Discord, but replying here for record tracking and elaborating on specific feedback notes ...

- Player laser underwhelming: I've recently added some audio to the game to help juice up the laser, but will also try to add some feedback on the mouse reticle to make the charge/fire mechanics more intuitive.

- Lean into catching resources: I need to add a subtle audio blip to make that a bit more exciting/reassuring and you're likely right that it should be worth more bonus resources, but I'm still waiting on economy feedback to make too many drastic changes with that number.

- Start the upgrade screen with just the center resource: Absolutely right, thought to do it before but got lazy and didn't tweak that properly. Thanks for making me feel the pain of that oversight (sincerely), because most players would probably fall into the same hang-up that you did.

- Game felt like a grind: From watching you and others play so far it's pretty clear that I need to give more in-game feedback that the prestige system exists and provide more obvious incentives for players to click that button and progress the larger-scale game loop. Hopefully speeding up the process of initiating that loop will reduce the grind feel, but from your video it's obvious that it's easy for players to just miss that loop entirely and that basically keeps them from enjoying or finishing the final game.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Over the testers that have played so far it's become obvious that explaining the laser and the overall round game loop is going to be a priority moving forward (basically every tester had some form of confusion about the laser and why the round ended).

I actually hadn't seen PVKK until now so that instantly went on my wishlist, lol. I'll try and juice up the laser a bit and definitely add more feedback around the firing mechanics, but I'm hesitant to do too much to the initial state of the laser because I do want players to feel the scaling of it as you purchase the upgrades.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

The game surely needs more feedback on a lot of things so I'm sorry that many things weren't clear. I There's unfortunately some issues with the mouse detecting targets and the pickups right now that I'm trying to sort out, which may have hindered your ability to actually shoot things and do the loop, but you seem to have the main idea about what you're intended to do.

I'm actively updating the game so bugs should be rapidly sorting out over the next couple of days and the feedback issues should also get clearer now that I've seen at least a few things where people get hung up or confused.

Thanks for the info!

I updated the page so that the resolution of the web window matches the resolution of the game. That should fix the zoom not fitting the play window issue. Hopefully with a better view you will be able to see what's going on and understand things more.

The buttons on the right of the upgrade screen are cheats that I have in the current build for anyone that wants to accelerate the resource gain process just to test the different things that you can upgrade without going through the economy grind to get to them. Just looking for feedback on both of those aspects of the game and I know that many devs don't want to play through a 2-4 hour experience to test someone else's game (especially in game jams).

Sorry for last minute submission. I've got the page setup with a password so hopefully people will be able to access it.

Password: igc

It's very cute and has a lot of nice little stories to tell to flesh out the personalities on the train in a realistic way.

I'm probably missing something, but I didn't much get the point of the die rolling whenever I was helping anyone and whether that really affected anything or not. I was able to complete tasks just fine even if I did roll a lot of 1's so I guess I might have gotten a "bad ending", but that's not readily apparent.

Nice entry and an interesting design.

It's a super polished little narrative that varies things up nicely and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The only thing I had an issue with is that I wished the enemies had the same light outline that the main character had so that they could also stand out from some of the backgrounds when they needed to. I literally didn't even see this guy the first time until he stood up and put his gun in my face, lol.

Overall a really good execution that feels quite good to play.

I enjoyed the very straight-forward nature of the puzzles and the introduction of the puzzle mechanics over time. The game starts off super strong with the striking visuals of the crash and the awesome soundtrack really creating the vibe.

I found myself wishing that the complexity/difficulty ramped up a bit faster since a few of the early levels felt a bit like filler since they didn't really introduce anything new or any of the things that I'd seen previously in combination with each other. I also ended up with a soft-lock scenario when I was supposed to stack the idol and a barrel and ended up putting the idol up higher to get hit by an arrow that knocked it out of my reach to get it back, lol.

Overall a very good execution on a solid concept.

The whole thing just oozes character and the color palette selection is right on the nose for the experience.

I would have liked to have some stronger use of either the pink or the white to highlight things in the path as good/bad so that players could have just that much more warning and agency in how to react to things. A lot of the objects quickly blur into "just more pink things" when the speed really ramps up as it is right now.

Overall an awesome entry with a true focus on fun and execution.

Excellent art, audio, and combat design!

As others have mentioned it would be helped a lot with some form of map or compass or other device for helping players navigate the dungeon and feel less dumb if/when they get lost. Even something as simple as some specifically placed blood marks on the wall to help people landmark their location in a couple spots would greatly improve the accessibility of the experience.

I quite liked the enemy designs since they all felt unique and challenging in their own way, but once you got used to the enemy patterns they were very beatable with less tension each time.

I greatly enjoyed the novelty of the story and the interesting twist on movement mechanics.

The boss fight felt a bit out of place to me. It was the first time that the concept of having health and taking damage had come into play and while I was decent enough at getting through the levels leading up to the boss I felt often that the movement was either unresponsive or too unwieldy to feel like I had a lot of agency in dodging the boss attacks. That feeling is made worse when the only place I can damage them is the location where I'm least likely to dodge their attacks since I'm directly below them. A possible quality of life tweak to that fight specifically could be just having buttons or something else to interact with on the opposite side from the respective boss that it affects so that the fight makes me bounce back and forth to opposite sides rather than sit in a very disadvantageous position to try and finish off the last remaining boss.

Overall a nice idea to break the typical platformer mold and a very good execution as well.

A very solid platformer that does a lot with only a few things on screen at a time.

I quite liked the used of positive/negative space and color when entering the cave with the bat creatures. I somewhat wish there was some other audio music loop that played after I reached the top of the tower each time just to have a break from the main loop and signify the level completion, but overall a very solid entry.

It's an interesting idea and a unique combat mechanic for sure.

It feels like you could tweak the combat setup a little bit for some quality of life improvements. If the enemy die had some shake animation for 2 seconds or so before they changed so that it didn't feel as sudden then players could better judge when to approach. If the enemies also progressed in die value in a linear fashion (1->2->3->4->5->6->1) then players could know what value they're looking for on themselves rather than feeling cheap-shot if the enemy switches quickly away from the value that I thought I needed.

Outside of minor gripes like that it is a very solid entry, well done!

Nice boss rush execution. I appreciated that each boss really felt like their own unique flavor with their own unique style of attacks. The only gripe I have about the gameplay is that I wanted more bosses to fight, lol.

Audio would also really help with ambiance and boss cues as well, but overall a very nice entry.

Nostalgic on multiple levels. I don't think any kid with a gaming system from back in the day would have trouble relating to the plot on this one, lol.

The mechanics were well organized and I appreciate the state adjustments based on previous attacks to make a turn-based battle system feel deeper than spamming the same action several times. Isometric is always tricky to feel good controlling with just 4-directional D-pad setup, but the sliding on the walls was very helpful to keep me from getting stuck.

Overall quite well done.

It's an interesting take on the theme to let the player explore their options and decide how they'd like to use what little agency they have in their fate. 

I do think that it could use a little quality of life tweaks to help the gameplay feel less slow and drawn out: reducing the walk distance to the fish, reducing the number of times I need to press a button to get through text prompts, and/or putting the timing somewhere on the screen at all times so that you don't need to keep reminding the player whenever they do anything.

I also almost completely missed the entire shopping experience because I thought I would just need to stick it out on the dock or going back to the fish so a push for players to go into the shop and at least look in there would be helpful to make sure players realize their options.

Overall quite nostalgic and a nice entry!

Great vibes from all aspects of the presentation and the idea definitely feels original. Well done.

I had trouble wrapping my head around some kind of strategy to try and "play better", which I personally value in games so that players can get a sense of accomplishment when they figure out how to be better at the thing. Each slot ends up being so randomly selected that it's hard to think of a way that players could take actions that better accommodate for things not landing the way they'd like.

Overall a great entry that gets right to the point and presents itself well.

Thank you so much!

Sorry for the "900's Score Bug". I'll try to have that fixed quickly after the build is able to be updated when the jam wraps up, but it has to do with dynamically trying to figure out the best value for your current combination of Ace's (which it obviously doesn't 100% get right every time, lol).

Top marks in basically every category.

I only regret that I pretty much only ever bought 7's once I realized that I had to put the icons onto the slot machine after they were purchased. It made me not want to try the other things until the game pushed the issue on me and made me feel the "need" for more power. I wish I had more time to run back through it more and play with some of the other toys, but absolutely a great entry here.

Good survivors-like and a great implementation of the theme in the context!

As others mentioned, the player hit-box seems big so it's finicky to try and get close enough to attack enemies without getting touched. Feels like there are other vectors that you could also play with for player scaling: radius that the bats circle the player, enemy projectile speed, shield that regenerates, etc.

Overall great work!

Cool premise.

I think it could benefit from some quality-of-life edits to really help players avoid frustrations from missing specific events when they're off the screen. Things like a timeline or clock for each run-through of the day would help players figure out when they're supposed to be at what spot. Super extra effort types of things would be markers on the timeline if players had witnessed an event on a previous run-through or little icons on the edge of the screen that hint at "something is happening over this way" to help players shift their focus if they're paying attention, but that's likely getting into the weeds of extras and might take too much away from the intended difficulty.

Great work!

Great art, audio, design, game flow, balance, and so much more! 

There isn't really much to critique so I'll just say that it would "be cool if" there were caps that allowed players to have an effect on the enemy attacks. Things like decreasing their chance to hit or the damage they dealt to allow for builds that debuff in addition to the buffing synergies that you already have in the game.

Excellent entry and excellent work!

It's a good foundation, but I feel like it could use more options for the player to interact with it than just push the button to roll again. If there were ways for players to change the dice or ways to earn more dice or ways to take risks that would let me win bigger but possibly die then I would feel more engaged as a player.

Sorry to hear about the input issues on the item selection screen. I hadn't experienced that problem while testing the game, but there are definitely a bug or two that others have found (like hand values in the 900's like you mentioned) so I probably overlooked something somewhere.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

Thanks for playing and the bug report!

A hand score in the 900's is likely a bug with the math used for figuring out which value should be used for the different Ace cards you currently have in the hand. I need to revisit that function to figure out where it's failing out, but appreciate people finding it so that I can tidy things up, lol.

There's a lot of nice themeing across the entire experience with each suit having their own flavor of bad luck.

Once the player gets scaling it felt like I could always stay ahead of the enemy scaling though and only the Hearts blood tax or Clubs enemy speed even had a chance of killing me. The Diamonds attacking me turned into extra XP most of the time in addition to the money as long as I kept my damage up to one-shot them and the boss from the Spades kinda turned into a free boost of XP since I could 2-shot him and not get hit by his charging attack.

Overall a really good execution and a fun game. It felt nicely balanced for a jam entry to let people have more chance of seeing the full experience so if people find it "too easy" then I think it's currently in a good spot, lol.

Very clean implementation, visuals, and audio. It also uses the theme well and stands out from other games mechanically.

If I had to critique anything, I'd say that the pace of the game can drag a bit when you get a lot of failure blocks in a row or a bunch of TNT basically stopping your progress. You get enough money to keep going most of the time so the balance of the game seems good, but the novelty of the slot machine roll wears off and it feels more like a chore over time having to wait for the slots to finish. If I could just speed up the slot roll animation that would give me an option to avoid that feeling once I'm already into the game.

It feels like a good setup and a nice start, but probably needs more push towards a final conclusion.

If the black hole were expanding over time then it would feel more like a high-score challenge to try and get as much of the 'E' resource as possible before being inevitably eaten or if the 'E' resource allowed you to scale in some way or open an actual escape from the area then it would be a race to finish your job before running out of time. If that's possible then I totally missed it and that's on me. Right now it's fun to just go around collecting the stuff, but you lose a sense of purpose after a while and I honestly had to hunt down the singularity my second time through after finding it by accident my first time, lol.

There is some quality sprite work in this. It is pretty easy to mess up and need to start over so I would have appreciated the ability to skip through cutscenes since I had already seen them at least once or more.

It's a nifty way of playing with Sudoku. I got a bit lost towards the end of the puzzle and ended up falling short due to being tired in late hours, but I can attest that the similar symbol highlights whenever you're over a given symbol were super helpful in-game feedback to run through my logic easier.