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A jam submission

Chicken Hacker 64View game page

Help the Chicken Hacker find his buddies before they get cooked!
Submitted by Jacob Marks — 7 hours, 8 minutes before the deadline
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Chicken Hacker 64's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall fun and playability#44.1674.167

Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme incorporation
Genre Fusion:
Combat and bypassing locked doors is done by playing on-rail style shooting levels inspired by Starfox 64.

Heist:
The player is breaking into a location and trying to stay undetected. Watching enemy movement patterns to avoid combat is an important part of the game.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Very nice game, really like the style here, art is great and the 90s feel works so well for it. Combat was fun to play and I like the mini game for the doors too. 

 It felt a lot like playing the classic 90s video games. Enjoyed the game  a lot and it was fun to play. Good work with this game.

Developer

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

I loved so much about this game. So many nods to the 80's / 90's, StarFox, the "chicken & egg" matrix, Neuromancer. Loved it. Movement was a good speed, and the combat surprised me. I liked the mini locked door levels, and the music was very fitting. Felt like I was sitting on the floor playing PS1. Amazing effort, and great job making something that blended the genres well. I played this with a gamepad and it felt great getting around in combat and the dungeon. 

Developer

Awesome! Glad you liked it.

Submitted(+1)

The 3D graphics looked great and the battle scenes were epic! Great job!

Developer

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

ESC twice exited the game. Better have it close the exit menu so people don't accidentally close the application and losing their progress. I might have done that...

Combat was a bit different and maybe a bit fun the first times, but hard to steer and get right, and spamming space or numpad0 didnt feel like a good choice here. I think I would have preferred mouse, and if only keyboard to have the key pressed to auto shoot, or maybe auto shoot all together as default.

Graphics looks nice and music is good as well.

I good entry to the jam!

Developer

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback! I had similar thoughts about the spamming by the end. The escape menu stuff is definitely a mistake.

Submitted (3 edits) (+1)

OK, for real this time.

I really liked this one.  The shooting segments are a a lot of fun, especially once I switched to using the arrow keys instead of WASD.  (I probably would have stuck with it if I could have used the mouse to shoot.)

Tying it into the crawling gameplay with the stealth stun was well executed.  Though sometimes the timing on the movement and range on the search-lights was a little hard to gauge.

The 80's aesthetic was great.  Sometimes that neon style can be garish and hard to look at, but no issues there.

Only issue with the game was I died on my first go against the last boss, then when I pressed Esc to restart, the game was stuck on a data effect.  (Using chickens and eggs for the 1s and 0s was neat too tho.)  I didn't wanna play through the whole thing to potentially just die against the Boss again, so I quit there.

I'd also say, mapping a 'back' button and a 'close game' button to the same key isn't a good idea.  At least have a hold and build-up timer before the game closes in case of slips too.

Other than that, top tier entry. 

Developer(+1)

Thanks so much for playing! And for the feedback.
Totally agree on the controls. They're not very well planned...

Next year I'm going to make a menu and exit screen from the start to make sure everything feels alright.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Playthrough's up.  Pretty bad audio desync BTW.

Submitted (1 edit)

On my first couple of playthroughs I kept missing and misreading things.  I missed that the arcade was in the Ice-cream shop, that certain weapons could only be attached to certain characters, and I think I only pressed the special buttons for the two characters that couldn't use them, so I never healed or used the Nanotechs uber powerful lightning attack.

Anyway.  I gave it a second playthrough, I figured the combat out, and blitzed through the first two floors.  All in all it was pretty fun!  Lots of environmental variance, and I like the retro 80s theming.

This is the first couple of goes at x4.  I'll post the unabridged final playthrough tomorrow.

Developer

Hey I think you got the wrong game here!

Submitted (1 edit)

This is a damning indictment of my lacking attention to detail.
I'll get to yours tomorrow.

Submitted(+1)

The general is toast.

The game is fun and ambitious, they're almost two different full games here. Movement during the crawling part feels very good, trying to attack the bots from behind is fun and I like exploring these big, open dungeon floors. The rail shooter part is well made and feels good too, especially the boss parts, with the right speed of the controlled character and enemies' bullets.

A small caveat would be that overall I didn't love the controls, the worst part was pressing ESC twice halfway through the game because I'm dumb.

The Bullet Hell Jam starts in 5 days. ;)

Developer

Thanks so much for playing! Yeah the escape key setup for closing the game is very messy. Any other controls you weren't a fan of?

Submitted(+1)

Good question, by the end I think everything else was fine so I'm not certain anymore, at first I think that I kept wanting to Press SPACE when you're meant to Press TAB or ENTER, to shoot with the mouse button and to open the Inventory with ESC (and then to close the Quit menu with ESC too), it's likely that none of this is any better than how it's done though.

Developer(+1)

Yeah originally I wanted the keyboard controls to line up with the gamepad controls with just a primary and secondary button. But on keyboard the inventory system felt kind of odd. Mouse input could have bee a much more natural addition.

(+1)

Fun story and interesting world! I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games from the Dungeon Crawler Jam.

Developer

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

Seriously great game. A bit more enemy variety and I believe this could stand on it's own as an independent product.

Developer

Thanks for playing! Yeah it would've been awesome to have a bunch of unique enemies with different fights. I originally wanted enemies to have different spotlight shapes too! But time ran out. Maybe I'll add some stuff for a post jam version.

Submitted

Seriously great game. A bit more enemy variety and I believe this could stand on it's own as an independent product.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I love the vibe in this entry. Very cool graphics and style, and music fits perfectly! I played with the controller and it was generally a smooth experience.

My main issue was that it is way to easy to accidentally open up the inventory with just about any button and also have just about any button then be consume first item (aka health kit). I think it is more reasonable that you open and close inventory just with the north button in this case.

I sometimes also accidentally did bonus, unintentional moves due to how quick movement was and potentially too by the narrow, if any, dead zoning on the sticks.

Especially in the beginning it also felt more natural to click primary action rather than walking into things, but I did learn.

The fighting was fun and an interesting fusion. It took me a while to register the prompt that I could sneak up and bump into them to get a free hack round. But I’m kind of glad I did too, because since those didn’t have any danger, they got quite boring.

The rescue hacks were much more stressful, and also fun. It did get a whole lot easier with all the upgrades though.

At some point I got a bit lost, but in general since each level had clear zones with different textures, it wasn’t much of a problem.

Very very good entry indeed.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/5f-i39eLcSY

Developer

Thanks so much for playing! Some excellent feedback here.

The best thing I could have had would be settings for the repeat input speed, control remapping, and other quality of life things.

Getting a bit lost is intentional. So far I haven't seen anybody take too long to finish the game, so I think it is an ok amount of getting lost.

I'm sad you never used the EMPs or Energy Drinks! I think maybe those could have been tutorialized better, or made more necessary/useful in order to prompt their use.

Thanks for playing!

Submitted

Yeah I kind of forgot about the EMPs and Energy Drinks until I had sort of overcome the base enemies which made them less interesting. I was planning to try them out just to do it but then I sort of forgot!

I’m the type that at the end of a Souls game I have so much consumables that I just hoard in case I need them more later though, so it might not be too much of a game design issue here as it might be a me problem. hehe

Submitted(+1)

I love the 80's synth/hacker vibe, the 64 graphics and the genre fusion with the arcadey rail shooter. It was very well made with no technical issues that I remember. There was really nothing to complain about this, except maybe a bit more variety with enemies but that's a minor detail. I built up a lot of bombs by the end so the boss was a bit too easy but that's my fault for over preparing.

All in all, awesome entry. It brought me way back to a time where I was a kid and just chilled and play some n64 all day lol


Gameplay starts around 3h32m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTryNg8QIo0

Developer(+1)

Thanks so much for playing! Everybody I've watched has beat the boss in the same way. I think multiple stages, or limited openings of attack could have made that more interesting. But limited time frame and all that.

Thanks!

Submitted(+1)

What an incredible Genre Fusion entry! I had a blast playing this.

You can rewatch my playthrough here: https://youtu.be/yEZHSwQSLeI?si=7e2_E9jrKWwbHXPk&t=5158

Developer

Thanks so much for playing!

Submitted(+1)

So much 'tude! It's an amazing amount of polish for such a ridiculously short time frame. I particularly love all the poses of the chicken hacker. I thought the combat took a little bit too long sometimes with the enemies having 30 hp, but I should have tried ambushing them more instead of just trying to avoid them altogether. That's my only nitpicking, I had a lot of fun playing your game.

Developer

Awesome! Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

Awesome game. Very impressive for the time-frame. Great vibe. Nice controls. Thanks for sharing!

Developer

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

(+1)

Very fun game. Love the flying mini-game and combat. Great job!

Developer

Thanks!

Submitted(+1)

Really enjoyed this! You've absolutely nailed the hackerman/vaporwave vibe with the visuals and music.

Developer

Thanks! Yeah EVA's music was perfect for this.