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Aura Hell's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visual | #16 | 4.276 | 4.276 |
| Audio | #25 | 3.690 | 3.690 |
| Overall | #33 | 3.586 | 3.586 |
| Fun | #57 | 3.310 | 3.310 |
| Theme | #111 | 2.552 | 2.552 |
Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Are you using any third party assets?
We made everything during the jam
Are you using any AI generated assets?
No AI
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Comments
incredible style and sound, then enemies were really cool. My main complaint is that it felt kinda frustrating to try to recover after being low on aura. besides that, pretty good!
Good game! i love the pixel art and the overall style
Nice difficulty scaling, visuals and controls. Managing the resource to attack mainly when you will hit a target is a good idea and it was well made even the feedback for the player. Good job ^^
THE CULT IS NO LONGER.
I had a lot of fun playing the game. It looks, sounds, controls and overall feels great. The enemies, groups of enemies, their bullet patterns and the overall difficulty also felt adequate for the jam with all the right speeds and plenty of fun dodging and shooting before the situation gets out of control to perform.
The only thing I didn't like is the very low maximum your aura can only reach after it got down lower than that, because of this the mechanic ended up more frustrating than fun for me.
Great one!
Thank you. Yes, this is certainly one of the biggest issues of the game. The thing is it would be too easy if the aura just always went up, since it's also your heath you just wouldn't die. One of the ideas I had is to make the aura refill until the player shoots, so you could recharge the meter to the maximum. Another idea was to make it recharge slower after some point, so you could still get your aura back without it being breaking the game. Wish I did something like that when I had the idea
Incredible art and music !
Gameplay wise i really like the progression and checkpoint system. The aura mechanic is quite original as well and tends to make the player think a bit more strategically than just spam shooting.
My only gripe with this is the recharge mechanic felt a bit unclear, i reached the 1st boss and my aura didn’t seem to recharge much i just had barely a few shots at a time before having to wait for a slow and non complete recharge ?
Other than that it’s a cool entry, you guys did great :)
I loved the visual style; the enemy and boss sprites are amazing. The aura mechanic felt a little un-intuitive, as it would go down via shooting but stop regenerating very quickly instead of fully recharging. I couldn't tell if this was intended or not.
Clean. God tier art. Loved it.
This game has a lot of good stuff! But I feel like the biggest thing it lacked was a "System B/secondary mechanic". You kinda don't do anything except just shoot and dodge and there's nothing really else to think about (though the spreadshot does add some strategy where it's better to get up close to do more damage on an enemy which is neat) or keep track of... And the fact that you can't even see your health despite the MASSIVE screensize feels bizarre. The game's biggest issue really is just the Aura Meter unfortunately. Like, it doesn't add anything "new" or even particularly fun to the average shoot em up gameplay loop, the only thing it changes is that instead of being able to shoot freely now you have to periodically press the shoot button and try not to miss, and it adds these downtimes where you can't do anything but are just forced to quietly dodge, which would be interesting if there was some kind of secondary mechanic like maybe grazing near bullets to rebuild your Aura or SOMETHING else you could think about while waiting, but since you don't all you do is just wait and then if you miss again you wait some more.
Some of the patterns also felt very difficult but in awkward ways-- The second section of the first stage with the guy that keps spawning eyeballs felt harder than most of the stages after, or at least tedious, since it felt like he had a lot of health and spawned eyeballs at a ludicrous rate. The part where the game "zooms out" was REALLY clever and actually made use of the screensize, but then it exposed a second issue which is the acceleration when you move around (which is a very odd decision for a precision based genre like a bullet hell) with no focus mode or way to slow down. The art and music are great and the final boss is awesome, though I admit I couldn't find much logic in the theming (besides the Aura Meter which was a hamper on the game's fun factor lol).
I'd say this is a really good _base_ for a game, but next time I'd try to think about the kinds of thoughts the player is/should be having at any given time-- Give the player something to think about if you're going to give them downtime through a mechanic like the Aura Meter.
Thanks for such detailed review. I agree that there should be some additional mechanic so that the player always has something to think about. Although, I don't like when there's too much to keep track of, and maybe with some tweaking the idea of the player entering pure surviving mode isn't bad for a bullet game. I like this idea because it introduces balancing between health and ammo, since you have this shared mana you have situations where in a pretty causal game the player is forced to change the strategy, maybe it's nothing new but I think it doesn't matter.
I think the theme is purely vibes, so maybe having an angel (final boss) as a demon doesn't make sense indeed.
> maybe with some tweaking the idea of the player entering pure surviving mode isn't bad for a bullet game.
Yeah, I mean like I said it's not like it's "impossible" to make it happen, but you gotta remember that dodging and shooting is something that the player is already doing at once all the time in a bullet hell. You just take away one of those things... and the player is just left doing what they were already doing, just with even less to think about at once. So you gotta give them something in return. The idea I randomly threw out there of "grazing to rebuild your Aura" gives the player agency, since now they're not just waiting but actively thinking about HOW they dodge and have a decision of risking getting closer to bullets to get back into the action; that's just an example.
Also nah the angel being a demon/demon looking like an angel vice versa isn't a huge deal, that's a pretty classical cliche in demon stories (like devil may cry or devilman lol). I do like the whole demon and cult aesthetic, but I didn't see the "unstable" part in it all; maybe if it was more "intense" with more monstrous designs it could've fit a bit more.
originally i thought it would have been cool if instead the player had weapons that would become unstable as you took damage. weapons could break leaving the player in a vulnerable state, and with a default "pee shooter" weapon. essentially the weapons would double as a offensive + defensive thing giving you Armor (protection) and a way to attack, over time they would break down. if a weapon began to break down your shots would become stronger but harder to control and would bring you closer to a fragile state, when a weapon would finally lose its "armor points" it would get removed from your arsenal and you would have to survive.
Another idea i was thinking to do was make the enemies themselves be "unstable" by mutating into demon/cult member hybrids, a chance to mutate into other enemies upon death or randomly :V. didn't get to making demon variants of the enemies though :
Really really good looking pixel art, and it was fun, but the take on the theme feels a bit too loose.
Great art, like really. This is some nice work. The enemies couldn't handle my Sigma Aura
A classic bullet hell, great work. The art is awesome!
This game is definitely a classic Bullet Hell game, but with more Aura. Good Work, I need to git gud
Felt like playing in an arcade. I need to go git gud real quick.
This game has aura 👍
For some reason my game just loops back to beginning after titan, can't fight the boss in the screenshots
That's strange, could you please tell what build you were running?
Never mind, I tried it again and I just didn't realize there was another set of levels. Titan was easier than the previous waves, and the marker didn't move to the skull, so I thought he was just a mini-boss before the boss fight!
Really great work , the sounds and graphics were top-notch!