Really fun and addicting game. Love the aesthetic and the music is also very fitting. My only feedback would be to add a visual indicator for the shield and spell cooldowns, otherwise excellent job (:
Play game
Chronoculus's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #364 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Narrative | #816 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Creativity | #986 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Artwork | #1246 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
| Audio | #2217 | 3.171 | 3.171 |
Ranked from 35 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The game takes place in a time loop.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
"Half Machine" and "Home" by HoliznaCC0, Licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/holiznacc0/retro-gamer-soundtrack
Comments
the concept and strengthening/weakening mechanics are pretty brilliant. i think the premise of this game won me over very well, and I feel the theme of the jam reflected excellently here.
like always with shmups, I have very specific pain points that I feel could have made for a better experience.
ive played a lot of bullet hell games (DDP, Garegga, Ketsui, etc.) and i feel what you're expected to do simply isn't possible at first when I strongly believe it should be "doable, but pretty much impossibly tough".
this game should really have a much smaller hitbox and faster speed. bullets are also very fast and barely leave you any gaps which makes me feel that the intended solution is to shield / facetank your way through a lot of the patterns instead of dodge them.
the player's fire rate is very piddly and weak, and the upgrades felt lopsided in practice. I wanted to select the upgrades with "make me faster and fire more bullets, make the boss not fire the spread that kills me instantly" much more over "increase the time in which the horizontal lasers take a coffee break for 0.1% longer"
you can't bullet seal chronoculus's spreads which is a bit unfortunate. getting point-blanked by the boss with no time to react is frustrating.
1 year ago(+1)
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write out such detailed feedback! You do make some very good points, we were fully intending to have the boss be beatable without upgrades but in the rush of the jam we never fully tested to make sure that could happen. In the end, we weren't expecting anyone to actually be able to do it, so we didn't make it our focus. That being said, I do agree that in an ideal world the boss should always be beatable without dying.
I appreciate the feedback on feel and balance as well, definitely something to keep in mind if we decide to work on this again. I can definitely understand the frustrations you've brought up, there are certainly areas that could be improved with more tweaking. Improved movement, attack telegraphing, or a more complex boss AI would all help the game feel more fair, while still retaining the feeling of impossibility when first starting. We've learned a lot from this game and I appreciate everything you've added here.
Thanks for playing!
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.