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Lil' Bomby's Nuclear Winter's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #2 | 4.409 | 4.409 |
| Theme | #2 | 4.545 | 4.545 |
| Overall | #3 | 4.119 | 4.119 |
| Graphics | #7 | 4.205 | 4.205 |
| Audio | #17 | 3.318 | 3.318 |
Ranked from 44 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I LOVE this game. It is super addictive and charming. The lil guys are just soo cute
I loved the replayability with the different item combos, and the art style is very charming. I do wish that there were an option to turn off the damage numbers since my game starts to lag around level 20. It's a great game either way. 10/10
Thanks for the feedback! I'll probably add an option to disable damage numbers in the future, it does get pretty laggy. I'm happy you enjoyed!
REally liked all of the weapons and passive item designs. Chicken bomb was my favorite attack (cus of the sound design) and Shrapnel was my favorite passive.
Pixel art was really well done all around! the wizard fireball was my favorite one.
The two runs I played were both really fun!! -- died at level 8 in both of em
Thanks for all the great feedback! Shrapnel is definitely one of the best passives in the game, especially when combined with duplicate, but I kind of like how rewarding it is if you can reach that point. I was also a little worried the chicken sound effect would get annoying after a while, but I'm glad you liked it! The wizard character is definitely one of my favorite design as well. I'm glad you enjoyed!
The gameplay loop is quick but addictive, and the pixel art is really good for the theme. Nice work!
Thanks for the nice feedback! I'm glad you had fun!
Awesome little bullet heaven! great job overall, very good theming.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm happy you liked it!
This was really fun! I love vampire survivors and it was cool to see it recreated in pico-8 with a bomb theme fitting the jam :)
The level of polish felt quite high, the art was good, you had some fitting music that was pretty good as well (if a bit repetetive) and some nice sound effects.
I do think that one of my favorite aspects of vampire survivors was missing, which is when you have huge waves of enemies that all get melted. I figured it was an engine limitation though, as when I got deep into runs the game would start lagging a lot even with just 100 enemies on screen.
I also found it a bit too easy, but that might just be because I've grinded a lot of vampire survivors. On my second run I was basically unkillable and only died at level 50 or something when the game was lagging so badly I couldn't tell what was happening.
Overall a really impressive submission, doing this in pico-8 seems insane to me so I was blown away by that, as well as with the number of abilities and characters you had, really well done! :D
Thanks for the feedback! I'm not really the best at making music and the loop is definitely way too short, but I hope it didn't severely impact your experience. Part of the low frame rates and lagginess can be blamed on Pico-8's limitations, but I do really need to work on optimization as well. I also think I should adjust the difficulty curve so it steepens a bit after reaching 8 upgrades, the main reason I kept it relatively easy is to not overwhelm people who might be new to the genre, so if it gets harder later it doesn't greatly impact their experience, but still provides a challenge to people who might find it too easy. Thanks again for all this great feedback, and I'm happy you enjoyed!
Nice presentation! The overall experience reminded me a lot of Vampire Survivors, I enjoyed it.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you liked it!
It's incredible. I feel like you pushed Pico-8 quite far with this game. The weakest point could be the music, but it's a minor hiccup in what is otherwise an excellent game!! Very good job!! :D
Thanks! Admittedly, I'm not very good at making music, but I'm glad it didn't ruin the experience. I'm happy you enjoyed!
Impressive nontheless :D I'm sure you'll get to make better songs (pico8 is quite tricky to make good music in, too hahaha)
It s really good work for sure! I had vampire survivor experience, but this game has lovely gameplay! I liked the design of pico8, really nice.
Wanna say some about mobile experience, that was smooth, but movement stick has not quite comfortable reaction. As I understood buttons "X" and "O" has same functionality, but first minutes I expected to see difference, may be you should gave them "close" and "accept" functions.
I enjoyed of your game, glad you added mobile controls, I think it's quite simple, but not every developer do this.
I would be glad if you test my game, too) That's my second gamejam, I had a lot of fun and hard time :D
Oh, forgot to add my record btw 😁
I'm glad you had a good experience! The mobile controls are built in to Pico-8, and they can be pretty janky sometimes, but they do make the game much more accessible. I'll definitely give your game a try too! Thanks for the feedback.
Edit: Level 26 is very impressive! Good job!
I've never played the "vampire survivor" genre of games before, only watched reviews and I am definitely missing out. This is really fun, the gameplay, the "dopamine hit" with all the explosions on screen and the cuteness of the characters, really top notch.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you had fun!
Out of all the vampire survivors likes i've played, this one was one of the most innovative ones i've played. I love all the classes and how much they change to the gameplay! This game is quite literally a 5 in every category. I hope this wins and you get featured!!!
Amazing work. We should get in contact because I'd love to learn from you in terms of gamedev.
My game personally was really fun to make but I am by no means an experienced gamedev. I'm a programmer, composer and artist mostly!
Good luck on the ratings, I gave you a 5 on everything <3
Thanks for all the kind words! In terms of advice for game development, I’m probably not the best person to ask, because I usually just mess around with a mechanic or concept I think is fun and expand on it, then try to make something of a story out of it and use that to create the world, environment, and basically everything else. For this game, I liked the idea of making a Survivorlike, so before the jam actually began, I made a simple prototype of a submarine that would shoot bubbles that bounced around. When the theme was announced, I made a two-frame walking animation of a cute bomb guy and a zombie bomb, which eventually evolved into Lil’ Bomby’s Nuclear Winter over the course of the jam. Though I didn’t really start development when I made that first prototype, or even use any code from it, it definitely helped with figuring out how to implement the things I wanted to. There are also plenty of tutorials and guides online for making fun game mechanics and even just game development in general that definitely put it much more elegantly than ‘just mess around until something seems fun.’ I’m really happy you liked this and wish you good luck with the next step of your game dev journey!
Thankyou for your advice! I personally plan all elements of my game and try to develop story and mechanics simulatenously so it's more of a coherent and cohesive design in comparison to story, then mechanics, or mechanics, then story. If you'd like, I'd love to have you as a contact or maybe potentially a team member for an upcoming jam! SBG (my girlfriend) is also really talented in all aspects, especially art, and us 3 would form a power trio. Would be sick for something like a platformer RPG. LMK! My discord is @sonicobg. I'd love to discuss how you got to this level of polish and how you learnt gamedev, whether it was trial and error or like a full on life plan (like me lol). Amazing game!
I also updated/patched my game, your feedback on the bossfight was patched and also the death mechanic actually works now.
Let me know what you think if you get a chance to play the patch.
Cheers!
Yeah, I think developing game elements simultaneously is probably a better system than what I do, but at least for small games like in jams it's worked well enough for me. I mostly learnt gamedev through trial and error, I just do it as a fun hobby, and the only other coding language I know is Scratch block coding, which I spent a little over two years doing before finally switching to Pico-8 about 6 months ago. As for your request to make a team, I'm not really sure about making any commitments just yet, and I think I would prefer to stay solo for now. I'll let you know if I change my mind though!
Nicely done. I think it is great you provided "Want to try all the characters but don't have enough gold? Enable 'JAM RATING MODE' in the pause menu!". The level seemed very large and it was easy to survive for quite a while. Looks like it gets very intense later on in the game, or at different characters. I'll play again after posting this, and I'll try that JAM MODE to see all the nice characters. I see you took the time to make a lot of characters and game play.
I like that your credits indicate what you learned and where you learned it from. I think you might have inspired me to make my first PICO game sometime in the future. Mostly I just do HTML, Canvas and JavaScript (easy to throw together a bunch of things and even Three JS, Matter JS and more), but you cleanly did a nice BIG thing with just a little PICO thing.
YOU Said: "The Alchemy Jam community on Discord really motivated me to keep working on my game and sharing updates, it was so fun to talk about my game with other people and get a glimpse of what others were making. It was a great source of inspiration, and helped me think through my ideas."
-- I also spent a lot of time and continually improved my submission over time.
Thanks for the feedback! I think it’s cool that I inspired you to make a Pico-8 game. There are so many resources available for Pico-8 including articles on the creators’ website, videos on YouTube, and there’s even a Wiki. It has harsh limitations, but those limitations encourage doing more with less like you said. I think it was a very good introduction to “real” coding for me as well (I had previously only ever used Scratch). That said, thank you for playing and I’m happy you liked it!
This was a ton of fun. You've made a great set of upgrades and the pacing felt just right. That said, by the time I'd reached level 8, there was so much happening that it was slowing down the game pretty badly in the browser. Not sure how you'd address it in pico-8, but it might be worth digging in to figure out how because I think you've got something really special here. It's another one of my favorites from the jam so far!
Thanks so much for the feedback! I’ve seen how slow the game can be with certain upgrades and yeah, the frame rate gets really bad. I think optimization is definitely one of the biggest things I need to improve on, but I’m glad you still enjoyed it!
Very engaging and simplistic. Not a fan of the horde survival genre, but everything here is put in the right place. The music felt repetative, but this did not take out of the overall experience.
If there's a game deserving of winning the jam it's this one.
Thanks! I'm not the best at making music, but I'm glad it didn't significantly impact your experience. I'm happy you enjoyed!
I love it, very fun and engaging, got to level 28 and feel proud. As someone who doesnt like this genre you did a great job with the design and upgrades.
I could only imagine how funny it would be if the death scene was bomby exploading, lols
Either way good job, you should be super proud
Wow! I struggle to even get to level 10! I think if I continue this project, a death animation like what you suggested would be a cool addition. Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you liked it!
Great Vampire Survivorlike with an impressive amount of characters and abilities. Difficulty ramps up a little too slowly for my taste. Without the duplicator ability it feels like it takes too long for anything to happen. But other than that had a really fun time. Great work!
I decided to keep the difficulty scaling relatively low at the beginning so people didn't get overwhelmed as fast, but I can see where you're coming from, which is part of the reason why I decided to have upgrades like the duplicator and cursed flame that incorporate some risk in exchange for such powerful boosts. Good to hear you still had fun though!
I loved the graphics, and gameplay was smooth and engaging. After some point I was no longer able to understand, but I haven't spent much time with vampire survivor games so it might be just a matter of time. Super nice progression as well, great job!
Yeah, the late-game can definitely get pretty overwhelming. I'm glad you enjoyed!
Oh my god, this is amazing. I really didn’t expect to see such a polished and complete game for a jam congrats!
Thanks so much for the feedback! I'm happy you liked it
The amount of passives in the game is insane. Pretty fun stacking them all up and seeing explosions everywhere. I wanted to keep playing just to collect all the passives! Also the cover page is too clean!
Thanks for the nice feedback! I set up a lot of the upgrades to synergize with each other, and I'm glad you had fun with them!
Am I really competing against this well-made game?? lol, all kidding aside, this game is very good and from what I've seen it receives live updates, which is funny to see. I wish you good luck and hope you continue updating this game in the future.
https://aquilamobile.itch.io/gombow
Thanks for these kind words, I'm happy you enjoyed!