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Interplanetary Recombobulator's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Execution | #13 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Game Design | #15 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall | #17 | 3.427 | 3.427 |
| Visuals | #19 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Audio | #25 | 2.917 | 2.917 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Lovely mix of mechanics! Took a little while, but I eventually managed to max out my coherence, and oooooh boy, does it feel powerful :D
Solid game, I really like the simple but functional enemy design with their drops signalled.
Being able to restart with Space would be appreciated!
The core concept is great but it is very counter-intuitive how much not missing shots matter in the beginning paired with how wide-angled your shots are. I think the simplest way to improve this would be to add some negative vfx and sound to the shots hitting the screen boundary (ie missing), to make it obvious that this is something that you want to avoid more than anything.
Without knowing this it is easy to just stay in the limbo of shooting constantly and wondering why you aren’t progressing. Maybe you could take it further to explain this better and have the game play out inside the body of something that you want to actually preserve (for example invaders are coming inside the mothership and you have fight them there), so the screen boundary would actually be the walls of the ship you want to avoid friendly firing at, then it would make sense that if you hit the wall enough the whole thing blows up. This would solve the “limbo state” by progressing you towards game over if you aren’t playing the game right, as you couldn’t heal the mothership the same way you can reverse your own fever damage ad infinitum now.
The rule for Coherence is that not hitting at least one thing has a penalty, so it’d be difficult to tie it to damaging something because most of the time, not all of your shot hits an enemy. In development, the first version of the rule was that bullets that miss did have a cost, but that was (in my opinion) not fun to actually play well, so I changed it.
I agree that there should be more guidance towards the idea of avoiding firing, but I didn’t have any good ideas for how to make this clear in-game, short of a “quest marker” system that explicitly points you towards the next stage of play (a more explicitly labeled, attention-getting version of the thing where bars appear when they first become nonzero).
I see, that is a bit harder to intuit as a player because I conceptualize bullets as distinct things once they leave my ship instead of being treated as a group where one hit “validates the rest”. If this needs to stay like this then maybe some unconventional rendering that groups the bullets visually might help with understanding? For example have them be connected together and back to the player and if one hits the connection turns green but if none hits the connections turn read and slap back on the player or something.
Alternatively, firing itself could always give you some fever so it would be more obvious that you have to turn shots into coolers efficiently, otherwise you’ll overheat.
I think that “always give some Fever” might be a good place to start. (Right now, it's directly proportional to Coherence, so shooting with zero Coherence gives zero Fever).
Actually, they aren’t a group at all. Firing starts coherence drain and any bullet hitting any target stops it. (The state of this is visualized as the wavy part of the bar — each of the 3 quantities has a “temporary value/modifier” associated with it which is drawn that way, but each one has different rules.)
The style is cool! Once you reach peak melon it feels like a lazer shots, a bit too bright if you ask me
Pretty simple, responsive, and functional! Definitely will be a challenge to learn good strategies.
Very fun and polished, 2nd enemy type would add a lot imo!
I like the cooling system!
fun and punchy! text can be a bit hard to read on web though
In case you didn’t, try the fullscreen button in the bottom right.
I agree it’s not a great default — the problem is that I did a pixel art design for 640 × 480, which means that the next scale up is 1280 × 960, which would be a bit uncomfortably large and put part of the game offscreen sometimes. If I do something like this again, I’d pick a smaller or larger base resolution with the itch.io page layout in mind.
I really like the visuals, the red screen effect looks cool. Player controller felt responsive, and I liked that enemies showed what stuff they had inside, so you could strategize which ones to blow up. Only complaint is after I got full coherence, I felt a little too invincible. Some other enemy types could be good to add here in the future!
Great game all around! Quite a few mechanics to worry about at first which can be overwhelming but once you get them its fun to try to balance everything. Visuals were cool too. Great job!
Points taken out on execution because without the explanation in the description, I would have never figured out how to win.
Some pumped up music could also improve the experience a lot I think.
Apart from that, gg well made, mate!
Once you get the mechanics, it's a pretty good shooter, with an original spin! It took me a solid 5min to get bored and read the description, then an additional 3min to actually beat the game
In hindsight it really needs some in-game explanation that the win condition isn't “survive all the waves” or “kill all the enemies to advance”. Lesson for next time: get playtesting sooner. Thanks for the feedback!