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A jam submission

Rust MaidenView game page

A metroidvania featuring a magical girl with her companion, a magical gun!
Submitted by CornLee, hinomaruQ, Sorumoru, fake4eye — 2 minutes, 30 seconds before the deadline
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Rust Maiden's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay Polish#203.0003.000
Enjoyment#243.1183.118
Overall#273.0783.078
Relevance to the chosen theme(s)#293.2943.294
Sensory#302.8822.882
Genre Interpretation#313.2943.294
Creativity#432.8822.882

Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit either (or both) genres?
This is a metroidvania that features a magical girl and her companion, a sentient gun! The player must find their way through the map to reach the end all the while finding upgrades and an additional ability.

Chosen theme(s) and relevant explanations
The chosen themes are Rust and Constructs. Constructs serve as the enemies of the game in the form of robots and the character wields the power to rust enemies into smithereens.

Team/Developer
Cornl3e, hinomaruQ, FAKE4EYE, sorumoru

Premade content
touhou sound bites, built in Gamemaker fonts

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Nice work! Lots of polish and it played well. The soda sign was delightful! The main thing (aside from more game) would be gamepad support.

Submitted(+1)

Awesome concept, awesome visuals, awesome soundtrack.. Really.. Just an amazing short game. Enjoyed every second of playing and seeing the rocket jump as a way of progression really filled my heart with joy (as a sucker for platforming and metroidvanias in general lmao)

Absolute cinema, absolute peak level and game designing <3

Only disappointment (not in a bad way) was not beating up a boss at the end xD

Also minor improvement is slowing down the text at the end.. Other than that, you guys did a phenomenal job! <3

Much love ~ Alucifex

Submitted

The art is cool, the robots are very Portal looking, the music was also fine.

I think tying the double jump to a resource that has to recharge honestly hurt a little the pacing on the gameplay, a lot of time was spent me just standing still, waiting for the thing to finish reloading, doing nothing.

Submitted(+1)

Neat demo! I really liked the sprite of the main character, reminded me a bit of zero suit Samus in Zero Mission. The level and the music were pretty good too.

The gun was fun to use, and there was a nice sense of progression with the damage upgrades. The use of "ammo" for double jump and dashing is an interesting idea, but in practice I think it was a kind of an annoyance.

Regardless, good job!

Jam Judge (1 edit) (+1)

That was very short, but it's serviceable.

The title screen and splash art are gorgeous, I really like them, and I also love the heroine's pixel art design, and her animations are very charming, she kinda reminds me of Metal Slug in some sense, despite having a very different artstyle.

I really like gunslinger characters in general, it's really fun to see them just solving all of their problems with lead in a way or another, like the way the shotgun was implemented as mainly a movement tool that just happens to damage enemies, that was super cool!

Movement felt okay-ish, there is nothing inherently wrong with it, it just lacks some polish. For instance, there is no coyote time, wich is kinda essential for characters that moves at high speeds like our little friend here, and everything also feels a little too weightless, I don't really know how to explain, but it's mostly due to how the animations doesn't quite flow super well with what is happening. Like, the character moves way faster than her walk cycle implies, and there is no animation for actually using the shotgun, wich kinda uhhh..... Makes it look like she is just super farting, I'm afraid x)
(I mean looking at it again, it seens like the blast comes off from her boots? Either way, it felt too subtle for something that I think should be way more dramatic, if you get what I mean)

I like the idea of the reloading mechanic, but I think it could be more refined. For instance, it should give better visual feedback aside from just writing it on the HUD.... Coming back to Metal Slug, an animation for that state would be the most ideal, but since that is definitelly a lot of work to do, just a few particles affected by gravity coming out the character to show the old rounds being discarded, or something like that would be great! Information like these that limits the player's action while they're on the middle of acting should be extremelly on the nose, since if the player is focused on the immediate gameplay like platforming or fighting, they won't really have their eyes on the hud at the moment, and subtle changes to it are harder to be noticed by peripheral vision.

I think that's all I have to say about this one. It's charming, but it also is sadly a little too short to really start enjoying it, but I understand this was probably a time constraint issue, I appreciate that you released it at all, that's already great

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

Oh no! I accidentally pressed No after dying as the game over screen appears so fast that I was still moving to the right and my input moved the cursor from Yes to No. Then I pressed Space and it confirmed leaving the game, losing all my progression. It would be nice to have a Resume game option in the main menu (we added it in our game in priority because I had so many issues with losing progression on mid-length jam games and didn’t finish many entries because of that)

Otherwise the game is really fun, I only unlocked one skill so far but was delighted to see it was actually two skills in one (Dash and Double Jump) using the same special bullet (clever!).

Having to reload it like normal bullets make sense, although it takes some time to get used to it (as opposed to other games where landing = reload double jump… it’s more common to have a cooldown for dash though).

Moving is fast and controls are tight, however player character could benefit from dynamic height jump (in one room you need to shoot an enemy just a little above the usual shot height, but you can’t hop, so you must either jump and immediately press shoot, or do the mandatory full jump and then shoot when going down). Air slowdown during shoot is however very useful (I have yet to add air attacks in our game but I’ll probably do something like that too).

Level-wise, the rooms are simple, easy to understand. However I wish they have one-way platforms because there are many places where you expect to jump from below and hit the platform like ceiling instead.

Story-wise it seems that some lore was thought ahead since the gun is said to be sentient, unfortunately this missed opportunity for gun talk jokes (there could be a small dialogue at the beginning and each time you pick an upgrade, to introduce both explanation of the skill and some gag). The thumbnail itself is very comical already.

Anyway I’ll rate the game after I finish the demo to be sure I’m rating the metroidvania progression well too, or if there’s any boss at the end.

Developer

Ah man when you said boss 😬. Sorry we werent able to fit a boss and the saving system 🙇‍♂️. We do appreciate the feedback! 

Submitted

Aha, don’t worry, we didn’t have time to implement the boss either.

More feedback after finish the game (I died on the laser right before the end last time!):

  • input: keyboard scheme seems to support both WASD and arrow keys, but with arrow keys you expect action input keys on the left side (typically ZXCV in Qwerty), so while feasible to play with arrow keys + JKL, it’s a bit harder to keep hands that close and also press Space bar with the thumb this way
  • aesthetics: the SODA machine is so fun, no idea where it comes from, personally I saw it for the first time in Halloween Harry (yeah, that was a long time ago) and it was fitting in the building aesthetics, and more recently in Touhou: Luna Nights (and it was totally out of place like can machines in Monkey Island)
  • level design: I’ve just noticed you can reach the double jump / dash item by doing two normal jumps to and from the middle platform. At first I thought you had to fall to the bottom then use the item to get back to the start in classic Metroidvania forced new item usage fashion. Not sure if it was intended or not.
  • UX issue: on the second savepoint / soda machine, I accidentally moved right past the machine without activating it and fell (the floor stopped not so far after the scene transition) to my death on the laser, then was respawned to the 1st savepoint!
  • … and the 2nd area BGM kept playing in this 1st area
  • But good thing: I kept my skill upgrade although I saved before getting it! (my own game doesn’t do that, you HAVE to manually save after getting skill upgrade… will consider adding auto-save when getting new skill – for now we keep a save point near the skill upgrade item)
  • UX issue: no save point before laser challenge, had to redo the (easier) big pit challenge many times when dying in the laser challenge (not necessarily terrible as it also trained me, and was fortunately not too far)
  • Bug/exploit: I can infinitely spawn damage up items when re-entering the room to buff up my gear to MAX level.
  • Cutscene: the final pre-boss cutscene scrolls fast, didn’t have time to read

Well I prefer a short game with a clear ending and what’s supposed to go next than a giant sandbox level with no clear end… like… our entry…

Submitted(+1)

i liked the jump shotgun that was funny me likey. movement and shooting felt pretty nice. peak

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

I enjoyed what little time i got to spend with this! I enjoyed the the movement and gunplay, although i feel the control scheme was a little awkward to get used to, and It wasn't immediately obvious at first that the shotgun is actually a dash/double jump ability.

Overrall i did enjoy the game, and I like the concept of badass girl with a sentient gun! I hope there's more areas added in the future!

Submitted(+1)

It's not a big deal, but it would've been nice if the controls were explained in game. Especially since they are a little unusual; arrow keys for movement + AS or ZX and the surrounding keys for actions would be more intuitive I feel like. Plus, I think those would've felt a little less awkward to control.

Music is pretty cool. Also I like the sound the checkpoints make, I find it amusing.

The sentient gun thing isn't really conveyed well in the game at all, and kinda caught me by suprise when the text on the end screen started talking about it.

I like the shotgun upgrade; making a dash/double jump explosion/gun-themed is cool I think. I also like the double jump is sort of an attack as well. I would've maybe liked if it could also be used as a weapon though.

Movement as a whole feels awkward though. The lack of acceleration + lack of fixed jump height makes platforming feel very imprecise, which did get to be a bit of problem when the instant-kill lasers started showing up. Also, stopping in place to shoot felt very pace-breaking.

And it's just a little thing, but the flying enemies coming in from off-screen with 0 indicators makes certaom platforming segments kind of annoying.

Overall though, it's a neat game. 👍

Submitted(+1)

The game itself is solid art is cute, I like the level design too. I do find myself fighting with controls quite a bit. Might benefit from a nicer control scheme, controller support and well as some coyote time for the jumps. 

Nice work overall.

Submitted(+1)

All right, I played through the updated version, and got to the room that said “WIP :(” which I assume is the current ending, haha

Cool ideas, I like the idea that the shotgun can be used as a jump or as a dash and you have to plan your jumps around it. I think the reload time for it could’ve been a bit faster (but maybe only make it reload on the ground?) so you didn’t have to spend a bunch of time waiting between jumps, but it’s an interesting concept. The difficulty was a bit strange, the enemies do almost no damage and can be easily ignored/ran past, but then it switches to a focus on instant kill lasers. It still wasn’t too hard since it’s a relatively short section and checkpoints are plentiful (this was a good idea) but it did feel like a pretty sudden change.

The graphics were nice, I really like the character design! Could’ve used some nice crunchy gun sounds to really sell the impact of the shotgun, but it was still satisfying enough to hop around with it.

Nice job on this game!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for trying out our game! I know you already played it but we just added the music and couple of fixes to the game😅. Feel free to try it out a third time haha (if you want to no pressure lol).

Submitted

The thumbnail art for this is extremely cool.

I might be missing something, but is there a place to go after getting the shotgun power-up? I managed to find what looked like a place to progress, but I just fell out of the level.

Developer

Hi thank you for liking the art! We are looking to do some bug fixes today. You can progress through the room with the two platforms and two robots on a hole or the big room with flying enemies. Sorry for the inconvenience 🙇‍♂️

Submitted

This one, right?

It doesn’t seem to be working. Hope you’ll manage to fix the bug in time!

Developer(+1)

Update! Fixed the problem where the room doesnt connect