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Rudimentary Unfinished Shooter Entry's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Mark's Favourites | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| Creativity | #48 | 4.556 | 4.556 |
| Enjoyment | #254 | 4.133 | 4.133 |
| Narrative | #1079 | 3.422 | 3.422 |
| Audio | #2092 | 3.289 | 3.289 |
| Artwork | #4916 | 2.978 | 2.978 |
Ranked from 45 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?
Shooting enemies ticks a count down. The exact purpose of the count down is best explained in-game.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
See description for full credits
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Comments
what
Well earned!
CONGRATS!!!
Congrats on making it into the Favorite Games!!
false advertising - not rudimentary OR unfinished (i want my money back)
sorry i already spent it all :(
Amazing entry, unique ! Well done !
The game idea is simple but unique, its a fun time killer but it could be cool if more features were added and there was a little more artwork than just shapes, but otherwise this has potential to be a fun game.
I must admit, I was extremely close to give up even on the first level, but then I think I actually made it all the way through? I at least got back to the menus and saw an extra option but I didn’t notice anything happening when I clicked it?
I think they puzzles were great and had a real mind bending design. What I do think could have been improved wasn’t so much the actual puzzles but the pacing of complexity and tutorials.
Right now you basically throw all the tools at the player at once, and some of them you don’t even need until a couple of puzzles down the line. And that is asking quite a lot of the player to be honest.
Another thing that I wonder about was why T reset and not R? Not that it mattered much, just seemed a little strange.
I did very much enjoy my time and of course it would have been epic if you could just break down the game more and more and evolve both the puzzles and get a bit of story in that way.
But still this was a great puzzle game for a jam.
Play-through:
Thank you so much for the feedback and the playthrough video!
You're right I could have done the tutorial better. There's two reasons it is the way it is; jam games tend to have low retention so I wanted to make sure that people who may leave early would still at least be aware of the game's mechanics (especially refreshing, since I knew that one would be fairly unique), and I wanted people to have a basic understand of their toolkit before being asked to use them in puzzles (somehow I figured that would be less confusing). There's better ways I could have gone about this of course, like shifting some of the tutorial elements to the level select area (eg, maybe level 5 could only be accessed by using a mirror/bounce square, since that's the first place those appear after the tutorial).
To answer your question about the reset button, it was R for most of the game's development, but CTRL+R is a browser refresh shortcut, and the overlap in controls and mechanics confused one of my playtesters, so the input was moved to T.
Some comments on the playthrough:
Thanks again for uploading a playthrough! The feedback is invaluable.
One of the most unique entries on this jam that I saw, nice job!
What an amazing game. What a unique mechanic . Definitely the most creative jam game I've seen so far! Great job!
Oh no, another unfinished game? Sad😔
Brilliantly subversive and the whole meta elements are implemented so so well.
I am a self-confessed smooth brain, and as you now know well, my solution to challenging puzzles is to throw it out of a window. As such I did find these quite hard. I got to the second to last level and my brain 404'd. I've been at this for close to an hour I think, so I should probably know when I'm beat. I play basically no puzzle games through, so this shouldn't be surprise and doesn't reflect on your game, only me.
The implementation is fantastic, both in the meta unfinished-ness and the puzzle mechanics themselves. When the penny dropped on the third to last level (can't remember which number it was), it was immensely satisfying chaining the several shots back to back through the slow fields and completing the level.
Thank you.
Always a tragedy when a jam game can't be finished on time.
Also you're not smooth-brained, I've just never made a proper puzzle game before so the difficulty is all out of whack lmao.
Thank you for the feedback. I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed this so much.
I CAN SEE WHY PEOPLE WERE HYPING THIS GAME! That's so creative, I can't say much for spoilers, but all I can tell you is that, it's an unfolding game, try it!
ohhhh my gosh, I just saw that the title also spells something smh lmao
[SPOILERS]
I got kinda stuck on a refresh lmao That was while the bullet was traveling across the long red line toward the red circle, I refreshed
Thank you!
Not sure if you're still stuck there, but don't forget that you can press T for a full reset.
You got me. Nice work 😁.
this is a brilliant mechanic! I think I managed to solve the last level in an unintended way though, as I had 4 moves left, even without it crashing :)
That's really interesting!
I noticed a way to beat the last level with 1 shot left right before submissions closed, but 4 is wild. No clue how you did that.
It was a well timed triple shot for me.
first shot to the left to get out of the middle.
second shot to reposition the yellow orb slightly down.
next three shots with a few seconds delay between them all to the left and rebound. the second slightly angled down.
before the first of those hits move to the first goal, wait out the second hit in the trapped location, and move to the second goal before the third shot reaches the right red orb.
Wow, that's smart!
Must have been a nightmare getting the shots lined up though.
It took me a while to understand what I was doing! but then it clicked, and the matrix unraveled in a frenzy of F5.
What an entry! the puzzles are amazing, the gimmick is phenomenal, the only thing I could say it's that the countdown being a limit move and just that fits the brief but doesn't go beyond.
Thanks for the feedback!
"the countdown being a limit move and just that fits the brief but doesn't go beyond"
I'm a bit surprised no one else has mentioned that so far. It was a thought that was constantly in the back of my mind while developing this. Definitely wish I found a better way to use the theme. At least there's the initial countdown until the game crashes.
Way better after you power through the first crash :D actually made me think! cool mechanics
My first thought was "Jeez this is low effort" but ow man how wrong I was. This is briliant everyone should play it and check how it is to think out of the box.
I really like this shooter, wish you had enough time to finish it.
Seriously, though, amazing concept and execution! I'm a sucker for fourth-wall breaks so you got me there. I loved the puzzles. Great job!
Very creative concept. The puzzles are mind-bending. The title spelling out "RUSE" is a nice touch.
Wow, this was really cool! If this is unfinished though, I don't know what a done game entry looks like lol. The level design broke my brain in the best way possible. Awesome job!
Thank you!
It is actually kinda unfinished (even though I'm only calling it that in the title to make the abbreviation work). There was so much more I wanted to do with this, but due to some real life stuff I had to cram the majority of the development into the last 24 hours. I was somewhat worried that the real game would seem almost as unpolished as the fake game, so reading this was really nice.
WAIT IT SPELLS "RUSE"!!! I feel dumb for that having to be pointed out, that is so clever
"Ruse" is also in the url.
I wish I could wipe my memory and play this again. Shook me to my core, it felt like I was playing undertale, oneshot, and ddlc again. But puzzle version. Genuinely beautiful. And of course the puzzles were hard and so satisfying to figure out.
I genuinely cannot believe you're comparing this to Oneshot. That was my biggest inspiration when making this. Thank you!