itch.io

Very simple but elegant game design, and very cute sprites!

In total fairness to Goblin Richy and given his death count, I don’t think I am too smart either.

I’m not sure I was playing correctly as I felt like I was the “enemies” more than the player, but still found it interesting, like a shmup version of tower defence. I don’t know if that was intended or not (the game description references to the player seem to refer to the white ship, but the red ships are the player’s fleet it seems?) but it seemed like an interesting angle to me and would be curious to see more of that (maybe some fleet tactics thrown in?), without the burden of the game jam theme.

Also I really liked the graphics and sound, the swirling parallax is nice as are the explosions.

Edit: also love these explosions!

Thank you! Once I added the cloud background and shadow I also started getting reminded of Hoth, if I expand the concept I’ll need to be careful not to add any giant 4-legged walkers 😅

Thank you fellow Usagi game dev! 🐰 I will have to turn it into a proper game!

I got up to the 1.0B target and took a break; but I got some Universal Paperclips-style vibes which is always appreciated!

Really nice top-down shooter, and I love the Sega-Genesis game style title screen!

I think a good extension to the idea would be some sort of event system like waves or swarms or bosses, like the “survivor” genre (for want of a better term).

By the way, I really like the enemy movement are a bit unpredictable but still threatening, means more of the gameplay space is usable (for my entry I was very lazy and just made enemies chase the player with some inertia and ± some random angular differences in direction, which leads to the player just needing to run away constantly)

Nice, surprisingly large scope for a gamejam! I think it will need various polish and adjustments to physics, movement etc, but I’m pretty impressed.

Also love the title crawl :)

Nice game, I reckon it’s a good basis to expand upon, reminds me a bit of Ultimate Chicken Horse especially with the wall jumping and spikes on walls.

Mandatory “BIFAR” required :)

I’ll have to try again on a Windows computer (graphics rendering issue) but I love the “cat in a sedan with a uzi” concept and laughed at the Dune puns. The particles are quite satisfying and the music is a bop.

Very nice graphics, reminds me of Sensible Soccer I think. I don’t know enough about the rules of volleyball but I still found it funny and relatable watching the CPU start to panic and start juggling the ball a little too much.

Actually I’m pretty impressed by the CPU player’s AI!

Also as someone else mentioned, nice localisation!

Thank you! And interesting feedback regarding the controls, that’s clearly some accidental bias from me that’s leaked into the game design, because I’ve been coding on a laptop and pressing down on the trackpad to shoot felt a bit awkward. I laughed because I’ve been having the opposite problem (“why is everyone making LMB fire?”), now I’ve only just realised what I’ve done… whoops… good to know!

I think there’s an interesting concept here that would be very interesting to see explored further, and that could be fused with many other genres. For example many RPGs have an “identify” mechanic that helps you learn more about an enemy’s moves and weaknesses, but once you’ve used it once, next time you see the same enemy you don’t need to reuse it. What I like about this is that you don’t even know which enemy it is UNTIL the “identification” is complete.

Likewise for FPS games, there’s lots of variations on the multiplayer “prophunt” genre, but I can’t think of many single-player or PvE FPS games where you have to scan each enemy you come across just in case it’s deadlier one in disguise…

So yeah, nice concept, pretty versatile.

Nice focused concept, and includes both score and chasing! I think encouraging the user to move the mouse, but also giving each click more “leeway/range” would be good.

Since I’ve only been working on shmups (et al) I really appreciate (and am very jealous of) the bullet patterns!

Nice concept! Apart from what others have said, I really like the starfield effect and the way the blue circles trail the moon.

Also kudos for the toki pona

tan mun mi li moli la mi pilin ike 😢

Thank you, means a lot! Yes having some enemies to shoot was the dream! I think a big challenge I need to overcome is learning enemy AI, then hopefully one day I can have ships and bullets flying all over the screen creating chaos everywhere…

(though as you can see I didn’t quite get to static enemies either)

Thank you for the blessing and quick reply, I will have to give it a try soon then!

This is a really nice asset pack, love the style.

Just a question about licensing. I read the “You may not redistribute or resell it” part, and assumed that open source game projects are probably not a good fit for this asset pack since if you just included the entire spritesheets verbatim it’d be the same as redistributing.

Is that assumption correct?

There’s been two game jams where I’ve been thinking of using this but then remembered the open-source codebase requirement and thought “aagh, not this time” and changed to another idea with my own hand drawn sprites.

Perhaps a practical middle-ground is to ask the gamejam organisers if it’s fine to submit an entry with the spritesheet listed under .gitignore, but thought I’d ask here anyway incase I’m overthinking the whole situation.

Thank you, I think you did better than me then, still have at least two enemies slip by! Good to know the rate of fire is hitting the sweet spot too.

Thank you! I spent way too long on them that I forgot to make the rest of the game :)

Actually, I even had a way to make the plumes gradually grow in size as the drone flew further, which was quite satisfying, but I accidentally broke it just before deadline in order to fix another bug (braking didn’t have the right plumes showing). I was trying to make the plume grow based on the inertia, but perhaps a better idea is to record how many ticks the currently active arrow keys were held down for and use that to increase the size…

I think my PB is 114200 so far, largely because the music reminds me of the classic Ys games and I start reminiscing about rushing up a tower at the end when I have too many bullets coming towards me to afford the loss of concentration.

Oh nice, I look forward to trying that! I didn’t notice that last time, apologies!

I’m too uncoordinated for this game but I was laughing for a bit while everything went downhill after my first collision with a random projectile.

Very nice graphics!

The graphics slowly appearing in the background is a really nice touch, gives a sense of impending inescapable doom. Reminds me a lot of the Three Body Problem series.

Thank you, I’ll need to flesh out the story some more and somehow integrate it into a full game!

Thank you! And interesting feedback regarding the focus fire movement! I did feel the movement was maybe a little too slow. I’ll keep that in mind going forwards.

Yes, the main character was quite clear to me, but the placeholder clear-coloured entities confused me a bit at first.

Makes sense regarding the controls. I actually like the simpler control scheme so maybe no sprint button is best :) I think it was around level 4 or 5 that I was feeling I had a lot to backtrack to turn off servers on both sides, so there was some drop in tension there for me.

Definitely a concept I can see myself playing more!

Very nice and polished!

Very addictive, and pretty complete.

I think the game could afford to ramp up in pace earlier on and scale to more chaos by the end game.

I think also more items needed positives + negatives to make the “curation”/“disconnecting” a harder choice. It gets pretty fun but unbalanced if you just have a bunch of gatling guns :D

Nice and complete game loop with a very topical “rage against the machine” theme and stuck to the game jam theme very nicely.

Readability of entities other than the main character is a little hard (but expected within the timeframe). I also felt like I needed a sprint button, but I guess that’d affect the balance quite harshly too.

I like the “speech” beeps but I think they can be tweaked a bit.

The text seemed quite well developed and added a lot of character.

I will tell my grandchildren one day that this was the 2026 world cup.

Can confirm the universe was quite large! Love the art!

Pretty interesting concept, I can definitely imagine this getting quite deep (figuratively and literally)!

10/10 would ride again 😎

Really impressive, both the 3D effect (or are those real polys??) and being able to skid around a corner and do a burnout. Controls pretty well too!

I also had this bug (first load didn't work, second load ok). Perhaps it's due to the way save data is created, and something is created on the first check that allows the second check to avoid the crash?

On web, attempting to open the editor also results in a crash to desktop, something is calling `notify(msg_str)` with a nil value but no stack trace to follow.