itch.io

First of all I can't thank you enough for pushing a bit more with Bouncenoid! N23 is so cool, it means you are so close to reaching zone 4, given than N24 is a bonus level where you can't die. Now, here are a couple more tips to get you over N23 and further, just in case you try again one day:

• First of all,  all the levels are designed to be finished in one life only and get all the bonus bricks in the process and without using any Extra-boost. Actually at first there was no Extra-boost available, I added this afterwards, to make the game easier. So each level has at least one strategy that works reasonably well without spending many lives. Of course, there is the strategy and then achieving the strategy, which can take some practice. But if you reach N23, you must start to be getting quite good already ;-) But practice directly levels that took you a long time to finish (with "Select a level" menu item), is useful to make sure you have a good strategy for all the levels before you reach the one where you struggle.
• Now specifically for N23:
  • as I said, there is a way to succeed without using any extra-boost (see 2 videos below). But you're right, for very few levels like N23, if you destroy the key boost bricks and you don't have any Extra-boost available, well, you're jammed and have to suicide or force game over to record your score. Which means that you need to collect Extra-Boost as much as you can and save them for when it's absolutely necessary, like for N23 if you have destroyed all the boost bricks.
  • For N23 itself without extra-boost, you launch and go over to the left, then fall on the penalizing brick. Then you press the right arrow to jam the ball to the right, but not going over straightaway: I make sure the ball is not hitting the top and is only bouncing on the bottom brick. Then I move to the right in hardly stopping and the boost brick at the end makes me jump on the next level. Then I go to the left to use the boost brick to get to the next level and same again on the right (video 1). What can also happen is that the first boost brick on the right actually makes you hit the boost brick just above, in which case you bounce up again and touch the boost brick above, which makes you bounce high enough to finish the level (video 2)

Here are the 2 videos showing these 2 different methods:

• As for how long it takes, in a straight line, even with a few lives lost on the way, each level is about 15-30 seconds max on average (some are so much quicker around 10 sec, not counting bonus level where you can pass almost immediately if you don't take any bonus), so reaching level 23 should be about 10 minutes max when you know the strategy for each level. But I agree with you that it's the kind of game that requires some good concentration for some time. Finishing the game is about 20-25 min, but it can also take 1 hour with infinite lives mode if you really struggle with many levels - and provided you don't find yourself jammed before the end.

Anyway, thank you again for trying so far :-)

Thank you so much Developer3244 for sharing your experience! Great for reaching level N9 - that is finishing the first zone!!! So a couple of things to make your experience easier :

• The option to have infinite lives in "Options" so that you can try as much as you can. Given you reached N9 very quickly, you should be able to go much further this way, without the frustration. Plus, if you beat a level with Infinite Lives, it will become unlocked to practice directly afterwards.
• The "Select a level" allows you to practice the levels you already beat, so that when you start an official game, you're better armed to beat them without losing many lives.
  
• The score is saved only when you start from level 1 as this is the official game to be able to compare to others.
• Level 9 tips: charge and release at about 75, break the top classic brick and land on the extra life brick and then stay pressed on the left arrow until just before you reach the left-hand wall, and then just let go: the ball will simply bounce on the "boost" brick and reach the second classic brick. It's easier to understand when you see it, rather than described like this, but not so hard 😅. This technique doesn't work if you absolutely want to get the "Extra-Boost" brick at the bottom left, but to start with it will get you through.

I actually have some videos of me playing up until N25, which I haven't shared yet (they're in French, so I'd need to play again an comment in English), but I could release a shorted version to reveal my strategies for the first 2 zones, for instance.

Thanks again

Hi CrocOne, I've tried your game. On my first go I got to level 5 and score of 82, then level 7, score 141. But it took me a couple of times to understand that what looks like an eraser for the board is actually counting as miss. It ran ok in my browser, Mac Chrome.  I used the mouse pad to aim and fire.  As this is an early playtest, it's not easy to comment a lot. What could be improved would be a notion of progression with clearer challenges. At the moment I didn't quite get how the level works, is it a minimum number of points to reach? Is it a timer to reach a threshold? I can see "level 4" for instance, but I don't have a sense of what's coming. Maybe a help page or instructions as a pop-up the first time you plan. Also the objects that make you miss should be better identifiable as such, because it's frustrating to have to discover that you have to avoid some objects after you've been trying to hit them and it says "Oops" each time and only then you realize that they are "bad" objects. A sound track would be nice. I didn't get the difference between "normal" objects and the ones that were circled. Are they bonus objects? Also I felt that the game was missing "life" or some animations. Maybe you should show a teacher or some students or something, because for now you could get quickly tired of just seeing the same objects with not much else to look at. I hope this is useful. Good luck for the project!

Actually I wouldn't mind having some feedback for my game too 😅 it's called Bouncenoid https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid it also features levels to unlock, it's a cross between a brick-breaker, a pinball and a puzzle game. There is an infinite lives mode if you struggle with the physics at first.

Thank you for your feedback, EvernoteBot. So which level did you reach in the end? Did you try the Infinite lives mode to help you go further?

Hi again, thank you for providing this explanation. But how do you use the skills ? What did I miss when I got stuck in Chapter 3 then? I don't mind pushing further in the game, but unfortunately I got stuck and couldn't go any further.

Hello EvernoteBot, thank you for offering to play my game and provide feedback. I have spent some time playing your game and here is my feedback:

• Good Gameboy design - though you put “Gameboy color” and it’s using the original Gameboy 1 color only.
• Weird voice in English, sounds like an old man with a lung disease → needs to sound younger or have no voice at all → I turned it off with the options.
• Some word-wrapping errors in English
• In the bedroom some squares are difficult to interpret (ex. coffee machine is good) but I’m not sure where the bed is. Later in the game I couldn’t lie down because I couldn’t find the bed.
• The zone for displaying text could be smaller as it is rarely completely filled up and it would allow for more graphics visible, even with large font size.
• When you’re on a square you can’t interact with the thing in front of you unless you press the arrow towards that thing. In theory it’s OK, but as it stands it’s easy to miss interactions because you only have 2 different versions of the character : one for left and or for right, up and down (at least I couldn’t differentiate them). It would be better to have 4 distinct versions so that it’s clear in which direction your character is looking.
• I got stuck on Chapter 3, as in the forest, I speak to a man who tells me to sit a little while longer, to breath in and breath out… I can’t get out of this or I haven’t found how to do these actions. When I press select, I see options:
  • Chat: I don’t understand what it is. Is it recording my different chats? Is it an action I can choose?
  • Skill: can I use them in game? I tried but couldn’t see that it worked. On your game page it says you can use the skills, but can’t seem to be able to do so. Maybe it’s the Web version?
  • Memory: same, am I supposed to be able to see them again or is it just a reminder of all the memories I got.
• I find the trailer to be misleading as you don’t show any actual gameplay, which would be better to understand what you will do in the game and what the game would look like. If you go for the Gameboy design, you should embrace it all the way and especially in the trailer.

In conclusion, I’m a bit frustrated because there are obviously things I haven’t been able to do and I don’t seem to be able to move past where I am. To be honest, I’m not getting the “second brain” part of the game. It’s more a story with some choices to make, which is fine, but I don’t get where the interactions with your second brain are. The story is OK, but maybe a little “fast” for now, though I have trouble understanding how much bigger the game really is. Good luck pushing it further!

For feedback on my game, please try to actually go past the first Zone, that is finishing the 8 first levels, using infinite lives if necessary. Most people try it once and say "hey, nice game", but that's not very useful. When I test a game I'm really trying to play it all the way if I can. Cheers!

Hey Developer3244, I'd love to give your game a go, but with my set-up, Macbook pro, Chrome, the Web version is flickering like crazy as soon as I launch the game even from the Unity logo. I click the start button, then apparently I can choose the level , but the image keeps flickering a lot and alternating between the start screen and the level itself. Then I went into full screen. It says Press Space to start. I do and apparently the level is starting but I can't do anything and it games over straightaway. Same if I choose Restart for the level. Maybe you could look into it. Maybe I'll try the download version, but it's less easy for me. Good luck!

Hello there! I'm coming back to you because I'm stuck again, though I made a bit of progress... I did find the torch in the mine, actually I don't know why, I'm pretty sure I had checked the cart and nothing had happened, but this time when I went, I could get into the cart and go on... but Now I have a couple of things stopping me, despite another round of going in every single building:

• What year was the new water tank built? I am seeing the demon and he asks me questions... unfortunately, I may have read it somewhere, but I just can't find that information again. Maybe it depends on other parts I haven't done yet.
• I can't get into the new watertank as I don't know the code.
• There is a chest with a 4 letter code I can't open in one of the houses.
• In another place, I can see tools, which would probably help me breaking through the "casing" of an object I found in my house... but the door is locked.
• There are more doors locked.

Without necessarily providing the answer(s), could you point me to the right direction for the next move? The issue I have is that I'm at 3 for horror, quickly going on 4 and I can't find any green absynth, which is tough.

Thank you for your help ;-)

Yeah, that's how Bouncenoid works as well for desktop, download, unzip and play. But several people told me they either don't want to download the game or they don't own a PC or their PC is a work PC and they're not allowed to download anything... that's why I got into the troubles of going web. Thanks for the reply, I'll check out your games if I can.

Wow, thanks a lot for taking the time to write a detailed reply, I really appreciate this.

And you are spot on with the crackling sound and performance going together. I first increased the buffer in pygame.mixer.pre_init to 2048 instead of 512. It did improve the sound but not completely. And then I spent a lot of time measuring the FPS and the time spent in almost each function to better understand where the "work" was being done... With regards to the sound, I think in there is still one particular screen where you can hear a subtle "hicup" the first time you display it, but the sound issue went away as I fixed the under-performances in most places. I know it's not perfect yet, but I think (I hope) it's good enough for now.

However, I had (and still have) plenty of ideas for the evolution of the game, and I have to say that this "webification job" dampened my enthusiasm... Now at least I'm really getting that a browser is not behaving like a desktop 😅

Thank you about the warning for the canvas resolution, I think it's really key.

I agree about the fact that the friction moved going from desktop to Web. And I wish that the loading was a little faster (though I also tried to squeeze this down to some extent). I'm using a template file to control at least the colors of the background and text displayed. I definitely could do better with the loading screen to make sure potential players don't go away before it's ready... but I think it's not so easy to control what is displayed very early on.

In any case, thank you again the explanation. It's a relief actually first to understand what happened and second to know that other dev experienced similar difficulty.

Hello Pamela, thank you so much for taking the time to play my game and to write some feedback. I'm very happy that you had a good experience :-)

May I ask how far you got? Some people told me it' too hard... but when you try the physics a few time and you don't launch the ball with full power, I don't feel that it is that hard. You can also play in "Infinite lives" mode (see the Options), which is nice because you can really go much further in the game and in the story. Anyway thank you again!!! And good luck with the next release of Cow Cow Remix , I'll be checking it out ;-)

Hi Pamela and Natalia! I've played your game, but I'm only realizing now that I should have filmed myself playing 😅 Sorry, I'll give you some feedback anyway... I played the garden and the moon levels, on my own, on a browser. I chose a timed version for both levels and I enjoyed the experience ;-) I hadn't read all the instructions so I figured out the different "bonuses" while playing, that was fun. Being French I liked the fact that the cows can enjoy a croissant as well ah ah. I got 248,900 points in the moon level. Probably not so good... It would be cool to have some kind of scoreboard so as to see your previous score and try to improve it. I enjoyed the different pieces of music too, though they have different styles (one is much quicker than the others). Not sure what you would expect from actually seeing somebody playing the game as opposed to straight feedback.

Just in case you care to have a look, I actually just released the web version of my game Bouncenoid (https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid) don't hesitate to check it out.

Hey, I played your game for a bit.

I'm on Mac with Chrome. The game looks and sounds fun however I had trouble with the controls for me "S" was down and "W" was up... Now on my Azerty keyboard, the S is above the W so it's really confusing to control the cube like that (D was right and A was left, which was ok, but I would much rather play either the arrows). But I played like this and managed to use the mouse pointer to shoot at enemies and pick up a couple of coins. Now when the "boss" arrives, the bigger blue cube on the right-hand side, I shoot at it as much as I can, avoiding its bullets, but I don't seem to hit it or damage it somehow. With the couple of games I played, I was able to buy better weapons, especially the one with 3 streaks of bullets (7500 coins), but that wasn't enough to beat the boss. When the boss is there, there is a small window at the bottom with letters going right to left, but I couldn't figure out what to do with them, I'm thinking there is a timing thing to kill the boss, but with no instruction in the game or on the page I couldn't find out what to do. I tried a couple of times to kill that boss but I gave up when I couldn't see whether I was doing the right thing or not... But congrats for your first game! You may want to include instructions and maybe some sort of back story to make it even more interesting.

By the way, if you care to check out my game Bouncenoid,  https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid I'd love to have some feedback too ;-)

At long last the Web version of Bouncenoid is live!

Honestly it's been tough to go from desktop to Web with the pygame/pygbag combo, but I think I got there in the end with what I hope to be a reasonable performance... Anyway, if you dig brick-breaker games with a twist, with an 80s arcade flavour and you like chiptune music, you should have a good time here: https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid. Let me know ;-)

Happy Bouncing!

JerkyHips

After many hours of hair-pulling over performance, I'm really happy to share the the Web Version of Bouncenoid is finally live!

No more downloads (though it's still possible for Mac and PCs), you can simply play there and then :-) I hope many more players will want to have a go and try to beat the game. Let me know how far you get!

Go check it out here: https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid

Thank you so much for sharing you experience, it's not just me then 😅 Anyway now that I'm done with the web version that I will release today, I'm not so sure about developing the game much more with the current framework. I mean small improvements/patches maybe, but now I'm aware about these performance issues, I'll think twice.

Thanks for sharing that tip!

Hi! I've played a bit of the new version. Thanks for taking into account my feedback about the change of color for the car, now I'm not getting confused any more when going through the gates ;-) and I like the fact that the drift marks do change color, which is inline with the change of color theme. The drifting felt good, but to be honest I can't really compare it to my first attempt... I'm playing from a Macbook Pro with Chrome. Not sure how I would do with a mobile though, but I'm curious. I think it's pretty cool that there is a new track everyday. I may add something like this to my game but more a "level of the week" or the month, as it would not be automatically generated and I would like players to actually work on it to come up with the best score... but for now I'm about to release the web version, one thing at a time.

The only thing is that I struggled when trying to come back to the main screen. Once playing, it seems that you can only pause, retry/restart or switch to today's track, but how do you see your scores again? how do you come back to choose another car (I remember that it said something like this the first time I launched it but I can't display that initial screen anymore. I tried Escape, Q and all other keys. Am I missing something?

What framework did you use to develop your game?

Anyway good luck for your game!

I tend to agree but that depends of what is meant by "beating the game". Using again the example of platinum trophies for AAA games, I'm certain that there are a majority of people who worked on a big game who either can't or would not take the time to achieve platinum trophies. Consider trophies like "beat the game in sudden death mode". Very few players in the world are able to achieve this for most games. Of course it has been developed and tested and yes, some testers are able to do it. But you don't need hundreds of dev working on the game to have achieved platinum or got that trophy to know that 1)The trophy works and 2)The trophy is doable.

In my case I'm beating the game more and more often after extra testing hours... to the point where I think it may be quite easy when you get used to it. Originally some levels where a bit harder and there were less "extra life" and "extra boost" bricks available in the levels. But it's OK because in a way I traded the difficulty entry level for difficult trophies to try and keep the interest going. So you may have beaten the game once, but can you unlock all the trophies? Can you do it without using extra-boost meaning score extra points?

I'm about to release the web version so you'll be able to check it out more easily ;-)

Thanks for taking the time to share. I'll check out your games then ;-)

Ah ah, I'll check out your games then. I'm starting to beat my own more and more often, to the point when I think it might actually be quite easy when you get the gist of it.

Interesting to know that going the other way round can also be challenging. Good luck to you, then!

Thank you mid for explaining and confirming what is happening. I think I've managed to sort out most issues. But if I want to evolve the game much further, I'll have to reconsider the framework, which would mean a full re-writing of the code - at least to maintain a Web version... not sure I have enough motivation to do that just right now, but at least I'm warned ;-)

Good luck to you man! I've managed to sort out most issues and I'm about to release. Now that it's done I'm obviously quite happy, but I spent a lot of frustrating hours on that job.

Hi everyone!

Recently I've come to understand that having to download a game to play / test it is actually a major friction for a LOT of people. It even seems that less and less people around me own a PC and those who do often only have a PC from their company, on which they can't or don't want to download or install anything.  Fair enough, it means it was time to get on with the "Web conversion" of my game. Now what I thought to be a walk in the park (given the relative simplicity of Bouncenoid) turned out to be much more annoying than anticipated - and for very different reasons I expected.

I guess it all starts with the dev framework you're using. In my case I started off with pygame and while this may be a good choice for simple games not necessarily meant to be shared/published widely, I'm starting to think that maybe right from the start I chose the wrong path... The good thing is that with pygame comes pygbag, which is a python package specially made to create a web version of pygame python games. And sure enough, after a few tweaks like adding "async def main()" to allow for asynchronous execution, Bouncenoid appeared in my browser... yet something seemed to be terribly bad:

• The soundtrack was horribly crackling
• Every screen felt sluggish like the browser was grinding almost to a halt, even for screens with hardly nothing going on.
• The game was virtually not playable as everything happened in slow motion.

What the hell? I mean I've seen games out there on browsers like super busy shooters with dozens of moving pieces, many meters going on, etc. and I could play fine. So how was this possible ?

Well, I have spent hours investigating to understand where the time was spent in the code and why it was costing so much resources when it played just fine on the desktop version. And it's not pretty.

The thing is that there is so much operations that we just take for granted on a desktop, especially display routines that we just assume would be the same inside a browser, but that's not the case - at least for me. And I'm not even talking about bits of the code where operations were done 60 times per second just to display a static image with no cache (yes, I know, I got it eventually). I'm talking about just displaying an image with some alpha or transparency. That turned out to be a huge cost for the browser when using the pygame functions, even with some caching going on. A blit with alpha can cost by itself 15 to 25 miliseconds, for a total budget of 16 ms to reach the 60 fps target. One of the reason is that the rendering with pygbag/Emscripten is done via SDL2 software, with no hardware acceleration.

Another point is that each python function call has a significant cost with the python interpreter compiled in WebAssembly (pyodide) compared to the native CPython. Some many "small" calls, like checking on a property 60 times per second for each brick when there can be 100+ bricks will cause the browser to sweat but is unseen on desktop.

I was expecting at first that calculating the physics, the collisions, etc. would be what could be costly. Not just displaying simple graphics.

Anyway, long story short, I spent a very long time working to get the game back to a level of performance that feels normal compared to the desktop version. Squeezing performance out of every part, caching as much as possible, pre-calculating things, etc. And eventually got there, but what a drag it was for something so simple visually.

Is it just me? Is it pygame ? Or is it the normal thing you have to get through when migrating from desktop to Web version ? I'm curious, really! 

Hello! Thank you to you for taking the time to reply in details :-) I'm also glad my feedback didn't upset you... I was honest, but it doesn't mean I'm right or that changes are needed 😅 Criticizing is so easy but making a game is a very long process.

I also loved games like Monkey island and the fact that I got frustrated is probably because I haven't played this kind of game for a long time, so I'm a bit rusty and impatient, especially when now on more "official games", you always find the complete solution online when you're stuck. That said, having  kind of subtle "hint" mechanism could be a way to let less experienced players progress rather than get stuck and give up. This could either be a text hint, or even something displayed on the map to indicate a place you may want to check out to make progress.

The thing about the fires/candles is a good way to know what has been visited indeed and I hadn't seen the smoke until you mentioned it 😅

With the info you gave me, I should be able to move forward and hopefully see the end of the game. I will let you know when I play again! Cheers

Hey! I've spent quite a lot of time playing your game :-) About 4 hours according to the saved game so I can give you some more detailed feedback.

• Given that I actually lasted more than 4 hours, I can say that I enjoyed it so far and now I am much more familiar with the game play than when watching the trailer 😅 I get the 4 counters (depression, madness, horror, wound). There's definitely a spooky atmosphere with the varied sound effects throughout the game. About these SFX, I wasn't sure at first whether there would be a lot of jump scares and how much bracing I should do... but as it turned out, it's more "relaxed" than I thought, which is good for me.
• Now, I have to say that I am kind of stuck unfortunately. I have made quite  lot of progress on several threads, but it now feels like I have explored everything, every house, every building several times and I can't seem to find some key missing items, which has become more frustrating than pleasurable... my worry is that some objects would just appear randomly and not with a rational logic. I hope it's not like that but it occurred a few times that suddenly a letter or an envelop appeared, with important information. What I am missing now is an electric torch to check out one dark basement (I have collected batteries), as well as maybe a battery for a laptop. Obviously there are several doors that are still closed, but I've been to the chapel, the cemetery, the lake and in fact I have died a couple of times attacked by the werewolf or the nun. I can't seem to get passed the spikes in the slaughterhouse, in order to check what is behind, which might open the door in the middle of the room. I have also a key to a warehouse, but it has not been used yet and I can't seem to find a warehouse. At some point I found a wall that needed an axe to break it. Then later on I found an axe, but man, it took me soooo much time to find the wall where I could use the axe.
• I got running water in some places but not all... About the water, there is something that is not coherent: if the taps are not running, then how can you flush the toilet, that really seems wrong.
• In almost every place there is a way to light candles, fireplace or stove... does it have a use? Is the player expected to light up everything?
• At the beginning, there is a dialog with my brother and he says something about meeting someone. unfortunately, maybe I closed the dialog to soon, but there was no way to read again what my brother had said... I hope I didn't miss too important information, because I didn't meet the cousin or whoever he was talking about. Maybe there should be a way to bring up the last dialog?
• There is a book that talks about getting numbers from the letters in the alphabet, but I couldn't think of a place to use this so far. I guess it works with one of the combination for a lock, but there was no obvious items that made me think of trying to get numbers from them.
• The inventory: as I progressed, I gathered many items and after a while, they got mixed up, especially when they are called the same, ex. "a note", "A letter", "An old letter", "A diary", etc. I spotted at the top of the inventory a kind of summary, which was useful instead of opening each item, but I wondered if there is a better way of sorting the items, for instance chronologically with the more recent ones at the top. For instance if I pick up a metal box, I expect to see this item listed first or highlighted rather than scrolling and find it among other items. Also, if I find a box, it feels weird to have to go back to the inventory and be asked whether I want to open it or not... If I find a box, I expect to want to open directly when I find it, same with the letter.
• On the health part, I "kept my sanity" smoking cigarettes, drinking red and green bottles, and checking out some items. So I felt pretty safe. However when I got touched by the nun or the werewolf, I almost died instantly as they are very difficult to escape, which I found a bit punitive to be honest.
• The map is good, but maybe a bit frustrating not to see a dot showing where you are on the map. I get that it's part of the game to learn the place, but after a while it's a bit of a pain to bring up the map and put the dot mentally where you are.
• About the overall story, I have to say that it's not very clear to me... Ok there's some kind of curse, but actually, as you progress, there are several threads and we're not sure if they all need to be "solved" as part of the main story, or if there are some sort of side quests. I got to the point where I know there's a kind of ritual to perform in 3 different places, but I can't make out how it's supposed to solve "my own" curse. There's the demon, the werewolf, the ghost, the Nina thread, etc. and I haven't made sense of them as a whole yet.
• Finally I got to the point where I really doubt I would see the end, mainly because I got bored of visiting the same houses over and over again, and I feel that I haven't got the full picture yet for the rituals. I guess this last point would clear itself as I progress.

That said, again, I enjoyed the time I spent playing. It's a good exploration/puzzle game with spooky SFX, with some part of the interface that could be slightly improved. I'm a bit frustrated that I couldn't go further and felt stuck, as it became repetitive in exploration and action, as I would have liked to see the end.

Anyway, congratulation for all the work, I hope that the feedback is useful.

Hey! Nice little racing game. Very colourful ;-) I was a bit surprised at first that your car changes colour when you go from one section to the next, it could be confusing, maybe an arrow could be added to show which car is yours as it can get confusing when you get used to a car and it suddenly changes yellow. I got through the 4 music tracks, they have good style, commenting the race and game as you go. There are 2 things that weren't clear for me:

• Losing: is it when you touch the side only once? It seems so but it's quite punitive and when I died I didn't think I had touched a lot the railing.
• Acceleration: do you need to do anything to try and get ahead of the other cars? When I played I let the game accelerate for me, but it felt that I should have been able to take more risk to try and get ahead. I must have missed something... Could you confirm how it works?

Anyway congrats' for the game! And welcome to the post release hell, when you realize that there are a zillion games released everyday and every hour and everyone is desperate to get some form of feedback... I guess I'm one of them too, having released my first game a couple of weeks ago 😅 Care to check it out ? https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid 

It's a fun little game! Unfortunately after several tries, I couldn't reach the end of level with the rivers to check out the others, which was frustrating. But I couldn't get all the controls to work: the only thing that worked was clicking to charge and jump, but the arrows left and right didn't work at all, which makes the game even harder I think. I'm using Chrome as a browser on a Mac. Could you confirm that the arrows work well on your browser? Which browser are you using ? I have also tested with Safari and it was the same, the arrows didn't work. Maybe you're not supposed to use the arrows with the rivers and just jump... It would be fun to be able to choose a level for practice, for instance, otherwise I'm afraid that most players would never see something else than the rivers. Or else, you may want to increase the number of lives/revive to start with because at the moment it's too difficult I think. I thought it was a shame not to see how far you get, like the number of successful jumps out og the total jumps. I guess I got to about 10-12, but I didn't count exactly. I also found that sometimes I would fall in the river when I was hardly touching it, in other words it's difficult to see/judge where the hit will make you die or live.  Is it the feet of the cow that count? The music loop was nice. I imagine it changes in the next level up. As I said it's fun, and I would have like to test the other levels, but for now it's just too hard and kills the fun for me after 15-20 tries. 

I hope this feedback is useful. Please don't hesitate to test and leave a comment on my game Bouncenoid, just released as well: https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid

Cheers,

JerkyHips

Wow! Thanks for that game, I'm instantly drawn to it with an irrepressible envy to explore and discover all the eggy secrets - I got the nest so far, but I can feel that there is a lot to achieve opening all the pipes. I had enjoyed VVVVVV and superhexagoon a lot, a long time ago, playing them on my phone. And today I stumble across your name on itch.io, that's so cool :-)  I'm new to the platform and as I've just released my first game (a humble endeavour while being unemployed, um...), I'm looking around to see what other people have come up to. Egg is definitely a cool game, thank you for the experience, I'm going back to it, hoping to uncover more secrets. 

Hello Hiki, I've just played Spirals and enjoyed it overall. I agree with the previous points and comments, but I'll add one: are you supposed to be able to pick up / interact with the magnifying glass/ question mark icons on the map? Because I expected to be able to pick up objects or interact with other things than the green monsters, but the E key had no effect, no matter where I positioned the character. I really felt that I was missing something... are these upgrades for your ability/weapon? I died during my first play not finishing the 3 levels, but I got to the boss and killed it during my second go. Is this the end of the game for now? During my first go I ended up in a corridor filled with the green monsters and couldn't slash them all 😅 Are the maps generated randomly? Anyway it was a fun moment, but I wish there was a bit more at stake in terms of story ;-)

Nice take on the classic game! What's your best score then? When I see a game like that, I can't help thinking about how we could pimp it up to make it more interesting, there are so many possibilities... maybe other projects ;-) ?

Thank you for your feedback. I'm very surprised that you couldn't complete the 1st level, especially if you enabled infinite lives, which gives you infinite tries/lives to destroy all the bricks. You use the arrows for left and right and the down arrow to charge & launch the ball, that's pretty much all there is to do. But if you enjoyed the game with just that very first level, it's ok.

Hey Emzizl, as promised I gave your game a go today. Here is some feedback from my session.

• I thought it was quite fun and I wished I was able to survive to more waves than I did ;-) So far I only managed level 9and  wave 48. This is when giant purple balls are coming, almost filling up half of the screen each, that's tough!
• I had troubles with the command though but this may be because I'm using an azerty keyboard. So moving with WASD on my left hand and managing E to fire and R to recharge, while aiming with the mouse was difficult to be honest. If I could shoot with the click button and maybe recharge with right-click or spacebar, I would manage much better. What I did in the end is that I left the pointer of the mouse in the middle of the screen and kept on moving and firing around it. It may not be the best technique but it worked until the giant balls. I could also try to play with a gamepad with mapped keys.
• The music loop stopped after a while, not sure it was meant to do that. It would be better to have the music carrying on. Currently the game is lacking a bit of sound I think, to make it a bit more immersive.
• There are 2 hard modes. I tried them both, but I'm not sure what makes them different. You could have a help page to explain.
• The small yellow balls get stuck to you quickly and are not easy to avoid.
• I reached the point where there are very small enemies, before the giant balls, but I couldn't see exactly what they were.
• Overall the action was quite fast from the beginning, making it difficult to pay attention to the information on the top left, like stamina, levels, etc. Maybe the first waves could be slower so that we can realize what is going on.
• The recharge part comes with a delay, but I can't see any indication of how long it is taking, which is a bit frustrating as we don't know if the recharge has worked or not until you see the firing again.
• Often on the navigation menu I lost the pointer of the mouse and it is difficult to highlight the options like "classic", "hard mode", etc. In this case I closed the game and start again to see the mouse pointer.
• There is quite a lot of russian (?) writing which I couldn't read, especially the score page when game over... but during the game the info is in English (like stamina, level, wave). It would be better to have everything in English to be accessible to more people.

I hope this is useful. Don't hesitate to give me some feedback about Bouncenoid, like the levels you reached, etc.

JerkyHips

It's crazy how you can be convinced of your own delusion and not believe I played your game. Do you have log files? In any case I don't need to pretend to play games, I don't have this kind of time to waste. I have joined the community recently and started playing people's games fairly but I guess like any community you can't escape trolls comments & reactions. Shame man. I play games because it's fun and I 'm happy to take part of the game dev community.

Other people will see these messages and wondered if it's worth trying your game if then the dev will tell them they're lying.

Hi Bren123, you got me wrong. First of all I think it's great not to agree all the time otherwise we would be making the same game, which would be boring. Then, I honestly didn't realize the challenges were mandatory: basically I was trying to pot all the balls before running out of lives and I couldn't do it. So I didn't look at the challenges to start with. Many games have a default gameplay you try to master and then trophies you can unlock, that's how I assumed (wrongly) that your game would work. You can think this is stupid, but that's how I approached your game with no hidden agenda contrary to what you think. I actually played your game twice, found a kind of usability issue and took the time to write a post... That's much more than you did with my game since it seems you didn't play it. So who is actually not playing fair here? 😅 When I get a chance I'll look into the challenges, maybe the first ones are easier than potting all the balls with 7 lives.

Thanks for your reply! Yes this challenge is for a trophy fortunately, not to reach the official ending. But I agree if you create the game you should be able to beat it to some extent, but for score based games the creator is not necessarily the one who will own the world record... Players tend to find ways, glitch and sometimes spend an incredible amount of hours to achieve platinum.

Hey Aamir, yes I plan to release it for browsers too, hopefully in a couple of weeks. Thanks for reaching the game page!

Thank you for your feedback, Emzizl! Could you elaborate a little bit on why it was difficult? Was it the controls on the keyboard you didn't find convenient or are you talking about the actual difficulty of the levels of the game itself? On the difficulty, did you try to have Infinite Lives enabled to be easier? If the keyboard arrows were an issue, it's possible to use a gamepad with a small tool like Joytokey for PC so that you can map the left/right arrows to the D-pad and down arrow to the X button for instance. It may be more comfortable this way... A next version will have native support for gamepad, as well as a Web version.

On my end I have downloaded the file, but unfortunately I won't be able to test the game until I come back from my leave.

Thanks man, I'll definitely test your game! Now I'm leaving tomorrow for a week and I probably won't be able to test it until I come back, but I'll do it. Question: there are 2 downloads, KOSMOOOOOOOOOOOO.zip and kosmo-ultimate-.zip, could explain the 2 files? I guess the ultimate one is the main game?