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still working on it! It’s been difficult to find time because we both have full time jobs and family responsibilities

Sounds like a case of really bad rng. But I calculated the chance to reach levels 1-6 without seeing any extra shot upgrades and it is higher than I'd like. I could address that by increasing the weight for those upgrades to appear in earlier levels.

As for the difficulty, I'm a bit confused why the general player feedback went from the later levels being way too easy to now being too difficult.  The only levels that were updated in this version are the first three and the bosses. Based on our analytics, players are making it 33% farther (near the end of stage 2) and abandoning runs half as much as before (from 6.9% to 3.4%).

I'd like to improve this, so if you don't mind, what do you feel is the cause of your deaths? Bad attack patterns? Web performance issues? Bad upgrade RNG making it harder to kill things? I'm working on an automated playtest system to run simulations to find these issues before we release, but it will be a while before we see results.

And yeah, we wanted to include more bondage but ran out of time. We're working on an update for that, but it might take a while since we don't have a jam deadline pressuring us anymore.

Thanks for giving the game another chance and providing feedback. It's really helpful and points me in the right direction for what to work on.

Thank you! Here I was thinking we made the game too easy... 

We are currently working on an update that will add more roguelike elements and hopefully make dying less frustrating. e.g. Permanent upgrade shop to make runs easier over time and more control over how difficult the game is. More builds to allow for different playstyles. More enemies and attack patterns. We'll keep your feedback in mind when we are rebalancing with the new content.

This is also the first bounty of many planned, so you're right that it shouldn't be too difficult.

Thanks, I'll look into that and fix it asap.

I understand what you mean. As the developers, we didn't find the first few levels difficult either, but most players are correct that the first levels are much MORE difficult than later levels because of how upgrades affect the game. So we've re-balanced things and now later levels should be more difficult and the first three are a smooth introduction to the game.

We are working on a balance patch to make the early levels easier. Gracias!

That's really useful feedback. I think we'd like to rework the temp upgrades so they're completely different from end-of-level upgrades (and more temporary, with shorter time limits). Not sure if that will address all the issues, but it's a start. Thanks for playing and sharing your ideas!

Thanks for the great feedback! I agree, the dialogue can be jarring and makes the boss fights easier because it destroys all projectiles from the previous phase. I'll do my best to address your issues :')

Mobile and PC (Win/Linux) builds are in the roadmap, so hopefully those will work better for you. Web can be finicky

Yeah, we wanted to add some slime bondage sooner for the fail state but ran out of time. Maybe a future update! Glad you enjoyed the asteroid insanity :')

Thanks for making it that far! We're working on updates that hopefully fix a lot of the balance issues.

Thanks! I do want to keep that feeling of annihilating everything, but make it less common and more based on figuring out builds that have synergy. Right now the best choice for upgrades is usually to stack additional shots and fire rate, but it would be cool to have more complex interactions with upgrades and the player. Maybe players could pick different ships, and they each have unique shots/abilities that benefit from upgrades in different ways.

Thanks for the feedback. We've definitely had a lot of people tell us the first levels are too difficult. I think they were poorly designed because enemies leave the screen and it makes the player feel like they're wasting points/potential upgrades by letting them pass. Doing nothing is often the "optimal" choice to get to the next level which feels terrible. 

We're planning on easing the difficulty curve and trying to put more of the difficulty on the bosses, where you can learn attack patterns and make progress by improving your skill, whereas the levels leading to them are more for deciding your build and destroying things.

 Game balance is something we definitely need to improve on. 

Glad you liked the asteroid level because it almost didn't make it in. The only reason it stayed in scope for the jam was so I could keep the "astblaster" joke :")  

And you're right, we did plan for more bondage. Hoping to add it in a future update. Thank you for the feedback!

Spoilers: What's coming next is more gameplay and more art! Thanks for playing.

Thank you!  we planned on having more when the player fails the mission. Great opportunity to get slimed. But yeah, considering this is a bondage jam we really failed that part. Thanks for playing!

I'll save you the effort. There's only one ending so far, but we would love to add follow up difficulties and stories! It would be cool if some prisoners escaped multiple times and the story progressed beyond where it does now. 

Let me know what you think of the theme you unlocked in the gallery! I don't want to admit how long we spent making it compared to the game...

And we should have put more time into balancing the gameplay, like you mentioned. We will do that after the jam voting period ends. Thanks for playing!

I don't know if this was a bug or intended but sometimes I would walk through a door and get caught, even though nothing was there to catch me. After breaking free I could see what caught me, but they weren't visible previously.

Overall I can definitely see the vision. This would be really fun with more time put into it! Love the character art and sprites

I really love this game! It was fun capturing and selling people and managing the crew. I liked the balance of good and bad events you could encounter at sea. 

I'm not sure if the artifacts are completely random or based on a hidden counter, but the last one took me a very long time to eventually get. I was just about to sacrifice all my goodwill and see if that's what I needed to do to get the last one, and then I found it.

The art and sfx are great and overall it's a very polished experience. Great game!

Really fun game! I like the momentum based movement and it was fun to try to figure out how to navigate the levels faster. I do think a countdown would be nice on level start because I stopped to eat a piece of chicken and when I looked up I already lost my bar. User error, I know, but maybe the bar and timer shouldn't decrease until the player presses something? I also noticed WASD is supported, but not for the quicktime event when you lose your meter. I wasn't successful on that at all, but my brain is kinda fried from lack of sleep and forgetting to eat while crunching for the jam...

I also loved the art style and game intro sequence. The whole game is a vibe that I really enjoy.

+1 for another game with slime. I loved how the enemies dropped from the sky when they were slimed and their sprite is really cool. I was wishing for coyote time on a lot of the jumps though because I kept getting too risky with my jumps and dashes. Really fun game!