itch.io

Very well made. What I liked most was the parry mechanic which gets easier to do when the game goes slower. Some more things in a similar genre could be a dodging mechanic or a shield in the direction you point your mouse which could be on different characters probably. 

Yep, that's exactly what I would've done with more time. Thanks for playing

Well done. You got a lot of different systems working well together, pop ups, an inventory system, questing system, a little minigame (the analysing), all this makes the game more varied, and fun for longer. The long comment is cuz you're destined for greatness, and I wanted to help. (or something a bit less dramatic)

But after I had submitted my first couple of orders and ran out of crystals and had to go back to mine more, I knew exactly what was going to be waiting there for me, and so got bored and decided to write this comment instead. In my opinion there's two way to fix this, or a combination of both.

1. You could make more required steps before looping back to the first. Like in the beginning of Minecraft where you have to first chop wood, then craft tools, then mine stone, then search coal and iron, then craft a furnace and smelt the iron, continuing until you beat the game, or build a nice house or something. Like sure each step is kinda boring, they're all different though. This takes a considerable amount of development time, considering that they have to make new systems for each part of the game.

2. As an alternative you could put more time into making the steps that you do have more deep, adding more features that make the step more varied, making the step more replayable by adding skill expression. This way you can let the player enjoy the same step for longer, which is effecient with development time

I'm not saying you guys should have put in more effort into your game, it's a game jam and you don't have infinite time. But I am gonna say that for your next project I'd spent more time on option 2, instead of 1, because the game has a lot of things now that feel like they were more work to make, than fun to interact with. Like the different crystals for example. I as a player don't really care whether it's a ruby or an emerald. I would have preferred they were all the same if it could spare you the development time to make the difficulty of analysing the crystals slighlty randomised, or something like that.

As another example, imagine if the analysis minigame popped up during the mining instead of first mining everything, then analysing everything. I think you will agree that would make the mining AND the analysing more varied.

It's also completely valid to almost exclusively do option 1, if that's your style and preference, and it can also be really fun to just make some game systems without thinking to much about optimal time management.

Okay, I just read your reactions to other comments and it seems you wanted to add a shop and upgrades to the game (which is a good idea, and would have made the game a lot better), and ran out of time. Maybe you've realised this yourself already, but if you don't know if you'll have enough time to implement all that is necessary, you should prioritise what is most essential to the fun of the game. When I make a game, I always actively work towards the feature in the game that I expect to make the whole thing fun. This is really hard though, and I also mess it up all the time, and it's also strangely specific to game jams in particular. When working on a larger game, the problem isn't nearly as big.

I played this for a while, it's very good. 

I would have liked if the progression was considerably faster, especially for a game jam. Sure this way I realised better what upgrades had what effect and thus could be more strategic than if I had gotten 6 new upgrades every round, but the latter is more satisfying...

I could probably have advanced quicker if I knew the "spawn copper" upgrade only became available after buying a stone pickaxe. I was like "Lets you mine copper"? That's useless, there is no copper! I'll buy that one when I see some copper appearing.

I liked how you could aim directly in one of the six straight directions to get the pickaxe to bounce basically indefinetely, having the unfortunate side effect that it creates a straight hole out of the center.

The visual effects on the things were really nice, like the copper one moving faster, making it all more visible what is doing what. I was never like "I have no idea how much of an effect this upgrade has". The lightning one could have been more subtle, and more clear from where it originated

I think it could have been nice if instead of the "wall bounce" being a chance, it just costed a certain number of ricochets, starting at like taking three quarters of what you have left. I don't know if it would work, but it would make bouncing straight into the void a bit less devastating.

The crates are cool, but I think they're a bit weak.

There could be a bigger incentive to try to stay alive longer, cuz for me the blocks just seemed to get stronger and thus getting less resources per point of damage. If there is already an incentive, I think it should be more clearly communicated.

I'm a bit curious why you decided to only use ingots, even for stone and diamond, when minecraft has some readily available textures for those.

I didn't expect the obsidian to spawn that quickly, but maybe I just bought the upgrade too late.

Nice game. 

Hey, 25 is a great score, well done. What would you have liked to see in a second level? Like longer, more difficult, more variety or just a valley instead of a hill perhaps?

Nice game, but there are some issues with the difficulty

I doubt anyone can get higher than a D within an hour of playing, which is a long time for a gamejam. There's a few things that especially make it hard.

1) "Miss" and "crack" aren't very helpful words. Crack sounds good, but breaks your combo. Also miss could mean you missed your swing. Thus it took me a while to figure out whether I was early or late, partly also because of the next three points

2) The feedback isn't located at spot where the feedback originates. This makes it very hard to see how to improve, especially if you do not notice it.

3) Which button corresponds to which instrument seems to be largely arbitrary, some of the patterns are like "k k  k     k  k    k      k k   k     k" and without knowing how the music is gonna sound that makes me have to do 4 of those at once. It would for instance be nice if too buttons had a more extended section of a simple pattern so I could focus on the other two buttons.

4) It's very hard to see when exactly you need to press the button, it looks nice, but it's hard to see. With the "kjk kjk kjk kjk kjk" section it's doable because you can just listen to the music, but when there's four inputs right after eachother it's hard to know which one corresponds to which note.

5) There are way too many new patterns that you have to learn at once. One simple thing to make this easier is to have a pattern in isolation first, and then adding it to another pattern.

6) When I first played I played with the arrow keys. On top of everything else this made it literaly unplayable.

I deem it possible that you knew most of these, and either chose it to be this way anyway or decided to spend more time on the art, which is fabulous by the way, in that case this is way too much critique, but maybe you find it to be useful.

Also, in the web version the music started desyncing from the gameplay, which is hardly your fault, especially since you have a download available.

After two hours I finally figured out that all the inputs are monospaced in the hectic segments. I thought I had to do weird stuff with the timing, but it turns out I only have to keep the rhythm and press them in order. This kinda negates the "k    k k   k     k" point in point 3 I made earlier. It would've been very beneficial to have one of those lines that come at you.

The D range is also way too big, I got 17000 first round, which I don't think is that weird for a first round, and 130000 is still D? ... One hour later, 230000 is also still D... Again an hour later I finally got a C. 

I also figured out that combo doesn't do anything? Meaning I'd definetely give its prominent spot in the UI to the resonance meter or the score counter, or leave it empty as there's enough on screen as is. I'm not saying you can't show "max combo" in the end screen.

The art is definetely impressive and the gameplay is fun enough that I played through it a couple times even though it always ended with a D. 

Really simple but well made

I personally feel like a "play out the song, then see what your score was" gameplay loop would fit better with the chill vibe the simple gameplay gives off. Currently each time I lose I'm like "it's so simple, how did I mess this up", which isn't great for the trance like feel you're likely going for. However, this game is so simple that this would change more than half the mechanics, so I don't know.

I thought the slow ones were a bit too easy and the fast ones too hard, the middle ones were okay though 😅.

I liked the menu system, I too do everything in my power to avoid a boring play button.

Simple yet effective.

Collecting crystals is very satisfying, the shield powerup is surprisingly fun to use, the hearts falling down give a much needed incentive for quick and less thought out gameplay, the fact that you can pause your movement but then commit to shooting across the screen consistently creates interesting choices, the powerups are well thought out and have great synergies, you somehow made it very apparent when you lose a life in all the chaos and lastly the way the shooty shooty things increase in quatity each time you cross the screen is very clever.

I didn't realise until I beat it that the "jumps" in the left bottom corner was the end goal, making me struggle to realise the importance of health and shields for much of my first playthrough. Secondly I didn't realise until I got the hold space to slow time upgrade that you can hold space to aim better.

LASER SIGHT I thought would've been more useful than it was. I thought it would show a red line where the triangles were gonna shoot, and then the line gets thicker the closer they are to shooting. I think that would've been very useful, cuz currently there's so much vital information spread in all corners of the screen. While this may be by design, the rest of the game design doesn't strike "I want to induce as much stress to the player as possible" as much as this does.

Other commenters have suggested an attempt meter, which I don't think is necessary as it promotes overly careful gameplay. Though something to tell runs apart would be nice.

Nice game. Though you didn't make the assets they fitted perfectly together, which isn't always easy. Especially the hit effects

When I actually started to get into the flow, and started creating some different strategies, very nice. The main strategy I created is mid air jumping as late as possible, to still be able to reach the top of a spike. This massively reduced the amount of arch I had to mentally draw to get to land exactly onto one. My highscore is 90.

Two main points of critique: 

1) When learning the game I was more in the waiting screen then actually playing. This is the most important playtime as first impressions are everything. You could've either made an easy/tutorial mode where you have lives or the sword bigger, or made the time it takes to get back a bit shorter. Calculating when to do a mid air jump is very tough, and when you just started playing it might take over fifty tries to get past crystal three.

2) I thought for a while that the mid air jump animation was also the hitbox of the swing if I had hit. I thought that the first attack after you bounced had a larger hitbox (which would've been a pretty cool mechanic tbh).

But overall a very smooth experience, like others have said.

You're right, enemies don't deal damage, the goal is to do it fast

Very cool game.

First of all, I'll have you know, I beat the game first try without reading the tutorial. I'm mostly saying this because I'm quite proud, but I also think you deserve to know that you made one of your players proud. That's something to be proud of.

I really liked the flow of the game, the way your actions are delayed in a non, or at least, less frustrating way.

I like those ranges in which there are attacks which you need to dodge meaning there's a reason to retreat, and when I felt in the beginning that a lot of the runtime there was very little reason to not attack, later I started using a lot more techniques for optimal play. When at first I was like "why did they make this many different types of troops" later they all started to have their place and it made a lot more sense.

It would be cool if there was some way to push enemies back.

Although the music was very simple, it fit the style of the game very well, although I did sometimes lose what the first beat was. I think one instrument that plays one long fading note that resets every round would be nice, like a piano press that's being held down.

Second time playing through I sadly had much less fun, as I could not avoid the attacks of Colossos in any way, none of of the configurations worked. If the radius around him was a bit smaller I would probably have been able to retreat, but as is, he just hits everything meaning the only way is just attacking, maybe I just sucked, I guess I let him get to me too much, but what else am I supposed to do. The guardians also weren't very helpful and started going on their own adventure, even when I did defend.

The flanking unit and the mage enemy were my favorites.

During the jam players had to wait 10 minutes between runs to promote interacting with the community. Now that the jam is over, you can bypass the system with this secret keystroke:

H+J+L+Space

Press those buttons at the same time. Have fun.

That's cool, cuz your game is one of my favourites. <3

About the appearing platforms, I can barely decide as P1 to make it not disappear as much as I can decide to shoot less, meaning that after the initial 'Ah neat it's appearing when I stepped on the pressure plate' it kinda just turns into an appearing and disappearing platform

I agree with your point about the P1 door, that would be lame, but for me, if it means P1 and P2 will be in the same room more, it's worth it.

Thank you very much by the way for being basically the only person to comment twice in our game. I'm sorry we didn't manage to make the barrier to entry small enough for more players to join the hinting system. May I ask how far you got, or if you managed to beat it? 

In my opinion you managed to strip everything that isn't necessary, meaning the trolly nature doesn't feel frustrating. The one thing that did annoy me was the jumping against a wall. 

That actually makes a lot of sense, I'm surprised how I missed that. I think I got confused because the berry bush also turns translucent, this is cherry picking but I think it would've been nice if the berry bush shrunk instead of became translucent, making clear that it has to grow again for you to eat it.

Very easy to use. Thank you. The way it fully colors with a single spot, but I can also spend minutes trying to fully paint it is very cool.

I'm very sorry for your bad experience. Please scroll down on the itch page until you see this:

Then click on "Hint?" where other players have left hints or lies. You must choose who to believe. You can also share your wisdom there or lie yourself. Good luck, and thanks for your patience.

Very fun. In my opinion the most fun part is the fact that you have to be closer to the birds to attack them, which risks you getting hit.

Very clever idea, had a lot of fun with it, until I figured out I personally can in no way predict what you count as correct one. I mean "rearrange the letters"? Come on man. I don't know accents well enough for Winrey Rockbell, I just can't do it, there are several where after long pondering I had to give up. The execution is very good though. It's very simple and where other games have books of text you need to read before knowing whether someone is lying, your solution is simply "if one then bad" which is very nice.

It's great how the world isn't randomly generated each time, and how it's quick to replay. It means that even players who are bad at minesweeper can get to the end with enough determination.

About the tutorial, for me it was unclear that I had to do the actions on the cells there at first. I don't know how to make it clearer.

Great entry

Epic epic game.

The way you managed to make it not annoying to die with: quick restarts and celebratory metal music carries the game.

The remaining bloodstains are a genius way to convey what happened in this quick paced unfair world

I've got a pretty alright time, but I refuse turning off my auto clicking macro at the boss fight (I'm sorry I'm weak like that), so I won't submit

Now some individual points in the game in order of appearance (I mostly wrote them during the first playthrough):

1. The sign explaining the jump button should probably take less time when the player successfully performed a jump once, it's the only moment with waiting on death in the game, and it's right at the start.
2. The second spike that moves sideways in the one level should probably have been visible in advance. I know it was probably a concious decision like this, but it's genuinely easy to forget anyway.
3. Mate the upside down sign is hilarious
4. The only moment in the game where I feel the game is needlessly hard is the precision falling section on the way back on the right most screen, I hope that's a precise enough description.
5. Gotta say, felt kinda sheepish getting hit by the rightward moving spike on the way back. Great placement

Thanks for this experience, have an emoji: 🐩

Pretty fun. I can imagine playing this for a long time. The main thing that would be nice is if you could clearly tell when you're visible and when you're hidden. The heartbeat when the wolves follow you are nice, maybe something similar to that?

Perfect game. I wouldn't change a thing about it, except for more customers.

I read the comments you wrote about your plans in the future, and I have to say that I don't quite agree. 

Potions against drunkenness is a logical continuation, but most players don't play this game to be a good barber. I personally really enjoyed seeing someone and their wishes as a canvas, and deciding what to do with it. So instead I'd make the player besides the drunk barber also the drunk pedicurist, make up artist, fashion designer, plastic surgeon, tattooist, body painter, and potentially more. You can turn a human into a completely new being. With the quality of this game I think you guys might be able to pull it off.

Secondly a lot of people seem to think honest customer feedback would be fun. I think instead it would be way funnier if they were happy with whatever they got. Thinking about seeing someone looking completely rediculous but extremely happy lifts my spirit. Besides, it's really hard making an algorithm that accurately messures how good you did.

Your game your decision. I'm not saying what you say is bad, I'm saying I'd do it differently. Congrats on an amazing entry.

Hm... I guess I should read the tutorial before trying to beat the end boss...

Really fun game. It would be nice if you could read the tutorial again after you've played the first stage. It really messed me up.

It would be nice if you guys could communicate to the player better when they could use their shield or their bottle. I understand that you only have three bottles, but there's also some cooldown they're under that is currently invisible. Something simple like a slight color change or a sound of denial when pressed during cooldown, letting the player know you heard them, but simply refuse to listen

I think the movesets of the characters were fun and diverse, though during my first run, the one where I didn't know the block button, I found some of the hitboxes to be a bit unfair.

Red riding hood was slippery and had a very floaty jump, which doesn't feel that great, but all the other moves benefitted a lot from that decision. The hunter's kick move for instance, and the grandma's roll move would have been easily dodgable.

With the directional inputs it would have been really nic if you had full controller support. I mean, you just have to assign the right button to block, and the top button to throw bottle, and you would've been done. On keyboard I found directional inputs to not be worth the trouble. It would also have been nice if you had assigned the moves to z, x, c and space or something similar for arrow controls, which is usually my go to for these kinds of games. I don't know how many of you could edit the game at once, but I think assigning one person to accessibility, as a subrole of course, wouldn't have gone unnoticed.

Working with 20 people makes sense considering the slight explosion of different styles here and there. Unavoidable for such a short jam and I think it works relatively okay. Well done coordinating 20 people and still having a finished product by the end. I bet Kevin Tian must have been very busy coloring the hunter as well as designing entirely new colors. Don't worry mate, the colors look great.

The backgrounds looked like they come straight from a fairytale bundle, very cool. Makes me wonder how the game would have looked if the characters were a bit more similar in style. 

The animation was whacky and fun

The difficulty curve was alright. Grandma was definetely harder. The lady wolf could be beaten just by standing next to them and mashing attack, which is a bummer but also really hard to solve sadly, making it harder would also make weaving in and out harder.

I dare not make a tierlist of which of the enemies I thought were most fun, as they're all really good and work well together. The first one kinda idle and easy to get you started, the second one having an abusable weakness, and the third just hard on all fronts, they worked well together, like I said.

That's it, good job, it was so fun that I played throught it two extra times. Sorry for writing too long of a comment.

Hi. What you did really well is keep the game understandable even when there's tons of stuff going on the player can't see. It does however mean that after level two all levels started feeling the same, this is also partly because I thought the levels were pretty hard and took long to beat. Maybe you could've made rotating mandatory and introduced it after level 6.

The rotating mechanic was really cool. The way rotating it a little bit gave you extra to time to react when your current platform was disappearing was a bit of an aha moment.

Currently I feel the controls are a bit too hard for how long a level takes to beat holding down one button. I kept getting almost to the end, then dying, and then having to sit there and hold the x or z button for 10 seconds again. The way I'd change this is by making the platforming simpler, and then making it so releasing x or z continues to move it in that direction until you hit the other button. In other words, it can't sit still. Now make a grace period for how long you can't change the direction, and you get a much more hectic hard than precision hard. If you then also make the speed of the z slider go up, that'd be great. You could of course merge both buttons to one button and make it start going automatically at the start of a level.

While writing this I'm really noticing how much of a bummer it is that the music keeps resetting when you die or beat a level. It's really good, bro.

The sound effects and art fitted well together. I like how only the players have footstep sounds. It feels very polished and smooth, well done. This game was both fun to play with a friend as well as speedrun solo, which likely wasn't your intention. The way the bullets bounced was very satisfying.

One thing I thought was really fun is trying to incriminate an other Dabuwimbi by making movement sounds when they moved.

I thought some of the messages were really funny. It did take me more than two tries to figure out you could look at where the lil figures were to see what's true. I don't know if it's the case, but I'd find it weird if "Alex and Sam are making out" would be good media for the school paper, even if it's true. I might be wrong on that, I never read a school paper.

A definete improvement you could make is showing at the end how many you got right and wrong in addition to the score. Because I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. A negative score count could also help, strangely 

Epic, cool game. I've got a lot to say about this one. I'm sorry for taking over the comment section.

The cycling mechanic is really cool. It seems like the kinda thing I personally would steal from a game I like, but if you came up with it yourself, that's really clever and it works real well. It means you can play with your prefered playstyle longer while keeping the variety.

It's awesome the enemies switch with you, that makes the game feel more dynamic and coherent in a way. It adds another layer

You've almost finished controller controls, if only you shot in the direction of the joystick. Bummer, but understandable for a gamejam of course

For your information, I only figured out there's a dash in level 4, after I tried to get a controller working. A little mention in the story would've been nice

It would've been nice if all the 'go to next level' portal thingies were at the top of the level or something, so they'd be easier to find.

I did have to restart at some point. After upgrading my apples the entire time, I bought one blast in all directions upgrade that was so bad that it became unplayable. The only way to not hit yourself is to perfectly time a dash. Keeping that timing consistent, calculating where you're gonna go, avoiding all the attacks from the enemies with way more range, and making sure you don't get hindered by the dash cooldown, while some enemies blast apples in all directions without friendly fire, is literally impossible. I beat one floor with it, but it was way too painful to continue. I must say though, the idea is really fun and it's very cool how the enemies get the same upgrades as you. The skip button is really helpful, great foresight.

Okay, it was probably just the last level that was really hard, and after playing it a second time, it's very cool. I even played it a fourth and fifth time so yeah, really wasn't that big of an issue. After those other playthroughs I went back to my first one and beat it without using the apples at all. Mostly level one powers, was actually quite doable. It's awesome that they then can also no longer use the apple powerup

I'd say that more ammunition is almost a nerf.

About the fact that enemies seem to get the same upgrades as you, I understand that might have created some issues so you did it slightly differently for the player and for the enemies. It is now a bit weird though, but I do understand. With more time you might have been to able to only pick upgrades that are beneficial to you even if the enemies also get them? Currently the shooting faster with the spinning wheel, or any of the damage up upgrades are very strong because the enemies barely get an upgrade.

About the general feel. I think the speed and friction were correct, and I'm positively impressed with how the enemies traversed the tough obstacles. The obstacles were well placed and created many fun environments. Some levels were more open and others more closed. This encourages using different weapons which was well done. Okay back to general feel. The main thing that bugged me was that you moved much slower when hugging up against a wall. This is a pretty common phenomenon in Unity games and maybe something to look out for next time. This annoyance is even more annoying when dashing.

About dashing. I think you have about half a second too much cooldown. I might just suck at the game, but it happened way too often that I lose 3+ hearts in one go because of a dashing mistake. My usual mistakes: 1.) The wall slide thing I mentioned earlier 2.) Walking into an encounter not realising I'm still in cooldown, because to me it's surprisingly long 3.) You can't dash through enemies. Absolutely no shame here, a dash takes an enormous amount of testing to get right, and you guys' scope wasn't exactly small as is.

Here's some feedback on each individual power, in order of most fun to least fun (still fun, don't get me wrong here).

Shoe. Awesome because you can hit once at max range, or twice closer by, in other words, playing more risky rewards you with more damage

Apple. Awesome because it ricochets and you can hit yourself. Sometimes when I wasn't careful I didn't realise my last power ran out and I instantly blew myself up. Unfixable without lame changes, funny, skill-issue, keep it in the game. The upgrades for this one were very varied and fun (bar the slight inbalance).

Rose. I liked the simpler gameplay in the mix of the more hectic ones. 

Needle wheel. While fun to try to go into close range to shoot from close up with a fast but short range weapon, it became practically impossible to avoid damage, so I either gimmicked or damage boosted most of the time. But when I did do it correctly it was very cool

Crossbow. In my opinion by far the most lacking. At long range it's very inconsistent and that makes basically unusable. I didn't really play with it that much though, so don't blame me if I'm wrong

The thematic is very cool, and the music fit really well too. I liked the music.

I'm not really a story kinda guy, but I didn't mind reading this one. Please read this as a complement thank you. One of several things I liked was how well the spawnpoints of the enemies tied into the story.

I'm also not one to talk about art much, but it was very nice, and fitted the gameplay perfectly, which is nice considering the amount of options in the game

Very cool game, have an emoji: 🥋

Hi. I liked when you could interrogate the murder weapon. I think the drawing of the red wires could have been done by dragging the left mouse instead, and also a larger hibox for that, probably the whole picture instead of just the red thumbtack.

This usually happens when you have an unsaved rating, so itch can't reload the page, making it look like you hadn't posted it yet. So the user clicks it again, not knowing the first one did go through.

Yep, this game is epic. Immediately making me wanna add an archer style character to my own game. It's very simple, but you avoided some pitfalls I think were easy to fall into.

First, here's the reason I think sprung most of the critique of the other players. Keep in mind I only know all this because I like the game and thus know what to pin point as something I don't like.

The main one is the varying jumpheight. While it may seem that adding more flexibility for the player can only be a good thing, the varying jumpheight doesn't add much flexibility as your jump is very low anyway. Instead it forces players to keep a bit of focus on how long they hold the jump for instead of on actually aiming, if you stop focussing on it you easily start jumping way too low and can't get anywhere. That can be good if you want maximum skill expression, but I think it is a trade-off that's not worth it in this case, as I think simplicity is key.

The second one, and one might argue that it is more annoying, is that the arrow springs from the bow, which is offset horizontally a lil bit. The reason I think it's less annoying is because it's more fun to wrap your head around in reruns, for instance in the center sprinkler level 8, where you can wrap your arrows around the ceiling there. One thing about this that kept tripping me up, and making me scream in frustration, which isn't bad cuz it means I was invested in the run 😏, was that when pressed up against the final door and facing right you can no longer shoot. Especially annoying when a cloud comes by and washes out your shiggles.

I think besides those points, the character moveset felt really good, wouldn't change a thing. The way you can't jump über high made it so that last level was possible, and the quick movement meant you weren't backtracking for an hour when those sacred clouds owned you once more. Plus the quick fire arrows helped with same thing, while being held back in some levels where those platforms were useful. These are the pitfalls I mentioned. For me it's easy to imagine a game where you had to hold down to shoot, or you ran much slower, which would've made the game more deliberate, but less dynamic and made the clouds even more thunderously annoying.

About the clouds. They're annoying. I like them as a local stress inducer. While playing you're constantly racing against the clouds because when it hits your shiggle, it quickly dominoes into Do the whole level over, dummy. I think it's nice to have something like that in a game without a time limit. One interesting thing about them is their cycle isn't always the same when you enter their level, instead being determined by how fast you beat the levels before them. This created a massive bus, as I think they call that in speedrunning, especially in the first level with a cloud, where if you're at a decent pace the cloud is just approaching the left side, meaning you have to wait all the way until it's gone again. That can be a good 7 seconds. When I finally beat that bus, my highscore went from 1:12 to 1:02 in one go. Which felt epic then, but before that it felt like all the work I put into the earlier levels was for null. I don't mind this cycle system, and I think the levels might be even more annoying if you had to wait each time, but I do have another solution which a bit more work to implement maybe. What if shooting the cloud made it go faster for a bit? Suddenly the earlier you get there the earlier you can leave. You can give up saying: "I'm never light all of those in time" and start shooting the cloud so you can restart quicker. I don't know how you would communicate it to the player though.

Quickly about the skill expression, very good, made it fun to rerun. I went from above 2 mins, to 1:35, to 1:18, stayed there a few runs, then 1:12, stayed there a little while, and then got 1:02, and I felt like I beat it, so quit. Very good progression if you ask me.

I don't know why the music and sounds are disabled by default, I suppose it's because you didn't make them yourself, but it adds a lot to the experience, and made my reruns substantially more fun

A minor bug: You can get stuck in the door if it closes as you're in it. Which actually leads to a feature request, and I think you know what it is when I say it'll help not having to refresh the page every so often.

Also, you failed to follow the limitation. To fit you would've had to have been 'the cat of three colors', you dinglecat

That's it. Good job, here's an emoji: 🦿

It's fun and the assets you picked worked well together. The allies could have probably been more useful to make them more impactful. Possibly you could have made them ignite the other blobs, letting them blow up in their wake, saving themselves. You could also make it so if they get too far away they turn evil automatically, meaning you'd have to stay in the backstab range. Hmm.. I did just triple the complexity of the game. Maybe it's better to leave it simple, even if it wasn't your first game in Godot. Good choice btw.

It took me a second time on a fresh page to realise there is a shop. I just simply clicked on play again without going to the main menu. I'd say make an extra button to the shop in the dead menu. This is extra important because the shop is pretty integral to the game, doubling my playtime.

Lastly, seeing as the points matter for the shop I'd make the points you get during the game more exponential. Currently it doesn't matter if you get one run of 100 seconds or 10 of 10 seconds, which takes the same amount of time but the second is much easier.

Hey, I wanna apologise for how I started my last comment. I don't think it's a bad game, I never thought it was a bad game, and even if I did I shouldn't have started my comment shouting it. I was wrong to think it would be a good idea to formulate my comment like clickbait in a bad news article, blowing it way out of proportions. But I didn't think about the fact that when other players see this page they're gonna read "Garbage game" and immediately leave, which is a shame cuz it's a good game. Now seeing that you only hit 6 ratings and otherwise would've probably landed really high in the ratings, made me feel bad. You're game was streamlined, it had a goal for eyes, sacrifised everything that wasn't necessary and thus came out as a very focussed and fun experience. Please continue making games because you have a keen eye for what's important in games and what isn't.

I see, and I mostly agree. When creating your initial scope it's indeed important to make sure you have time to polish and stuff. But it's also vital to have at least one mechanic you know is fun in there. For an arcade game it's improving your skill and getting higher scores, and for an idle-esque/permanent upgrade style game it's seeing progression in possesion. When starting out your game it's important to constantly keep in mind one of those goals immediately to avoid having to hack it into your game later. If you then think of adding some optional feature before having the basis of what makes your genre fun, you can put it on a list for later or ignore it completely.

With 72 hours it's indeed easy to overlook certain things that in hindsight you would have thought about earlier in development. And I think the stuff that you did make was cooherent and executed really well.

The beginning was fun, when I was zooming, but when I got to a halt, I couldn't get it going again... The pressure and the temperature stayed red no matter what I did.

On my first read through your comment, I thought what you're saying is uninteresting.

On my second read through your comment however, I think what you're saying is interesting.

About the fact that you wanted to narrow your scope, I think you guys did that effectively enough, but could maybe have been better, which I'll come back to.

The fire spread makes sense, however I wonder how much harder it would have been to implement in place of the current system, but I trust you had your reasons for omitting it. I do question whether it would add anything to the game. To make it balanced you'd have to drastically decrease the random placement of the fire, which would just mean you stay at the same place longer, which is less fun.

About the upgrades, you're right that it would massively increase the scope. But it would also greatly influence the identity of the game. Suddenly it's no longer an arcade game. The scoring system would break, seeing as a perfect score and a meh score are pretty close together point-wise, this could of course be fixed by making the scoring exponential. On the other hand, the way you can currently 'turn your brain off and just do the thing' lends itself well to the average 'play, buy upgrades, repeat' gameplay. 

In fact, following that last conclusion, it could very well be that that's what's so jarring about the original version. You're selling it as an arcade style game, but it's missing the high skill ceiling those usually have. Instead the game is an idle-esque mindless progression loop style game, without the progression. 

So if you guys were like: "We're gonna make this game with upgrades in an infinite progression loop" but then said: "You know what, let's lower our scope and not make upgrades" I think you guys missed the plank a bit. Instead you could've simplified the gameplay a bit further or done a bit less polishing, so you could add minimal upgrades, something like a speed boost, costing points, which are now permanent. Or you could've changed the genre, and add a bit more skill expression somewhere in the game.

The concept is, as is mentioned plenty already, really good. And if you were planning on increasing the scope of this game in the future, I think it lends itself perfectly for that. Because while it is a mind boggling main mechanic, which is usually annoying when adding new mechanics, here you could simply activate or deactivate parts of the level, like enemies with complex patterns or other physics objects. It could reduce the amount of active things the player has to watch out for without increasing the distance players have to walk to get from one obstacle to the next. Instead you could also add more colors to take it more in a puzzle direction

Quick example of something you could do, which I believe is easier to implement than one might think: A wizard-like enemy shooting switch balls. Getting hit by them thus means you switch colors. Then in your level you'd have two in two different colors, one on the left and one on the right maybe. Getting hit by one would disable that one, and activate the other. I think that sounds fun

And now some more specific notes about the game:

You explain you can double jump before you actually need it. I forgot about the double jump and thus got stuck, while if you missed the double jump instruction in a level where you actually need it, you can always go back to read it again.

The mechanic that elements can move when switching colors is in my opinion too weird to merit being in the game. Yes, it might make designing levels a tad easier, but it is very calming for the player to be able to see exactly what the world would look like once it switches, and this just adds another layer, which I think is unnecessary. 

The one level where you dash under and jump on the right side, and then similarly on the left, is really good. It had a planned pitfall where you get stuck on the left, but you make absolute sure they know the mechanic to get around it

The last level is funny, because you can beat it in under 2 seconds

It's hard for me too, but I had no idea how to make it easier.

Yep, agreed. I hope you feel well soon.

I see what you did there...

Wow, you've a nice collection of one line comments. I'm sorry to break the trend. 

I think the music was surprisingly good for what my first impression was. 

About the game, I wanna say that while it is nice and simple like this, where there is very little you can do, it is also to the point where a hypothetically perfect player would practically play the same way as a beginner, except that they have better memory. It's possible I'm wrong of course, if the strategy with which you guys play has actually changed over time. But I believe not so because everything you can do, you have to always do, there are no optional things.

For some game genres it's fine if more experienced players play in a simply more strict way rather than with high IQ plays. Think animal crossing or geometry dash. The former buys into it by being calm and relaxing, which your game is not, and the latter by making execution more difficult, which your game is, in my opinion, also not.

In believe arcade games usually get their draw from: "I know I can do better next time if do this and this", where in your game I won't go further than: "In move in cleaner lines" or "I need to react better to when the fire stops" or even "I need to get more lucky with where the fire spawns". Because these are all execution things I feel your game would most benefit from going into a strategic direction, which to be honest, increasing the FOV would already mostly accomplish. Why don't you try it, triple the zoom of the camera outwards and see how that feels. I believe you'll start to be able to move around more with more intention, and strategy will matter more.

Please don't take my feedback as me trying to say "You stupid, is bad game" because it isn't. The simple mechanics work well with the aesthetics and sound, and I think they work well for when you're tired and don't wanna think too much.