If this just had a tad bit of more movement like somedifferent moves based on if you’re holding up or down like in Kirby I could see myself grinding this a bit… Though only if I didn’t have like 20 other itch-games on my itch-games list
StarDDDude
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Very very neat and pretty good remake of Super Meat Boys Physics… I have never been too fond of those physics though, just overtly floaty for my taste.
But I do adore the tech of Mokous fireball sticking to walls or not based on wether the fireball-key is being held down. It is pretty fire.
Time: 6:34:78
Deaths: 48
(accidentally closed window so this is me rewriting a comment in minor annoyance)
I know how jam games do end up with the most random game mechanics you don’t care about. I (miracolously) ended up with a similar game-setting as your “Drunk as I Like” in a jam, which was extremely outside of my field of gamedev. But even with those random mechanics that I don’t care about or even barely make sense I like to think about how they could be spinned into something that actually works. Is fun practice for things I actually care about (hotlinks roughly sorted from lowest to highest quality).
And sometimes I just get a little overanalytical of random jam games. Am not trying trying to be overtly critical of a jam game, am just living out a habit I like.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNND on that note: With the spinning attack I didn’t mean to say it is hard to dodge or unreadable. I meant it was specifically unreadable on the first attempt. When someone encounters a boss going spinny mode for a bit they would have no clue what the boss is about to do. In this case leading to them inevitably seeing a bunch of reimus explode. Which, while absolutely hilarious, can be rather frustrating. And due to the player being unaware if the Boss has another 5 of those attacks they can’t read on the first try it could lead to a ragequit. I personally would just add some homing indicator during the spinning so the player knows where the danger will be (of course only if I got the time for that, and also if I don’t have some special reason to keep the attack more ambigous).
Fun gimmick
Could use some rebalancing as currently holding the reimu formation is ridicolously powerfull as it allows you to actually dodge shots while concentrating all your shots into one place.
This also makes it so that the balance barely allows surviving when you’re down to a singular reimu. And recovering from that becomes pretty much impossible as you don’t deal enough damage to get more reimus. Maybe an additional power-system could fix this?
And the Boss is rather… boring. The patterns don’t have much of a bullet hell feeling. And while that charge attack is quite funny it lacks some proper indication, as on my first run when I stacked all my reimus together it just one-shottet everything.
To give the patterns a more Bullet Hell feel I would really really reccommend Sparens Danmaku Tutorials. They are focused on danmakufu but knowing how a proper danmaku engine works does give a lot of the groundwork to make pretty bullet hell patterns.
And on the topic of all reimus being one-shot I would reccommend giving some reimus invincibility in case of another getting hit. Like if a reimu gets hit 10% of the reimaining get invincibility, and on the next one being hit another 10% get invincibility. And so on. Of course the actual amoutn would need to be tweaked but it would make things a lot more forgiving.
Very cool game
The atmosphere is really cool. Love how the dialogue hints on tidbits of the background story and the importance of the blizzard on the outside.
The main character does feel a tad bit hypocrytical for the short runtime of the game. Though other than that I really really like his vibe.
Graphically I am not too hooked on the blizzard but the dim atmosphere inside the building sets the mood perfectly for the game. And the style of the ending hits exactly my preferences.
The UI does feel like it has a good amount of polish, though I feel it needed some better indicators. For me it was kinda hard keeping in mind which options my opponent has and which got overridden by the slot machine. The game already shows what the last actions were. From that you can easily deduce what actions are available, it’s just not as readable as the icons from the slot machine.
I think there could’ve been some slight swaps to the UI system to ensure it is a little more readable. Like showing the slot machine over-writing the icons from the last used act. Or some more visual clarity on the timer… I did not figure out wether that timer tracks actual time or time in terms of acts.
I adore these animations. Especially the blocking animation is ridiculously cool. Though I wish that some of the animations were more readable. The drinking animations often feel very unintuitive as like half of them actually take away your gun, while the other half just drinks something, making you unable to shoot for some reason. Which in turn can even make it a bit confusing noticing which animation played.
I also think a bit of color-coding could help here to make each animation stand out as what type of action it is.
But those all are just polishing nitpics.
What I find really fascinating about this game is how, even though it is a very short ~1 hour game, it manages to play around tons with the game mechanic. Each of those mechanics feels like a really unique twist on the gameplay. And someone who is better at it than me could probably grind the arcade mode for quite a bit.
Something that does feel kind of missing is a 2 player mode. Feels like it could be really fun to play with another person. Only real hurdle would be keeping what the card is a secret from your opponent.
Finally I do feel the making the game free. The game does absolutely feel worth the price tag of 3 bucks. But knowing how much usually gets cut away from that payment means the dev bareley gets anything in the end. My main reason for not wanting to sell any of those 1-2 hourish long games. Looking at the steam page I gotta ask, have you even gotten past the 100 bucks boundary to get your money back, I think there was something like that.
Though what really interests me is: How did you have to help people pirate the game? How did that situation even appear? That sounds like a goldmine for some funny stories.
It went… somewhat well. The main issue is that I am unsure if I actually prefer it over just having a 3D Model. But I’ll have to check back on that when I have more visually distinct rooms.
You can catch a little glimpse of the effect in this video: Link to Video on Bluesky
And here’s a more focused render:

I know the framerate can be changed, but there’s just a few presets. I was aiming for a very specific low framerate. I ended up just animating 24 fps for 1 second and discarding every second frame, resulting in 12 frames (writing that I realized I could’ve just gone with 24 fps at 0.5 seconds).
I did actually find a little issue on the tool. Though it is a very unusual edge case.
On very very low resolutions (32x32) when using a transparent background, the edges of the render are still blended with a back-ground color, resulting in a faint shaded outside:
Output

Corrected

With my knowledge on rendering I expect that’s either 2 lines being executed in the “wrong” order, or the most impossible thing to fix in 3D graphics.
I absolutely adore these kind of tools from you
They may be extremely specific and especially this feels like I would have never asked to have it. But just seeing how insanely easy it is to use just gives me ideas on how to implement it.
Outside of just having neat rotating animations this could have some use for chopped rotating textures. Export the rotation as png-zip and then only use every 10th image to get the look of a choppy rotation. Though that workflow would probably be a bit more intuitive if you could just specify how many frames per rotation it should render in the zip export.
Honestly that thought may actually be THE solution to an artstyle-problem I had. Will test that out later.
Hey, I’ve finally fully updated the Boss with Spell Practice and the Dev Room. Took WAAAAY longer than anticipated.
The Spell Practice can also be used as a High Score mode and includes 2 things not present in the Boss-Fight itself.
Everything should be unlocked for you. But I am not sure if I added some code to unlock the separate attacks in Spell Practice after having finished the boss. So you might have to sit through some of Ph2 to unlock everything. Attacks get unlocked as soon as they are triggered. You could also just edit the SafeFile wherever your OS put it, when opening it with a text-editor it can be easily edited.
The Dev Room should already be fully unlocked. That purely depends on how far you got in the fight.
I’ve started liking Tower Defenses waaay too much. And I relly like the twist in this one.
However it could really use some touch up on the mechanics. Currently you can’t really spend karma to improve your gift-delivery. You can only spend Karma to temporarily boost your Gift-Delivery.
It is a nice mechanic to have temporary boosts like that. But having some more variants of fairies to buy or upgrade santa and have some elfs deliver too.
Maybe also some secondary money in the form of cookies… No clue what to use it for but cookies are great.
Edit: played for 6 minutes (have to rush now, will update my personal notes later with this)
Hidden things sounds cool. Though I don’t think I’ll get around to digging through the game to find any. So I’ll keep myself to imagining what secrets there could be. That’s also a form of fun.
I’ve had donations on since about a year now. So far I haven’t gotten any yet. Though I also couldn’t put as much work into things this year as I wanted due to personal reasons.
How hard it is to setup donations depends on your Country. Itch needs to know some things about how you are allowed to make money, and the legislation for that depends on your country. I am from Germany so I had to do a little bit wrangling through bureaucratic things, but after the initial setup the legal part isn’t really much extra work. I do have to fill out some tax-papers every year. But doing so actually returns some tax money to me.
Other than the initial setup there’s also the extra “pressure” from doing something for money. Unless you put some extra effort into getting people onto your page it’s highly unlikely you will make monetary gain. And on top of that, of course you’ll need to make things of high enough quality so that others will donate.
I personally would recommend focusing on getting better at making games. The money is secondary during the learning phase. That’s what I am currently doing, putting not much effort into the “how to make money” and more effort into the “how to make game”. Even if I want to sell my games at some point, I first need to know how to make them.
Of course if you can find some time to figure out the steps to turn on Donations then go for it. Even if I haven’t made money off of my donations yet, I am happy to have dealt with turning them on already. This way I won’t have to bother with the legalities when I find the time to “market” my games more.
Pretty cute. Some of the dialogue was also really fun.
Though the color coding is missing on some things. Some doors have color-coding while others don’t. I am guessing to distinquish between locked doors and doors you can use.
Would there have been a way to allow for different colors for different interactions? Or is that just a limitation of bitsy?
Also is there any secrets? Seems like there could be some.
I absolutely adore this. Probably my favourite twist on Snake yet. It just feels so “modern” arcadey. There’s just so many things at play here which interact in really fun ways.
On another note I am kind of unsure how exactly it decides to lay off some of my goo. I understand it when I get hit by something that isn’t my head. But other than that it also seems to happen randomly.
I am 100% certain this is a form of existence Frankensteins Monster would’ve far preferred over the one he actually got (ignore that that’s a very low bar to clear).
I also feel I kinda made something Touhou-Esque!

And while it was already mentioned in an earlier comment I also wanna point out how much the swapping between grave-robbing and dress-up just helps give this a bit of flair and time to think about what creation you wanna make. If Victor Frankenstein did that he definitely wouldn’t have created a miserable existence.
Wanted to respond a lot earlier, but I was missing only a bit to finishing up a project with some more fancy 3D things. Exclusively fancy 3D things, nothing else, no Gameplay, just pretty 3D scenes. Here link. Took longer than anticipated because Real Life is being busy. And I spend some of the little energy left on Nightreign, the Game is making me feel like I have to step up my capabilities of making pretty 3D things.
My plans for now with my 3D knowledge is getting more experience in the pretty 3D scenes I am already good at, and learning some better blends to 2D so that I can also use that skillset in 2D games.
And the post launch fix version sounds like a good idea. There’s always things in a project that feel like they need some dire fixing. But which only really become apparent after release. I’ve heard from some friends at DigiTales that they like to do an anniversary patch to tidy things up. And it’s similar to what I am planning to finish up next with Cosmic Boss Cube (though that’s more me finishing the Spell Practice to make it easier to learn the attacks). I also don’t care that much about whether that’s for an existing player audience or not. I make games because I like making them. And while I do wanna make money with them some day, I think I should prioritize the developing of games before that
Tutorialisation is always one of those tricky things, especially when its about GameFeel things you really only get after some experience with the Mechanic or even just the genre. I’ve even had people not be able to do any air control in a Jump n’ Run which doesn’t automatically halt movement in the air. Something I felt was completely natural to be able to do due to my years of playing SMW. So goo luck with the tutorial overhaul.
And I’d be very interested to see what you can dig up on those old shaders.
The Pyramid-Stars bit is the most simple setup I could jam up together to render a 3D background in a 2D space.
Detailed explanation with Spoiler-Screenshots
In Godot you can use SubViewports as a Texture displaying a render of a secondary Viewport. I this case I used UI nodes to arrange the viewport textures… Actually kinda janky because I don’t particularly like Godots UI nodes but I am just rendering 2 scenes on top of each other so I didn’t bother with making it better. I might experiment with other ways of doing this so I can do more fancy things.

The 3D scene is just a pretty normal 3D scene with some big cubes, lighting and Godots basic Sky Material. The basic Sky Material in Godot can have a “Sky Cover” texture, which is just added on top of the sky dome. I gave it some Cellular Manhattan Noise with fitting color Ramp as Texture, which results in those stars. And then there’s an animation player which just rotates the sky once within a minute.
I did try to make it more fancy by rotating it inside of the shader and doing other shader things. But I ended up just doing the most basic thing.

When I get to SDW4 I’ll probably have a nicer setup for 2D with 3D background.
About kmm, yeah I did get past the dog via Chainsaw. Pretty sure I noticed the weapon swap and how OP the chainsaw is before the getting to the dog. But I did also try to let it live (didn’t manage to do it). And I did watch through some of the Developer commentary when I was struggling to figure out why I didn’t get to the next level. So I already heard that nobody read that fanficiton.
I did see Robotron got released, but I am not sure if I’ll get to it soon. I still have 3-4 playthroughs going on right now. Nightreign for some casual fun, KMM for janky cool single player, Environmental Station Alpha for some secrets and I’ll probably start Baldurs Gate 3 now AND on top I have a backlog of ~15 short Games on itch.
I haven’t even been able to get back to KMM yet. Atleast next time I start it I can actually do some progress because I now know it just didn’t save my progress as I had it installed in programm files (I also remember when I didn’t know why appdata existed).
Sadly didn’t manage to get far.
However I nearly found a really cool easy mode. If you restart after dying the ship will still respawn. Meaning you have 2 ships to shoot things down. Sadly this bug allows you to shoot yourself. So it is rather impractical. Kind of a shame because at that difficulty I would’ve loved to grind a bit.
Anyways I really love that graphical style you got here for this remake. remaking my first game is also something I gotta do someday (when I know how to make levels that aren’t kaizo).
Neat shmup
I think my biggest issue is how chaotic the screen is. I know that’s usual for shmups but the screenshake seems rather overdone. I also think giving the player bullets a little bit of transparency and/or making them render behind all other bullets might help with the readability a bit too.
But take that with a grain of salt, my shmup experience so far is just Touhou. There the focus is far more on pretty pattern recognition than player-abilities. When I see other non-danmaku shmups it also feels a little too chaotic for my tastes.
I really like the idea of the grappling hook. And it does seem plenty usefull. Sadly I barely used it, I think the tutorial should make sure to show it off a little better. And maybe giving some more reason to swap out what your holding could make grappling hook use a little more dynamic than just grabbing the strongest thing around and keeping it.
(I do have some other things I could mention but they all boil down to ‘Touhou is different’, if you are interested in some differences that I notice do tell me)
And at last I also wanna ask about this post you made a whopping 7 years ago about a star trail shader. Just wanna know if that shader ended up complete and how good the effect ended up being. I just love Star Trails and am always looking for new possible shader techniques.
(and yes I indirectly came here via that post lol)
Hey, thanks for playing. What does it remind you of (just asking in case it reminds you of anything other than SMW)
Also I finally started playing Killing Machine : Movement. After digging way too much through the first level I can already say I’ll definitely have a lot of fun with that game. I especially like the inclusion of ridiculous amounts of text/books as exposition laying around (I won’t read them). I have a similar idea for a game I wanna make, just a lot less… chaotic. But seeing 40 pages of Star Trek Fanfiction casually sitting next to a Bible-Section does make me wanna do absurdist stuff too.
And about your attempt of running my Cube-Boss: I kind of expected it to atleast try to run the game instead of crashing instantly. But I guess changes in rendering hardware/software just say NO. It probably notices it needs to do some specific GPU instructions and that your GPU-Driver just doesn’t have that instruction. Kind of shame, but I’ll keep that issue in mind in case I actually make something 3D that I want able to run on ancient hardware.
Got to wave 28. Really cool how the balance starts going towards trying to pick up as many blood droplets as possible to stay alive because of how quickly the blood starts depleting.
Though the upgrades no longer counteract that so it starts feeling somewhat impossible at wave 28.
The second game I played from you, will definitely have to check out your other games.
This is some really fantastic tiny arcade game.
My only singular issue is that while looking extremely clean the graphics don’t have much of a meaning. White doesn’t particularly mean it doesn’t hurt you, red means it hurts you but also not, and the cool outline stretch doesn’t automatically mean it can hurt you or you can collect it.
Also the screen shake should only happen when you get hurt. So many times my instincts told me to think about why I got hurt even though I wasn’t hurt, lol. Maybe that’s just a representation of how the live of cat owners feels.
Edit: I also had this funnny littlöe health bug:

Well it is the time of being a cheapskate, so don’t rush it with upgrading your machine.
Though could you tell me the specs of your current setup? Would be good to know a bit about how performant my stuff is.
By the way in the settings you can turn off the biggest performance issues and turn on the CRT shader which lowers the resolution by a lot. That should get it running on pretty much anything. Looks very much diffrent though.
But don’t rush yourself. Especially as I might soon finish an update with some extras.
Hey, first off thanks for looking through some of my ~2-ish years old post.
I am not sure if I am too big a fan of Long convoluted stories or hard janky gameplay. But looking through some of the stuff you put out about that game it just reminds me of why I love the internet. It looks like its from some forgotten corner of the internet in the early 2000s. It gives me the feeling of looking into some weird thing for 4 hours which could be absolute trash but might be one of the best things humanity has ever created.
Even without having played this this has been some of the most fun I’ve had on the internet in a long while. And it definetly found me in the right moment, so thanks a ton for plugging this here
It might take a while before I get to this but I’m putting it high on my list. My internet is broken and I’ve gotta spend some times developing my own games.
In the meantime I’ll just plug my BossFight project which also ended up becoming overly ambitious: https://stardddude.itch.io/cosmic-boss-cube
Less in the feature creep “What the hell is this”~manner, but rather in the overtly high polish manner
Second game I played this year which is just called o… though this one has more o.
And I really really like this game here. The bomb mechanic is insanely cool. Reminds me I should really brainstorm some cool platformer mechanics for my games.
Outside of the really cool character-mechanics puzzles I really really adore this artstyle. The frogs are an insanely cool way to create Key-Doors.
The bomb-explosions have that really fun weight to them. I love how they are predictable in how far they shoot you, very good for a puzzle Platformer.
And I am insanely happy I just replayed this with the music on. The sounds are fantastic, booth the music and the sfx. I love the layers the music goes through, especially the fly layer. It reminds me of Pikmin and how sometimes the pikmin will sing along with the melody.
Edit: Oh god, while I was writing this Lil’ o started sleeping and the music stopped (though maybe the music stopping was a bug because it won’t turn back on). Insanely cute, I love it.
That was really really really pretty. Artstyle and its execution is fantastic. The 3D environment is absolutely fantastic at setting the mood. And the usage of 2D for the character is some great spice on top of that. I love how the lantern actually works as lightsource to light up the scene (even if sometimes its placement leaves the player area a little too dark).
The story… I do not understand. But I didn’t realy expect to understand anything with a game of this name. So I am really more interested in the mood set by the audio logs. I really like the mystery aura they give off without giving a conclusion. I think their execution could be better, but it’s still noticeable how much work went into the voice acting and writing.
On the Gameplay front there’s not much to say. I love grappling hooks. And the camera angles to set the scenery work together really well with the movement (except like once or twice when walking into a weird corner). It just feels great to walk around in that little world.
Though there should probably be something like a respawn button. The game did softlock me once. Though that wasn’t such a big issue in such a short game.
Zebulon was a good cat. I’ll remember him. Wanted to play this for quite a while, am happy to finally get around to it.
I loved how interconnected that little world was. All the different routes really helped getting back to points of failure. And on subsequent run they allowed for some fun routing.
I am also really impressed with how smooth the controls are. It feels really polished and there were barely any moments which felt like the controlls failed me (except in the water), which I didn’t expect from a PICO-8 game.
I also love Zebulons animations. They look really fun and complement the character controller surprisingly well despite how chaotic they are. And the little animation for the end of every run is extremely well done. I just had to watch it to end off a run.
Something I only noticed on my later runs is just how neat the Overworld looks. Even if it is very small it has what I think are meant to be normal building, the rooftops on top, and a little Forest area with a lake.
The challenges for subsequent runs resulted in a really relaxing difficulty curve. With the last few ones having some actual challenge. My favourite were likely the Minit and Half Minit challenge. Those two work absolutely perfectly in such a small game.
I also wanna say that the music was a really fun listen. Especially the energetic part even if it was a little overly chaotic just felt great. i always tried jumping along with the melody, which did result in me missing some jumps because I was way too eagerly playing along with the music. But it was fun.
Ok, where to begin. First off, one opf the best games I’ve played on itch. Was overall fantastic.
I really like the story/dialogue, it’s very fun and feels perfectly in line with fun precision platformers. The music is also fantastic.
I think the majority of the levels is great. There were few which I didn’t find interesting. The Different modes are always fun to play through, though sadly offer little variety.
Except for during the Final Boss. Where each mode feels really unique to play.
However that final fight is definetly too much “RNG”. Not in the sense that it is actual RNG, after all when you do the same you did previous run it does the same too. The problem is that, especially during the 3rd phase on growth it just starts moving into the player constantly. I don’t care anymore. I beat this boss, even if the game says no. But seriously I would love to have a little fix on the bosses behaviour so it is more easily predictable when you’ve gotten yourself into a situation where the boss will just move into you.
Yeah, this was very funny. I love how the cube just… spins. The level Design is also seriously funny, most of the jokes work really well.
Though I had to stop on the falling platforms, I’d continue, but only if there was a checkpoint before that. Those platforms seem like they need some insane precision. And it’d take another 10 minutes to get there with how often I fall for the fall-through Ground.
Okay, finally got my hands on this a while back. I am not an expert on soundeffects and am also rather new to using them. So don’t take anything I say too serious.
First off the soundeffects themselves are nice. My favourites are likely the Menu soundeffects, they are a nice mixture of Wii-Era Menu Sounds and Musical sound thingies. Or maybe that’s just me usually liking UI sound packs. The Terrain/Nature sounds also have some great stuff, but they suffer heavily from an isssue of the pack I’ll mention in a bit. My favourite category overall might be the Charges & Fires.
The pack itself is varied. There’s 9 categories of sounds, each ranging between 4 and 23 sounds. And the categories with more sounds usually also have like 3-4 different styles of sound. Leading to the usual soundpack problem of having 100 sounds and like 3 fit your usage. But that’s just the usual thing I experience from sound packs.
Now to the actual problem of this pack: It’s very noticeable this is the first SFX work you’ve done.
The sounds are rather “long”. And by that I don’t mean the sounds themselves, that is perfectly fine depending on the game. The files all have 3-5 seconds of nothing in them. Even on effects I think should be used in a loop they have this nothing at the end. EXCEPT for Engine Stationary (1), that one has no empty space at the end and actually loops… Except it doesn’t because the files are all exported in MP3.
MP3 is fine for casual music listening. But due to it being lossy and a peculiarity in how it saves data it just doesn’t work well with soundeffects. That peculiarity leads to a miniscule amount of nothing when looping a track. Normally soundeffects are exported as .wav (Higher Quality) or .ogg (lower quality).
Overall this pack definitely needs a reexport of all sounds with more sensible length and filetypes. Also, while there are indeed 102 unique soundeffects, which is quite many sounds. But still, when compared to other packs on this site that is among the pricier ones.
Finally I wanna mention a personal issue I had when trying to use the sounds. I tried using the Small-Itemcollect 1 Soundeffect for coins like in a platformer. But I quickly noticed the soundeffect for the coin went on quite long. Meaning that if I spammed some coins around, you could hear the soundeffect stack on top of itself till it got really loud. And it also takes a little while to quiet down. For comparision, Super Mario Worlds Coin Soundeffect is roughly 0.4 seconds long. While your Small-Itemcollect 1 is roughly 2.2 seconds long. I do have some recordings of how it sounds in-game, but I can’t send them here on itch.
Oh my god I love this. If I were actually able to use 10 finger stytem I would probably grind this.
The gamefeel of this is fantastic and makes me genuinely wanna play this even if it is just typing. I got a score of 33500 points. I love how that score feels high enough to still feel fun even if I am not particularly good.
I also love some of the absurd words put into this project. How does one even find words like Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia… That sounds nearly as long as some of the German words I can come up with like: Luftschlossautohausbauarbeiterleitergeschäfft.
An important part in development is finding your own process in developing a game. There’s many many different possible approaches to making a game and using the tools at your disposal.
There’s also the issue with Tutorials that they often are made by people who are still learning themselves. I’ve seen some tutorials try teaching some fundamentals without actually understanding them. So whenever you watch a tutorial always question the quality of the tutorial itself and try coming up with other solutions.
The only Godot tutorial I can truly reccommend is Wye’s remake of super mario world. He’s new to godot but already experienced in making Games through ROMhacking. He’s also very carefull when implementing things, always trying to find a good solution. Though the tutorial series focuses more on the structure of solutions that actual direct coding. And as he isn’t finished with the project yet, he hasn’t released the source code for it yet.
Also if you’ve got any direct questions, I wouldn’t mind if you asked me. I’ve already gotten a good bunch of Godot experience by now and feel fairly competent in my personal developing style with the engine.









