I've Got A Second Chance At Life But Now I'm An Axolotl And In Massive Debt

adrien-dittrick 2019-05-01 09:34

This title feels like Isekai clickbait lul

adrien-dittrick 2019-05-01 09:37

THe music was nice and the gameplay solid! Maybe it's lacking in sound effects though.

remruts 2019-05-02 16:03

Hahaha, yeah it wasn't on purpose, though. Just wrote whatever to try to convey the story that I didn't have the time to put into the game. This is my first time participating, so I couldn't manage my time very well. Anyways, thanks for playing! :)

antti-haavikko 2019-05-04 10:49

Yay, finally found it! Good thing you had the same username on here and itch.io

First of all, you should probably update the links here to include Mac/Linux to not deter us weirdos away with the Windows only looking game. And you can consider the mac version tested, worked just fine except for the fact that a slice was missing from the top and bottom. About as much to only see half of the bubble icons. Lovely install instructions for the Mac version too on the itch.io page. Well, it's the same as Windows, just unzip and open the app.

Looked great and the music was pretty good even though it didn't really fit. Definitely would have needed some sound effects. Other than the sound missing sound effects (and maybe a bit spicier particle effects), the "game feel" was juicy and on point with the screen shake and whatnot. One thing that I was kinda missing was an aiming reticule instead of just default mouse cursor. I at least seem to have this mouse cursor blindness that after launching a game and in the heat of action, I don't seem to see the default mouse cursor at all.

The lack of other enemy types you told about (and even the boss) really messed with the difficulty here. If you can even call it difficulty since it was unexistent. The zombies were super unthreatening and the levels didn't get any harder, it was just repeating the same level again and again but you only got stronger. At least you should have increased the zombie count each level even though it wouldn't have really mattered either since they die so fast and do literally nothing. And after remembering the right click to suck the hearts, you make so much bank so fast that you can afford all the upgrades in a heartbeat. Speaking of the upgrades, the attack up was the only useful one (well, the speed up was ok too). All the different bubble (btw, big and spread were mixed) types were straight up worse than the default one.

The walls were super glitchy. Well, not the walls but the player collider maybe. It was very easy to get stuck on walls, especially on corners. And shooting around corners quite often resulted in the bubbles just evaporating on the walls.

Dunno how much time you spent on the level generation script but I think the whole going the roguelike route kinda held the game back a bit in this scope. The terrain was also very open, wouldn't have felt really different if it was just a big open rectangle with the ladder in a random spot. Adding hand crafted levels would have probably been better here and the time saved from not tinkering with the generation could have been used to add the additional enemies and threats.

Anyways, great job!

remruts 2019-05-04 13:39

Thanks for the feedback! I'm aware of most of those problems. The level generation didn't take that long, though I didn't really mess with it to make interesting levels. I just didn't want to make things by hand since I take too long designing levels and the end result wouldn't have been much better. There were other little things that sucked my time, like I spent almost two hours on the numbers that come out when you get hearts or lose lives and they weren't really necessary. But I guess these things happen your first time on a game jam. The music was made by my brother on a whim in 10 minutes, so I guess it's natural that it doesn't fit. And I'm sad that I couldn't get some sound effects in. I didn't think about the aiming reticule, so thanks for mentioning it! The Mac and Linux builds were made after the submission deadline so I forgot to update this page. Will do it in a bit. Again, thanks for playing!

ithildin 2019-05-04 15:08

On the Windows version the top of the screen gets cut in both windowed and full screen mode at several display resolutions :confused:

I've tried to play anyway and the game feels quite polished, with cute pixel art graphics and catchy music, but I'm not sure about the target because of this. I lost once, then on the second game I did arrive to the shop, but it's hard to tell.

Any chance for a fix? The game looks right up my alley :)

minibobbo 2019-05-04 19:01

This was fun! Shooting a whole horde of zombies and then running into the middle of them to suck up all the hearts was super satisfying.

You've had some great comments above and I think you know this, but the default weapon is clearly superior to all the others :) The music and the mood was great and the graphics worked well. Some difficulty progression would be nice and give us a reason to keep playing!

rufia 2019-05-05 18:35

Love the cute pixel art and characters and the alternate bubble types were interesting, particularly the bubble that split into continually smaller bubbles, but ultimately the main weapon felt like the best weapon at your disposal. Sucking up a whole bunch of hearts at once also feels very fun. I'd love to have seen where this would have gone given more time.

remruts 2019-05-06 20:24

@ithildin Yeah, it seems that it's broken for a lot of resolutions. I think the best fix is drawing everything to a quad and then render the quad to screen (with bars when it doesn't fit). If I fix that, I'd probably want to fix A LOT of other stuff, so I won't be doing it quite yet. So, not this month, but maybe the next one when I'm not so busy and the voting has ended? I'm glad you liked it and thanks for playing.

@minibobbo Yeah, balancing was not part of the design process, hahaha. Thanks for playing and the nice words. Since there are some people who liked it, I'll try to finish it some time in the future.

@rufia Thanks! I think choosing a limited color palette worked well with the simple art. The hearts jumped around when spawned, which I think was more fun, but there was some kind of bug and they don't jump anymore.

hearts.gif