Voidborn

dank-nibba 2019-10-08 13:40

When you run the game you immediately think "THIS WAS MADE IN ONLY 72 HOURS?!" Everything the game does is just amazing. Gameplay is simple yet fun, humor is top notch, level design is unique, not to mention the beautiful pixel art graphics (honestly, this is some of the best pixel graphics I've seen). The mechanics seem perfectly balanced, making the game not too hard, not too tricky. Loaded with references, easter eggs and hilarious dialogue, this game is a blast to play. The only difficulty I had was with the camera not skewing enough for me to see the bullets during level 2-3's tower section. Other than that, this is one of my personal favourite submissions.

zsombro 2019-10-08 18:20

I think that this game is impressive enough that the lack of sound can be excused! I thought the idea was neat, although I have to say that it's more on the frustrating side of things in terms of difficulty, but maybe I just have to git gud

shelvid 2019-10-08 18:25

@zsombro Hey man, thanks a lot! What part did you find most frustrating? It's really hard to judge a difficulty when you are so used to playing your own game hahah

@dank-nibba Thank you a lot! Best pixel art is probably a bit too much but thanks a lot hahah

zsombro 2019-10-08 18:34

World 1-1 I think? Where you have to jump behind a wall that has two enemy soldiers, it's difficult to time jumps since the pattern of how of then they shoot doesn't seem to have a discernible rhythm that I could follow, so I get shot quickly

I think this one-hit type of game works better when the patterns are clearly predictable, since the idea behind a game like this is that the player is meant to plan. This could also be supported by levels that fill one screen

shelvid 2019-10-08 18:38

@zsombro Oh that's unfortunate. I in theory did put a pattern where each unit has its own fire rate and they fire shots in equal pauses but i think because there is more than 1 soldier in that pit it gets confusing? Thanks a lot for your input! Will definitely keep that in mind :)

moddingmachine 2019-10-10 20:01

Awsome Game! Its pretty diffucult but fun overall! Its a shame you didn't have time to add in sounds.

shelvid 2019-10-10 20:05

@moddingmachine I'm very glad you enjoyed it! Didn't want to make the game too easy but i hope it wasn't just anger inducing difficulty, Could you share what you found difficult? Would love to know :) I too feel very sad that i had no time for sounds, definitely could have been much better but oh well, I'm glad i managed to put in 11 levels instead :)

moddingmachine 2019-10-10 20:11

@shelvid The game had a nice amount of diffuculty but it was kinda frustrating when you would die (get one shot) and the whole level would reset.

shelvid 2019-10-10 20:12

@moddingmachine Ah, thanks a lot! Will definitely keep that in mind, now i kinda wish i added checkpoints :^)

arcus 2019-10-10 20:47

Great art style :smile:

shelvid 2019-10-10 20:49

@arcus Huge thanks man!

jakemchugh1 2019-10-10 21:01

Fantastic art style! This reminds me of megaman games.

shelvid 2019-10-10 21:09

@jakemchugh1 Thanks a ton! I'm a beginner pixel artist so your words mean a lot to me :) Funnily enough i did look up megaman videos to see how games art looked because i was feeling lost with some of the tile drawing hahah, thanks a lot for the comment!

dodelov 2019-10-10 22:05

Very good idea and graphics. In the world, 0-3 flew over the map without seeing the way out)) In the world 1-3, after the dialogue, a checkpoint is needed so as not to read the dialogue again. There is a lack of music and sounds. But overall very very good. Good job.

pedro-rosa 2019-10-10 22:09

Overall I really liked the game. The concept is a simple shooter platformer with a lot of humour and really fun to play. I think it was clear the authors tried to make something related to the theme of the jam and in the end when of the day the game accomplishes that object. You really start from nothing with only the character movement and as the time goes by the player gets more and more mechanics. Regarding the mechanics walking and jump, mechanics are very nice. Especially the jump animation reminds me of Samus. The shooting mechanic is not so good for me, mainly due to the short fire range but I get that it was a design decision probably to make the game more challenging. The level design is well thought out but I think there is a big rampage of difficulty from the 1st part with the torrent to the second part with the 2 enemies. I think a more classic level design approach were you present one enemy alone and them you present them in groups would make the game a bit more easy to play. The art style works great, I don't have anything to point out and as I said before I love the jump animation. I also have a suggestion here you could make some death animations, add some particles and a bit of a camera shake to have a better game feel. In my opinion that would make the game great. I will end this review by saying I loved the humour of the game 5*. The way the narrator talks with you was so funny. Congrats, great job.

shelvid 2019-10-10 22:11

@dodelov Hey huge thanks! The 0-3 bug is bizarre, never appeared when playtesting :D As for 1-3 dialogue repeating after death that's really odd, most likely a bug as i definitely programmed a checkpoint and it worked for everyone that i know :) Lack of sounds sadly is not a bug hahah, really felt sad that i had no time for that for sure. Thanks once again!

shelvid 2019-10-10 22:19

@pedro-rosa Huuge thanks for the review! The jump animation was definitely inspired by samus's jump... indirectly as i remember i saw it somewhere but didn't remember who jumped like that, thanks for telling that hahah. Yes the shot distance was definitely a game design thing... sadly left from the time when level design was a bit different, definitely forgot to increase the range, it's very difficult to balance a game when you get used to your own games mechanics :) It definitely was difficult to figure out how to approach difficulty as i'm relatively new to platformer genres and i don't quite understand that side of balancing, definitely hoping to improve it for future, thanks for pointing that out :) Sadly i wanted a quick death animation but i ran out of time, had to put up game with 15 minutes left on submission hour. Very glad you enjoyed the humor! It was very fun to write dialogues for this game :) I'm extremely glad that you enjoyed the game and left such a review, thank you!

finalforeach 2019-10-10 23:14

Very good level design with very smooth control. One of the more fun games I've played here. Difficult, but I got all the way through. Also, V01-D is the spitting image of the boomer meme.

V01-D = Boomer.png

shelvid 2019-10-10 23:22

@finalforeach Hey man, thanks a ton! Those words mean a lot to me :) That comparison had me laughing for a while, I've seen that picture and not once has that comparison popped up in my head, damn it

welshdivision 2019-10-10 23:32

This game is top-notch in terms of difficulty and controls. Everything is up to the player to do, and the game does not hold your hand, which I think works really well with the aesthetic and theming. I enjoyed this game thoroughly and would play more if there was more. The lack of sounds is the only issue with this game. Even without them, this is one of my favorite entries I've played so far.

shelvid 2019-10-10 23:37

@welshdivision I'm extremely glad you enjoyed the game to this degree! With these reviews i realized that for some the difficulty is a bit too much, for some its just the right amount, glad you enjoyed the difficulty :) You saying "would play more if there was more" really makes me happy, from the very beginning i wanted to make a sequel to this game but now i'm even more tempted to actually go for it hahah. Huge thanks for this review!

alphaden 2019-10-11 02:16

We cannot believe that this game was made in 3 days time. Unbelievable. Great work. Then the art style of this game looks pretty cool. I love the gameplay.

shelvid 2019-10-11 02:23

@alphaden Huuge thanks man! I did mess up my sleep a bit but damn if it wasn't worth it for these reviews hahah. Really glad you loved the art and gameplay! Means a ton for me especially the art part as i'm mainly a programmer :)

david-shire 2019-10-11 03:21

Funny. And hard! But not impossible

trevor-shoe 2019-10-11 04:46

Nice work! The game is really nicely put together, and I'm impressed with the amount of content. Love the voice in the speech bubbles too :)

Found it a bit hard -- I felt like the hit boxes on the projectiles were unforgiving, and was constantly doing an accidental jump after landing on a platform. I could probably get better, but that would require really dedicating myself.

vaibho 2019-10-11 07:34

The graphics were awesome and animations were nice. The game was quite hard. Overall, a nice game. I liked it. Nice work.

shelvid 2019-10-11 10:15

@david-shire I'm very glad you found its difficulty fair :)

@trevor-shoe Thanks a lot! Hitboxes are definitely not adjusted, they are simply fitted perfectly pixel to pixel so its basically very straight forward in collision. Jump happens probably because when holding down space, the ground checker detects ground too quickly and you end up jumping again. Thanks a lot for the comment!

@vaibho Thanks a ton! Glad you enjoyed it :)

jam373 2019-10-11 15:29

Difficult but really fun, loved the boss designs too. Well done!

trevor-shoe 2019-10-11 18:51

@shelvid one idea for the jumping issue I mentioned would be to listen for "key down" on space, rather than "is pressed" -- that way, I'd have to manually press the button for each jump. I think this is how most platformers do it.

honey-pony 2019-10-11 20:45

Pretty good gameplay but man is this game hard. There are a couple problems that I want to try to enumerate so that my feedback can be of some use. :smile: I couldn't get past world 2-2 so that'll be my main jumping off point.

The first one is that your gun fires really slowly and with a very short range. The rate at which it fires makes it possible to dodge maybe one bullet at a time from the normal enemies, which I think is the primary reason I couldn't get past world 2-2. The rocket guy at the beginning shoots rockets so fast and the only way I could ever get around them was to shoot the first one and then somehow maneuver around the second one. Part of this was due to the fact that sometimes the rocket would be not exactly level with my character so there was no way to shoot it at all.

And that brings up another problem: the rockets in the second world are really hard to maneuver around. In my experience I more or less could not jump over them, which meant my only option was to sort of run away, and I had to have a bit of luck to pull it off.

However both of these things are relatively forgiveable. I think they could even be left as is and the game could be fine. I think my main problem is that shooting is really unresponsive. I usually would try to shoot right as a bullet got to me and I would always die instead. (This also happened on world 2-2). On the world 2-1 boss I in fact generally would allow a few moments of lag time so that I would not die when hitting his bullets, but then of course I was always worried I would be too far away... :)

Perhaps the player bullets should be prioritized over enemy bullets somehow so that you generally don't die when trying to fire them out of the air. You could maybe even have a frame of invincibility when shooting although some testing would be necessary to see if that worked right.

I think the other thing that generally would help is creating a more predictable pattern when two enemies are on the same floor. I was unable to kill both enemies on the bottom floor of world 2-2 once I finally got down there a few times as they would usually begin firing before I was able to.

I should say though that I do, as a general rule, like a lot of what I played. I had some real fun but I just got frustrated when certain mechanics felt really unfair to me. In particular the player platforming feels pretty good for the most part although you can get trapped on the corners of enemies and that's basically a death sentence.

I do have two criticisms of the art, if you don't mind: First, I can't always tell when something is a platform or background. The first time I saw the orange bricks I thought they were lava, and when I saw the blue tiles in world 2-2 I at first thought they were solid platforms and so I died once to that mistake. I'm afraid I'm not enough of an artist to tell you how to fix this problem, just thought I should mention it.

Second, I always tell people when I see it to never mix pixel art resolutions. In my opinion it practically never will look as good as pixel art that is all drawn as the same resolution.

As far as rotating pixel art goes, I think that's kind of up to the individual. To be clear, I'm talking specifically about scaling up your pixel art, and then rotating it. If you rotate a graphic, and then it's rendered pixel-perfect with the rest of your graphics I think that looks good (I did it in my own game) but if you scale up your pixel art and then rotate it, it isn't pixel perfect and in my personal opinion pixel-perfect graphics are always better. However I think this is definitely more personal preference, I used to actually prefer it the other way around (sort of).

Anyways, hope this feedback helps and doesn't come across too harshly. You gave me some great feedback on my game and I wanted to reciprocate. :smile:

shelvid 2019-10-11 21:05

@jam373 Thank you a lot! Glad you enjoyed it :)

@trevor-shoe Thanks a lot for the suggestion, will definitely try to see how it works! Or for that matter how other platformers do it :)

@honey-pony Thanks a lot for the huge review! Don't worry about harshness, all of the points you stated are very much critical :) First of all the rocket issue on 2-2. As you know playtesting the game on LD is very hard as you are mostly the only one playing the game.. Now the reason why i said that is because for me that part is very doable but of course i couldn't get others to play before upload so... now that you point it out, that part is horribly designed :D Huge thanks for pointing that out, will try to get rid of that kind of design.

As for shooting i definitely don't have a pre-programmed delay, shooting is one of the highest priority in execution order in the script but i will definitely look through that as it seems to be an issue sometimes, i totally got you, thank you :)

I definitely wanted to add clouds to make it look like a window but as you see, there are no clouds :^) (time constraints/sucking at drawing fast). I love how 2-2 seems to be the most problematic level hahah, i did try to put as many combat encounters to keep it fun but yeah, with lack of platformer balancing that... definitely didn't come out as brilliant as i envisioned it hahah.

Yeah that's definitely up to a personal preference, i definitely wanted to experiment on which one would look nicer but sadly had no experience to pull that off :) But even with that i kinda prefer smooth rotation (maybe i need to play more pixel games to give a better answer to this tho so take this with a grain of salt). The scaled pixel art was mostly product of me sucking at drawing, i had really hard time trying to draw a huge version of certain things (e.g. First Boss, had to draw it in small resolution and then upscale to make it look acceptable). I definitely need to sharpen my pixel art skills, i definitely agree on the pixel resolution variety looking odd :)

Thanks a lot for the comment! I definitely can take away a lot of things from that :) Glad you still enjoyed this messy project hahah

honey-pony 2019-10-11 21:09

@Shelvid Yeah, I didn't think the lag when shooting was a programmed lag--I guess I should have been more clear. It just *feels* laggy because I can't process the game as quickly as a computer, which is why it would be good to compensate with a little extra leeway.

For example, I don't know if you did this, but a lot of platformers will add "coyote-time" -- you will still be allowed to jump for a few frames after you leave a platform, as sometimes when people *feel like* they press the button "right on the edge" they are already off of the platform a little bit.

shelvid 2019-10-11 21:13

@honey-pony Ah damn the invisible platform! I totally forgot to implement that, it did feel weird trying to make some jumps, couldn't figure out what it needed. Thanks a lot :) Your tips definitely help me out as i want to work on this game in the future, huge thanks! Good luck with your entry as well :)

dock-frankenstein 2019-10-12 09:02

The gun is really slow. Except that it was fun.

shelvid 2019-10-12 16:58

@franciszek-pyrc Thank you a lot! It is supposed to be a shotgun so i went for a slow speed but it might have ended up being too slow hahah

rodrigo-denubila 2019-10-14 02:09

Really cool game. I laughed a lot in these dialogue boxes, mainly when I didn't skip it. I think the gun could be more quick. I died a lot because of that. But overall is a good game. Good job!

unidaystudio 2019-10-27 12:09

Hi, an idea for you: your game is great and it will look even good (visually) if you play around with 2D lights... Try it out. :)

shelvid 2019-10-29 17:08

@unidaystudio Thank you a lot! Will definitely mess around with it :) Is 2D Light a new feature? Doesn't seem familiar

shelvid 2019-10-29 17:09

@rodrigo-denubila Really glad you enjoyed the game! Yeah i guess gun could use more speed, definitely made mistake in that :) Thanks a lot!