Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → BulletWell
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1262 | 3.31 | 32 | |
| Fun | 1051 | 3.25 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 571 | 3.51 | 32 | |
| Theme | 1186 | 3.43 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 1 | |||
| Audio | 1 | |||
| Humor | 867 | 2.72 | 29 | |
| Mood | 1548 | 2.91 | 32 |
The character feels a bit too floaty because they have inertia, which is a bit too floaty for a game that requires bullet hell-like precision. Also, the rate of descent is a bit too fast to react to some spikes. That being said, I really like the graphics, I like how enemies can die by being spiked, and the fact that you're just a bucket with a propeller. That's funny.
damn that's hard, i love it (that's what she said)
Really though game, I like the concept but I find the character controls a bit floaty and it's hard to line up to catch the bullets. Maybe if the character acted like a vacuum and sucked in the bullets from a greater distance or angle it'd help with that.
I great twist to a bullet hell game! The catching of bullets is a bit buggy though, as if you run at the bullets they sometimes hurt you. In my experience, I got hurt randomly as well. Player movement feels slow as the bucket speeds up too slowly. Shooting should also instantly happen instead of requiring the button to be held down, and also should NOT have that much recoil.
A great concept that can be polished a bit more.
Use enemies bullet to charge your weapon is a amazing mechanic and I realy loved it.
It's a simple and super fun game.
Great work!
too hard to play for me xp. The bullet collect point is too small. Anyway is a good concept.
My god this is so hard, I can't even pass the first wave of ennemies and I have tried several times ! But I might be bad... Otherwise the concept is really nice! (love the name btw)
EDIT: 6 waves! Yeah ! Didnt understand you could long press to shoot multiple bullets, that helps a lot!
Love it... yeah... the pixel art... the tunes... the concept. Good stuff. My favorite thing is the way the bucket on the music slider turns as you drag it... just a nice subtle touch.
the fire trigger is not so responsive so I had to keep the button pressed to shoot.
Also it could be a good improovement to add some kind of powerup. And an upper wall: i lost multiple times just by going up
Very hard for me, because I never played such games (only saw videos of it). Netherless I really enjoyed the time trying my best to move deeper into the well :D Gread job!
Fun stuff, one of the more satisfying things about this is how the enemies can die to obstacles as well. It's really satisfying to have 3 of them lined up against a wall only to have spikes plow through them all.
The game is quite scary to be caught in the middle of multiple enemies. While you CAN carefully pick up bullets from multiple angles, it's not worth the risk as it's easy to mess up such a thing and lose a precious HP. I usually just flocked to the furthest bottom area (that couldn't get hit by spikes) and turtled it out. I wouldn't say the game is terribly hard, but you do need to make sure you don't get caught in bad situations.
Regardless of that, I do like some of the hecticness the situations generated. It wasn't always easy figuring out the best way to prepare to absorb hits so I was always kept on my toes. An impressive game, especially for a solo effort.
Just a great game, really nice :).
Quite fun :)
Long time no see old pal, glad you've made it this time! :) This game is simple in its core design, but somehow I just can't stop playing it. Made it to the third wave, keep dying under mysterious circumstances. :thinking:
Bullet catching mechanic is clever and gives the game an interesting twist, but for the most of time it's easier to just float around. Spikes appear suddenly and without any notice, which is not so user-friendly, but I guess it's okay for a bullet-hell game. I love the fact enemies die on them too, otherwise I would have a very hard time. X_X
Here's the video of me playing the game with no commentary if you'd find it useful:
https://youtu.be/uM0NuF2958s
Thanks for submitting! Hope my in-stream feedback was helpful!
Hi, I'm not sure why the game wouldn't load in my browsers (Chrome and Firefox). Do you have a build for Linux?
EDIT: Just saw the Linux build. Thanks!
Interesting mechanic. Feels really good but I find it kinda hard to tell if the bucket has caught a bullet or not, maybe some visual and sfx feedback on the bucket would help.
Cool concept!
Very unique! Really like the twist on the bullethell genre. If you continue working on it after the jam, adding more enemy types and obstacles this could be turned into a fun little commercial game.
Graphics look great with nice colours and animation, and the music fits the gameplay well.
Great work, especially for one person!
Nice game! I liked the catching bullets mechanic, definitely intersting. Art & audio was pretty neat, too. The only confusing thing for me is that you cannot click once to fire a bullet, you have to hold the mouse button, which felt a bit unresponsive to me (but it's a minor detail). Overall, solid entry! :D
THX for playing and leaving nice feedback everyone.
Also sorry to everyone who played it before yesterday-ish and got damaged out of nowhere - I fixed a bug with dmg colliders staying longer than they should and similarly, on some resolution the scaling was off, so the top spikes weren't visible, so I'm sorry if you got murdered just by going up.
@matthewrobo @ryannielson I don't like super stiff movement, but the I might have overdone it with the inertia given it's a bullethell.
@thatanonoword Sorry, the random dmg should be fixed now. Were you dropping frames? I was missing the catches when I was recording thru the unity recorder, which was droppig frames quite a bit.
@thatanonoword @tyrannas @kromeboy @thomas-bringer The shooting after the bucket rotates was a design decision to make the player switch between shooting and catching (so they just don't catch and shoot out immediatelly). But it's clearly not the best way to handle that. What I think I could have done is either catch without pressing anything (ideally sucking in the bullets as mentioned by @ryannielson ) and the shooting, which would disable the catching, but would be way more responsive than the forced rotation. Oh well...
@joskerdu I'm glad someone noticed that. :wink:
@peachtreeoath Yeah, turtling at the bottom 4-ish tiles from the side is probably the best way to go. I wanted to add in SuperCrateBox weapon pickups to change things up, add actual score to the game and also to make enemies drop HP to incentivize riskier play.
@yngvarr Good to be back and finally ~~finish~~publish something again. The spikes are only on the walls to be fair. Originally I had them on every platform, but that was just ridiculous. I'm quite pleased people like the enemies getting obliterated by the spikes. THX for the video, that's super nice of you. (BTW. the -997 HP should be hidden - spikes do a flat 1k of dmg - but I found it slightly funny, so I just left it in :sweat_smile: )
@one-seed-fruit THX for confirming the :penguin: build actually works :) Yeah, I should have certainly added better feedback for the catching.
@okamit I don't think I'll go for an actual release, but I'd like to take this and make a better version (with the stuff mentioned in this post), but rewrite it in a different engine (in Rust with Bevy) as a learning experience. Could be fun.
I really enjoyed this game. i found it to be kind of hard to catch the bullets on top because it was spinning all the time. other than that it was a great idea and good use of the theme. thanks for making the game.
@secretpocketcat Unfortunately, having inertia makes movement feel _more_ stiff, not less.
https://youtu.be/VNVzN6DagTA
Having inertia in a tightly designed bullet hell means that some dodges may become almost uncontrollable because the ship basically doesn't reflect the inputs.
Sorry for being overly critical. As a big fan of shmups there's some pretty weird misconceptions of the genre and euroshmups deciding to stick in inertia because "it's realistic" is not fun.
nice game! The bullet catching was pretty unique and interesting; it feels like playing dodgeball. The mechanics or enemies felt like they could use a little extra something, but the core of the game is really solid. I was impressed to learn this was mostly all stock art; it meshes together so well!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007659333?t=07h48m42s
@paulhocker The feedback for catching is not great, I should have certianly focused more on that.
@matthewrobo I'm definitely not gonna argue that the current controls are great. I think the movement code (not rotation) is just 1 line IIRC. Honestly, terms like _floaty, stiff, tight_ etc. are not helpful at all, 'cause these are just subjective feel terms. No inertia is definitely a better description, so I'm glad you mentioned it, but I don't appreciate the prescriptive tone of your 2nd comment.
Just 'cause you prefer direct one-to-one input-to-movement approach doesn't make it the only 'proper' way to go. And this's not about realism for me (obviously none of this stuff is realistic and actual realism rarely makes for a fun experience), but I just don't like the sudden stop-start movement of direct input mapping. To me, it looks and feels bad. I realise that's a very subjective description, but so is your description of euroshmups.
It's about expectations, really, and learning the controls and how it's reflected in the rest of the game. I do prefer a slight messiness to the whole thing - less bullets with slightly less control, which is clearly not what you were looking for and that's completely fine, but it doesn't make your way the only correct one.
I'm gonna reiterate - the controls are not great and I'd have definitely liked to have more time to work on those, but I wouldn't likely have done the direct input-movement mapping.
@pancelor THX for playing, the stream was super chill. I definitely had plans to do more with the enemies, but my time-management wasn't great :sweat_smile:
Digging this. Pixel art is crisp and the musics sweet.
Shooting back seems a bit imprecise, or maybe I'm missing something?