Gossamer Glade

frogravity 2024-10-07 07:58

Managed to defeat the boss and upgrade the tree! On day 1 - not sure whether it's a bug or I accidentally speedran the game :) The concept of a city builder with a shmup is cool though - I did not expect to enter a totally different game upon ending the first day! The graphics here are very pretty too, and it's nice that the boss has a different music. The game wasn't very stable - it crashed both when trying to upgrade the armory and quitting - but it wasn't a huge deal. Overall, really nice entry!

deepfreeze 2024-10-07 08:09

The city building aspects were admittedly super rushed in the last moments of the jam, so I made the requirements for the tree upgrade just require a boss kill. The initial plan was to need various items, as well as population requirements to upgrade the tree (But Unfortunately, building houses had to get cut due to time constraints), with the final upgrade needing the nectar, but time ran out, so I had to simplify the tree. The boss only having a singular attack was also a victim of time. I'm still getting used to HTML5 exports and I struggle with debugging them. The windows version should be much more stable.

pirate-rob 2024-10-07 08:10

Amazing game, I love the concept so much, will you be making a post-compo version to fix some of the bugs/issues?

deepfreeze 2024-10-07 08:21

Yeah, I plan on fixing it up a bit post-compo. The main plan is to implement the city building a bit more as intended, with the UI actually telling you what's going on, as well as making the boss challenging, as the top priorities besides bug fixes.

ellaris 2024-10-07 11:44

I liked the art and the sounds/ music were also good, and eventually managed to get to what seemed like gameplay.

+ The city building seemed to crash the game, and I don't know if anything was happening there. + The boss was a nice thing but it was very predictable + I found myself several times wondering if I just keep flying until I die and then how much hp the boss has. + The "spider" that shot 3 times was a bit difficult to kill as the screen was small and had to move to it dodge it's attacks and then he was almost on top of me so had to run away. + In the options it seemed like several buttons had functionality, but in city building either nothing happened or it crashed, and during flight I only moved and shot.

tuism 2024-10-07 12:58

A lot of things packed into a tiny tiny space, but it doesn't feel like a lot of what would make it a unique work... works? This is why "scope down" is often repeated as the number one lesson in jams :up: - Yeah you already know this, the entire starting experience is impossible to understand. Some of the menu selections straight up crash the game. You could have disabled them? - The window is tiny and I didn't see any way of making it full screen or enlarging it or anything, that's no good. - The shooter part of the game works alright, nothing very interesting. No bombs, no movement mechanics. No powerups during a level. I understand that the metagame was meant to be the main hook, but like, the main game just feels flat. - The resources being outlined in white is a nice design detail. - There's nothing to tell you about the length of a level, and there's so much repetition that it feels like... Something's wrong, am I supposed to trigger the end of a level somehow? Players should have some way to easily tell how long till the end of a level. - Logic wise - you're flying, but you'll hit ground beetles walking. Other shooters have resolved this kind of thing in various ways (can't remember shooter names, but there are several well known ones that "throw bombs" to hit ground targets and you can fly over ground targets. If you wanted to have slow moving enemies that collide with the player you can quite easily just retheme the enemy sprite and change nothing else) - The boss was also completely flat and uninteresting, one single attack, repeated forever. - Everything is technically very competently executed. Music, graphics, animation, etc. But the game itself just isn't very interesting. Again I say - scope down, focus on getting the player to the interesting hook of your game AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!

bitluderrb7804fr 2024-10-07 15:03

I pressed z on the workshop, and I got a black screen. Anything else I tried didn't do anything. I need an explaination on how to play this... But it looks interesting.

deepfreeze 2024-10-07 22:32

@bitluderrb7804fr @ellaris Ok the HTML5 armor upgrade crash should be fixed. (Crash was due to a typo, but only affected the HTML5 version, which is why I missed it.) @tuism Yeah, time got the better of me; I tried to chase two hares and caught neither, and it shows. Xevious-style ground attacks might be a good idea for a future, post-jam build, as well as some much-needed variation.

klaus-peter 2024-10-08 16:03

It's a broad game with quite a lot of features. I really enjoyed the music and the scenery. But as others mentioned it was difficult to first even understand what even the task is and that the gameplay felt a little all over the place. I thought maybe a smaller focus on one or two mechanics would have given the interaction of the player more meaning.

deepfreeze 2024-10-24 04:39

After giving it a lot of thought, I've chosen to halt development of this game after the next patch (which will make the boss actually not be exceedingly boring). I absolutely overscoped, combined with a slow first day, lead me to make some poor game design decisions, which cannot be easily rectified by minor tweaks, and it needs a whole rebuild from the ground up. I am currently working on other projects at this time, which I should put more focus on. Thus it will likely be a few years before I come back to this concept. I earnestly believe there is a good concept in here, but I executed it quite poorly.