Battlerager

Soda Pop Vampire by neontropics 2020-05-10T16:48:03Z

Cool visuals! The dialogue stuff is very cute and looks nice and chunky. Eventually I got quite annoyed with the repeated text when I started getting caught over and over, haha.

I don't think sound is working on my machine right now, so I can't rate it, sadly. I'll try to remedy that later and amend this comment.

As for gameplay: For the most part, it works well! I get stuck on level 6. I think it kind of falls apart in wide open spaces. Maybe I'm missing Metal Gear Solid experience (it's been a while). From what I can piece together, I think areas that would normally be in line of sight but are currently obscured are represented as dotted? It's a bit hard to see with the overall look / filter going on. It's not a problem when there's a bunch of walls, but when it's just a few boxes in a wide open field, it gets quite confusing. After looking at the menu, I found the 'unlock camera' option and thought that helped a bit. I think with stealth games like this, a more zoomed out, straight-down perspective makes things easier.

I liked this time limit addition to a stealth section via the depleting soda meter. Quite intense!

Cool game, good job!

-SPROUT- by ZEN 2020-05-10T16:36:39Z

Cool game! I really like the visual aesthetic. A hexagon is a cool shape for an arena (and the plant basin). Could even imagine a version where you move between adjacent "rooms" instead of just advancing to the next level (since hexagons form such a neat grid).

I don't think there was any sound, was there? A bit confusing with the audio volume slider still present in the options menu. If there is supposed to be sound, I'll have to go back and check it.

The one thing this needed, I think, was some feedback on when things are taking damage. This goes for both the plant (since the robots just wiggle against the basin once they get there) and especially the robots. It's good you added that little tutorial text telling me to make sure I'm in range to hit, but I don't think I have good tools to follow that advice. Maybe some classic red flashing on damage would fix this for both robots and plants in one go.

I like the water gun basic concept! Has a lot of cool applications I could imagine (putting out fires, maybe making some hedges grow, short some circuits, etc.)

All in all, cool idea, nice visuals, good job! Just needs a bit more feedback to player actions, I think. :)

Liftman by gamechoy 2020-10-10T16:07:30Z

Got a gameover once, got it on the second try. Manages to create quite the atmosphere! Can't figure out where the witch wants to go still...

Good game! Never riding an elevator again!

Loop Heart by NeithR 2020-10-09T17:40:18Z

It was fun! I enjoyed the varous elements (breakable blocks, switches to make hearts appear) being introduced.

Nice level progression.

One thing I don't fully understand is the choice to use mouse controls. As there are only 4 directions to shoot in, the conversion from mouse position to shoot direction was sometimes unpredictable / surprising. It also made the game kind of heart (**edit** haha, what a typo) to play on a laptop touchpad. (Yes, I know. Sorry!) Would appreciate something like arrow keys or WASD to just shoot in one of the 4 directions.

Nice game :smile:

Not Enough by Toccio94 2020-10-10T15:53:21Z

Enjoyed the graphics and visual effects a lot. Glad you pulled through despite hitting the Pico-8 limitations a couple of times! Would have loved some music, personally, but maybe that would have clashed with the glitch-y sound effects a lot? Not sure!

All A Board by Jake White 2020-10-05T23:47:50Z

Great graphics and presentation overall. Love how the slow-motion distorts the music. It felt like the lorry was going a bit too fast at times. Maybe a slower lorry speed, but some sort of fling physics on the projectiles to compensate, could be a potent mix.

I didn't get very far but will definitely try again. Great job!

Framed Space by LaJazuve 2020-10-09T16:36:21Z

Cool game and idea! Sometimes I couldn't push a block and I wasn't really sure why. Maybe it has to do with if there's grass on a block or not?

As others have already said, sometimes I'd get stuck in a block. Feels like this happens when wrapping around the screen (leaving on one side, coming out the other).

I think this basic principle would work really well with small, contained levels that you push around to reveal different sections of and make different jumps and interactions possible! Would be a cool puzzle game (then again, I'm really into puzzle games, so maybe take that recommendation with a pinch of salt :stuck_out_tongue: )

Nice effort!

The Serpent of Scorhill by Jofish 2020-10-10T14:14:32Z

Interesting concept! Certainly a cool spin on Snake. I liked the flavor text stuff! My main gripe is the graphics for the segments that make up the "Snake" body. Them being taller than one grid tile makes it kind of hard to line things up correctly, especially when things get crowded and hectic. Less is probably more for this kind of gameplay.

Still, I enjoyed my time with this!

LoopBots by Empty Set 2020-10-10T00:32:23Z

Very unique idea!

Because the loop always starts and ends at the base, setting a good loop is basically a mixture of getting the energy consumption vs. ore mining ratio right, and also performing well at platforming after starting a loop.

The first half of this got more interesting in later levels for sure. It meant that it might be the best move to actually wait standing in front of the base for a bit before handing in the ore, so the Loop Bot would consume energy slower. Cool! The second half - the platforming - suffered a bit from the controls, I feel. Up = Jump isn't my favorite, and controls did feel a bit slide-y in general. Certainly workable though!

I really appreciated how "complete" this felt, with a tutorial, levels with a timer (that felt doable but not easy! Got stuck on level 3, personally) and a main menu and such. Impressive in the Jam timeframe!

Bunny Loop by Fedora 2020-10-06T16:59:52Z

Enjoyed and beat this! The "Now playing" music player surprised me when it first came up. But it's a nice variety of music and knowing the song's name was appreciated.

The hopping movement is fine and pretty fun - but when you get the speed upgrade, it can lead to situations where the increased jump distance makes it really hard to reach a brush of berries or an upgrade stone, as moving back and forth always takes the bunny just past it. Have to do sort of a drive-by, haha.

It feels like trying to keep the bunny from dying wasn't really worth stressing over, as you'd respawn with all evolution points still intact. It made more sense to always keep pushing on recklessly instead of trying to focus on not taking damage / finding food. Maybe it you lost (some) evolution points on death, but the purchase costs were lowered to compensate, that could be changed?

At any rate, cute little game. I wish the bunnies the best of luck in their ...... future endeavours. :smirk:

TimeSlider - A Dopterra Story by Battlerager 2020-10-06T10:38:10Z

Thanks for the reviews and bug reports, everyone! I'm glad you enjoyed the game.

@neithr That crash seems to occur when resetting without having zapped anything in the level yet. Looks like I missed something in the cleanup that happens when changing levels. I'll fix it!

@cameron-foster Oops. That level was a puzzle I made before I started putting together the story structure, and I straight up didn't adjust the blockers to match the tiles here. My bad!

Anything For You by Emily Pitcher 2020-10-09T17:26:58Z

Good stuff! The writing, graphics and music combine to create a... melancholy mood. I enjoyed it!

If there's one gripe, it's that it was sometimes hard to click what I wanted to click one. It might be "fullscreen messing with the cursor" thing, I don't know. One time, the bike got priority over the "turn to see the next part of the room" arrows. Things like that.

A nice little personal story. Also, coordinating so many people seems like quite the challenge!

Loop Dream by ZoeAgxn 2020-10-13T15:25:43Z

Didn't fully understand the scoring system - is the goal to get to the goal as fast as possible, to keep the ball rolling as long as possible, to use as few tiles as possible? I wasn't sure, which stopped me from trying to go for a better highscore.

I did enjoy the game though. I liked how the music picked up as the game went along!

Space Police Simulator Platinum by Future Labs Unlimited 2020-10-09T18:27:28Z

At first I thought this didn't really fit the theme - until I saw the nice transition between platforms. But later, it occured to me - it's really about the cycle of violence and policing. There'll always be criminals, there'll always be paranoia, and there will always a policeman. I found myself laughing out loud many times at the sheer absurdity of the situation. My confusion combined with the bloodthirsty impatience of the alien populace combined with the manic soundtrack are a great mix for comedy.

Time is Ticking by RicardoEPRodrigues 2020-10-10T16:22:43Z

It's a fun concept to build levels around. There's one issue I ran into though: When you already have 4 or 5 blocks placed in a level, then fall off a ledge, this can mess up your block setup, and you basically have to place 5 new blocks, as they are replaced one by one.

Thanks for the game!

Corporate by Peche et Tradition 1867 2020-10-10T13:30:27Z

Graphics and audio did a great job creating that office atmosphere.

High production value for sure!

Rotating the office rooms to get an angle on these employees was cool. I didn't quite get how / when the game suddenly - is it on a timer? Anyway, I enjoyed this one.

i++ by SlavTurtle 2020-10-10T13:58:27Z

I THINK I got to the end of the game. That jumpin' son of a gun has won, I'm giving up. Great concept and it's pretty mesmerzing to see the blocks move the way they do. I feel like this would slap with a great soundtrack, with very simple geometric forms (as they are) pulsating to the beat, or something like that.

Enjoyed most of the levels - towards the end, there was one where you have to line up the blocks in a way that you can juuuust squueze between a regular block and a red one while jumping up. I felt that was a bit too finicky. But other than that, most levels were great - and there were lots of them!

Good job!

Dwarven Delve by fronwewq 2020-10-13T15:06:01Z

It's really fun!

I thought that the mushrooms are a surprising game over, visually. Also, turning enemies into skeletons and then dying to the skeleton feels a bit strange. The game description on this page states that only diamonds are safe to touch, but ingame, I felt it was a bit unclear.

Maybe a way of destroying / manipulating objects once they are on the conveyor belt would be a great addition!

At any rate, I had fun playing this. Cheers!

Dwarven Delve by fronwewq 2020-10-14T09:11:21Z

@fronwewq oh, I thought by combining three enemies (goblin /orc), I had somehow "killed" them, and replaced them with skeletons. Guess they just got replaced with those randomly one time, and then I made that assumption and never really thought about it again.

Boots & Booty by Ava Skoog 2021-04-28T23:27:18Z

Loving the aesthetic and how just the level of polish on display here. It feels very full and realized, with the map, the mechanics for pulling up treasure, the item checklist. Very impressive, given the timeframe.

Sadly I couldn't beat it, as I just couldn't finagle my way out of a very dastardly set of underwater rocks.

Great job on this. It feels like this could be the treasure hunting / traversal mechanics in a bigger, open world game with more stuff going on - basically a well executed slice, that works on its own. Thumbs up!

​​

Drill In The Dark by Battlerager 2021-04-29T23:32:58Z

@pnkvrt & @magnie thanks for the kind words! I'm really happy with how the atmosphere turned out, myself. Predicting what sprites would look like after the lighting system is applied was tricky, and the music was written while very, very tired. Could have gone worse!

@tigerj your "first few plays"? Did you play this game multiple times? Wow, thanks! :smile: I sadly didn't have the time to add in gamepad support. My guess is that the slingshot mechanic feels a bit better and more intuitive while using an analogue stick.

@dom-de-re & @just-dante Thanks! I agree, it's a bit confusing. Would have loved to show some onscreen text in level 1 maybe.

@Lelan Hey, I'm glad you liked that! I basically made as much content variety as I managed in the time, then decided to introduce them one at a time, starting with the simple ones. I think having some sort of arc like that is important.

@digitaldude555 Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the levels are roughly 3 minutes each. I got stuck having to make them that long to fit exactly what I wanted the player to see at a time on screen. Messing with scroll speed and enemy speeds might have fixed it, with more time to tweak.

Graphite Journey by pnkvrt 2021-04-28T17:54:33Z

I liked the visual style a lot! It felt kind of strange for the mount to not block player movement, but that's a nitpick.

The fruit(s) had different pieces of art, right? The camera was so zoomed in / the fruit so big that I often just stumbled into them and noticed I had picked up fruit by the counter going up instead of seeing fruit and consciously going to pick it up. I think a slightly more zoomed out perspective could have been nice, but I don't know how well that works with the art assets / art pipeline.

When those messages started appearing on the second round, I actually got a bit scared ;)

Great aesthetic, cool little game!