Really enjoyed your game! LOVE the music and sounds, reminds me of Punch-Out!!. I think each moss attachment should slow you down a tiny bit in addition to this combo mechanic I see in the comments. Also, the fact that enemies fire projectiles right at the start is too much difficulty right off the bat, in these kinds of games projectile shooting enemies don't start until about 5 min in, I assume you tested this and probably found the game maybe too easy without the shooting? Maybe have it shoot less often, I'm having a hard enough time dodging enemies, great work!
Fair enough, I considered extending the timer to 15 minutes and having a more gradual difficulty increase but I figured for a jam game it would be best to keep it shorter. In hindsight it definitely could have been a good idea to let the player get a few level ups in before throwing anything too challenging, since the first 2 minutes are especially rough if you get unlucky and don't get any attacking moss. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
Hey, interesting game, I like the concept of the moss attachments but I feel like the placement of the moss didn't matter, I would say you should continue this concept by making each attachment act differently when paired in certain shapes with others.
I also felt like I was too weak as the player, this may be a mechanic or perception issue I don't know. I would consider either bumping up damage or add some sort of screen shake or the like to feel more powerful.
Thanks for playing! I originally wanted to make the moss placement matter more, such as making moss more effective when placed next to other moss of the same type, but I unfortunately ran out of time to implement this. A valid point to raise regardless
This is really awesome! I made a bullet hell survivor-like as well, but didn't get as far with the gameplay. This is really sticky and I like the idea of developing your own mossy attachments. You did an awesome job! I'd be really interested in knowing if you had any resources that you cited when designing and tuning this game. It feels like you got it down well.
Thank you! I mostly just felt it out as I went, but I'd say my past experience with playing a lot of these sorts of games helped with knowing how to tune the mechanics (Vampire Survivors obviously, as well as 20 Minutes Till Dawn; and some bullet hells like Enter the Gungeon, Touhou, among others). Other than that I just have a lot of past experience with hobbyist game development in general so it's largely practice :)
Ah, wonderful! My domain specific problem for my version of this gameplay, was the severe blob growing in the center of the screen. It didn't help that my game isn't optimized so well! Your game is butter smooth :)
In that regard, there were two main decisions I made that helped reduce lag:
I tried to design the enemies such that they were less plentiful but a bit bulkier/more aggressive so that there was less "crowd crush" to resolve
To account for cases where the player isn't clearing enemies fast enough, or even intentionally avoids damaging enemies to amass a bigger crowd, I made it so that any enemy who lives for longer than 60 seconds will start to run away from the player instead - and despawn once they're out of the play area. This did have a side effect of having some enemies run away and then fire at you from way outside of the camera region, which I forgot to fix haha
The TL;DR is that even without a super efficient collision method, some effective game design can go a long way to help circumvent the issue
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Really enjoyed your game! LOVE the music and sounds, reminds me of Punch-Out!!. I think each moss attachment should slow you down a tiny bit in addition to this combo mechanic I see in the comments. Also, the fact that enemies fire projectiles right at the start is too much difficulty right off the bat, in these kinds of games projectile shooting enemies don't start until about 5 min in, I assume you tested this and probably found the game maybe too easy without the shooting? Maybe have it shoot less often, I'm having a hard enough time dodging enemies, great work!
Fair enough, I considered extending the timer to 15 minutes and having a more gradual difficulty increase but I figured for a jam game it would be best to keep it shorter. In hindsight it definitely could have been a good idea to let the player get a few level ups in before throwing anything too challenging, since the first 2 minutes are especially rough if you get unlucky and don't get any attacking moss. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
Hey, interesting game, I like the concept of the moss attachments but I feel like the placement of the moss didn't matter, I would say you should continue this concept by making each attachment act differently when paired in certain shapes with others.
I also felt like I was too weak as the player, this may be a mechanic or perception issue I don't know. I would consider either bumping up damage or add some sort of screen shake or the like to feel more powerful.
Thanks for playing! I originally wanted to make the moss placement matter more, such as making moss more effective when placed next to other moss of the same type, but I unfortunately ran out of time to implement this. A valid point to raise regardless
This is really awesome! I made a bullet hell survivor-like as well, but didn't get as far with the gameplay. This is really sticky and I like the idea of developing your own mossy attachments. You did an awesome job! I'd be really interested in knowing if you had any resources that you cited when designing and tuning this game. It feels like you got it down well.
Thank you! I mostly just felt it out as I went, but I'd say my past experience with playing a lot of these sorts of games helped with knowing how to tune the mechanics (Vampire Survivors obviously, as well as 20 Minutes Till Dawn; and some bullet hells like Enter the Gungeon, Touhou, among others). Other than that I just have a lot of past experience with hobbyist game development in general so it's largely practice :)
Ah, wonderful! My domain specific problem for my version of this gameplay, was the severe blob growing in the center of the screen. It didn't help that my game isn't optimized so well! Your game is butter smooth :)
In that regard, there were two main decisions I made that helped reduce lag:
The TL;DR is that even without a super efficient collision method, some effective game design can go a long way to help circumvent the issue
Yes, that's really good advice!