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Nucleus's itch.io pageJudge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- The quiet groove of the background music soothed me for much longer than I played the game, and it was quite relaxing to the ear. The text and entrance scene were also well-suited to the music's cosy tone. However, getting directly into the gameplay was startling, and the background sound appears to have been turned up and is a touch harsh in contrast. I particularly liked the look of the block trail you left as I zoomed over the tiled map floor; it felt extremely beautiful.The mechanics of the game were enjoyable to play; I enjoyed attempting to "snowball"; jumping was also a wonderful feature, and the physics simply felt excellent.
Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://drive.proton.me/urls/CBQWXG82VR#A87lIwhQr32e
Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
Yes
Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
Yes
Summarise your game!
Your player is surrounded by particles, "blocks", which you use as ammo to shoot. If you get hit you lose a certain amount of them and if you run out, you die in one hit
Please explain how your game fits the theme:
The "blocks" are part of you, which you use as a weapon
Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
I'd like some feedback on how to improve the polish and game feel side of things specifically, but general feedback is appreciated
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Comments
I really enjoyed this Cookie! - I had to turn my sensitivity all the way down but I think the idea was well executed
there were some spots where it would freeze up a bit when picking up things off the ground but that just might be a me thing
yea the freezes are a web thing, can't seem to fix them unfortunately
The controls felt great and what you did with minimal visuals popped very nicely. The shaders doing the most on this one haha. Very fun getting upgrades and the ranged enemies had insane aim. Great entry.
hey thanks! loved your entry aswell
The visual aesthetics of this were great. It would have been nice to have a bit wider view of the player so you could backup without falling off the level so easily. It would also have been interesting to have more diversity in enemy behavior so you weren't just kiting them around all the time. Even a few stationary turrets or something would have made the field more dynamic feeling.
you can increase your field of view in the settings if that's what you're talking about
stationary turrets are an amazing idea, might add it if i continue
I had fun. A few things I liked were... Not sure if this was intentional, but the enemy seemed to predict my movements and fired their cubes at me before I arrived at the spot - which was awesome! The aesthetic of the game, although simple, really does standout and it's amazing how far you can take this. Mechanic-wise, I really enjoyed this because it reminds me of a mecha game 🤣 you pilot the cube, and fend off other cubes within the arena. Awesome entry!!
I think I saw clips of this in the discord during development! Super fun, the visuals are clean and have lots of yummy juice to them. I enjoyed the fps style of play a lot. Unfortunately it froze a bunch, especially as the game went on (probably just my crummy laptop), which made it a little harder during dangerous moments. I'll just pretend that's the oooonly reason I didn't beat it, lol. What skill issue?
Great game, I'm glad I got to play it.
yea web build has some freezes unfortunately
It was still a good experience over all though!
ayy thanks
I love the visuals! The icon art is good, and I appreciate the effort put into the graphics menu. It happened to me that two enemies were in the same place, making it impossible to know which one was which
Really fun game! I managed to reach wave 20 on my first playthrough but died right at the end. The music is great! The art is really simple but works well.
I encountered a bug at around wave 14, where it had 2 ranged enemies still chasing me, but the enemy count being at 0, which started the next wave. This kept snowballing where every wave I would always have 1-2 enemies still alive that carry forward to the next. Which resulted in wave 20 having enemies chasing me, shooting me, on top of the bosses. I killed all the enemies except 1 boss, but died to it. Was pretty weird as even when there were 2 bosses left, the counter already showed 0 enemies on wave 20, so it was surprising it didn’t show an end screen.
The web app kept lagging on enemy spawns, which caused me to lose quite a chunk of HP each time many enemies spawned. But this game seems better suited as a standalone app, so it shouldn’t be a worry.
I love how many settings there are! This is the first game I’ve played so far that has so many settings available!
The enemies being able to shoot ahead of where your player is moving is a great touch to add on to the difficulty of the game. I had to keep doing zigzags to confuse the game if not I would just get hit. I also liked the addition that the lesser ammo/HP you have, the faster you move. It helps the player have a sort of catchup mechanic, as I dropped to 0 ammo many times since Wave 17.
An issue I had was the shop. In the shop, it told me things like a decrease in damage, or increase, but I had no idea the base damage numbers. I did not initially choose upgrades that decreased my damage, as I was unsure if it was possible to do 0 damage (or negative damage). The buckshot upgrade also seemed a little bad, as it consumed so much of my ammo, but sadly I couldn’t disable the upgrade. On the other hand, the pierce upgrade seemed amazing, as knocking back the enemies into the path of the bullet seems to let the enemy be hit multiple times. I feel that it would be great if the player could access the shop at any time instead of at set levels, as most of the upgrades come in a burst, despite having enough money for an upgrade at a particular moment.
Overall a really simple game done well! Great job!
This game is awesome! Really simple shapes but executed well. Clever use of ammo being your shield. Cool idea that I think is well done here.I think there's a ton you can do with this game! Great music and good SFX. Loved the look of the nucleus. Everything is so bright and I love the simple flat stage with the particley skybox! I think the enemies could use some sound. Or something. They kept sneaking up on me.
I think your shop could use some more variety to it and juice when picking upgrades in general. Think there's potential here!
Loved it! Well done!
ayyy thanks for the kind words!
the shop definitely was pretty rushed, couldn't come up with many good upgrade ideas
Finally finished wave 20 and completed the game! I needed to download the pc version since web lagged so much, but I do have a nice time after doing that! The game is very nicely done, the controls are very polished and smooth, and playing the game feels so good. It also got some good music to back the gameplay up too, nice work!
For some constructive criticism, I would really want to see where the enemies are, especially when they just spawned behind you. Maybe adding some sort of on-screen radar would be nice. Also, I think the bullets shot by the enemies are a bit fast and accurate and are quite difficult to dodge. Do they do predictive shots? I eventually resort to kiting enemies at an extreme distance in order to not get hit, and I guess that's not the intended way to play it. Also, I felt a bit sad not having anything to acknowledge the completion of the last wave, a good old "Game Completed!" screen would be nice!
Anyway, despite everything I've said, this is a very nice game! Nice work!
the enemies' predictive shots is just adding half a second of the player's current velocity to the position lol
yea good point tho, i should've nerfed them probably
You did a great job with the difficulty. I died on wave 15. I also played the windows build, because I understand what web build does to a game. I think it would be nice to know how much health the enemies had, along with how much damage you were doing to them. A lot of the enemies just tanked a lot of bullets. Sometimes, the blocks you pick up gave you 0 ammo. I feel like it was intentional, but it's not a great feeling after you just got all your blocks taken away after getting hit lol. Overall, I enjoyed the game and the particles were fun to look at. The menu and settings screen is also really impressive! Best one I've seen so far.
blocks giving you 0 ammo was definitely not intentional, dunno what's going on there
Nice little shooter you have made! I did experience some small stuttering at the start of waves and when enemies spawned, but I'm guessing that's probably really just a problem in the browser version of the game. Game felt pretty nice to play, movement and jumping were good. I think for this style of game I would prefer to fight against more enemies with less health. Since each wave really only has like 1-3 enemies and they all take multiple shots to kill, feels a bit slow in that regard. I hope you keep working on this idea, great job!
I'm rating based on the windows version because nobody likes WebGL. Also, no sugarcoating in my feedback as always, trying to help in making this game the best it could be.
First impressions:
Pretty decent main menu, it's definitely more than what I'd expect for a game jam game!
Would definitely add some SFX for the sliders, buttons etc. but otherwise I like it.
So first of all I think the gameplay is both too slow and too fast at the same time. The enemies and cube resupplies spawn really slowly with a large cooldown between them. I would increase spawn rates for both of these, especially the cubes since currently if you run out of cubes (which doesn't take too long) you just end up running around in circles until a new one spawn. This really breaks the flow of the game!
You can also mitigate this by adding shop upgrades that increase the amount of cubes you get per resupply.
Not sure if it's intentional, but the piercing upgrade lets the player hit the same enemy multiple times.
Uhm, why can you fall off the map? I feel like this is the most unnecessary and evil feature you added and it adds nothing to the game only pain and suffering... This is the reason why I quit early (just after the first elite where I died like this twice).
The hitbox on enemy projectiles is absolutely diabolical. I've never truly felt like the bullets actually connected with the player. Would definitely make them smaller, or make the player's projectiles bigger in order to make it more consistent.
I don't really like the sound design of the game, I think it's something that definitely has room for improvement. The first step would be to not use SFXR or other sound effect generators since those don't really fit the game that well. Some more futuristic, a bit glitchy sounds would fit this game a lot more.
I would recommend digging around in these sites for SFX and most of the are free to use!
https://www.zapsplat.com/sound-effect-packs/
https://99sounds.org/cinematic-sound-effects/ and other packs from 99sounds
https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/
Would definitely add sounds for when the enemy's shooting and when a bullet is approaching. Helps judge what's happening around the player while trying to look for cube resupplies. Don't be afraid of layering, shortening, fading these sounds in something like Audacity or some Digital Audio Workstation like FL Studio. It's definitely tough but once you wrap your head around it and with some creativity it can get really fun!
Balancing is a bit interesting as there aren't any upgrades that are just purely positive. This kinda forces the player to upgrade all of the at the same time, otherwise they'll have a weak point. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this? It's both a good and a bad idea...? Kinda ruins the fun of breaking the game for the sake of a balanced build, but that doesn't really fit this game all that well.
There are a few UI improvements that I'd like to see. The first one is replacing the crosshair with a line on the ground which shows the direction of where the player will shoot. Not 100% sure if this is better, I just feel like it would be. If not that, then I'd definitely make the crosshair smaller and thinner in general. Currently it covers up a large portion of the screen and I don't think that's a great thing when you're trying to see what you're aiming for. (nvm ignore this since the bullets come out from the center of the camera which I find a bit weird but it's fine I suppose)
Secondly, I would definitely add some sort of health bar to the enemies. Currently there's no way of judging how much damage the player is doing to the enemies which is really not ideal.
There's also a bug when using Buckshot, the UI shows (-1 cubes) when in reality it's taking away 2 or however many you're shooting.
Please add [ESC] a keybind for pause menus even for WebGL! I almost missed this and I wanted to adjust volume stuff ingame. Having it bound to [ESC] doesn't do any harm on browser builds although yes it's a bit weird for fullscreen stuff. Would also recommend binding it to [P] as well.
For polshing I'd say you just need more animations for UI. A lot of polishing is basically UI work afterall. Here are some ideas that you could do to improve stuff:
Also, study https://yollie.itch.io/ 's games. They are FULL of insane VFX stuff and you can learn a lot from him. (he's also one of my long time friends but that's irrelevant here)
Overall, it's an OK prototype that is a great base for practicing a bunch of fields of gamedev such as VFX, SFX and UI. If you have the time, I'd definitely try playing around with my suggestions to see how they affect the game!
Best of luck Cookie man! ❤️
there is supposed to be a trail, but it disappears after the first time you die because i'm bad at coding
amazing feedback tho! i'll make sure to take it into account, might continue the game after the jam we'll see
What a ridiculously well crafted and in-depth feedback, not even my submission and I learnt something. Thank you.
Quite a fun arcade shooter!
Would've been nice if there was a win screen of some sort once you beat all the waves, but there not being one also allowed me to just wander around and pick up ammo until I exploded. Seeing the particle count surrounding my character balloon to ridiculous sizes gave me a laugh.
Well done!
i was gonna add a win screen but then i just didn't
(v.v)
Cookie is tooo fricken amazing GEEZ! 5.3/5
But seriously its a blast! I didn't know what the capsule was until it was too late ><' hah
ayyy thanks for the kind words <3