My highscore was 55 :) I kinda love how blindingly fast the character moves haha, I think the game would have been too easy if it was easier to control
A lot of submissions were in the same vein of shoot-stuff-while-moving-around, but while most of them utilized conventional health systems, I deeply appreciate how this one framed it around the theme of Don't Get Surrounded by having quadrants you needed to avoid having enemies fill. Very clever :)
My score was 143.1s :) the way the penguin moves put the biggest smile on my face. I'm not sure if I just got unlucky or if it's designed to be rare, but I got 5 sticky feet spawns and only 1 icicle breaker spawn, which made dealing with the icicles hard. But maybe that's the point!
283 was my final score :) I dawdled a lot because I didn't notice that I could scan for documents for the first couple of minutes I was playing, but after noticing it, I was able to speedrun collecting them and getting tot he island.
35.003s was my high score :) surprisingly difficult! It's neat that, even though there were only two threats to consider, the way they played off of eachother added a satisfying level of complexity to the game.
Made it to wave 11 before feeling like I was going infinite and had to call it quits :)
I really want to praise the decision to make the control for placing cows on Earth 'S'. I fumble with controls in a lot of games, especially when I'm playing dozens after a game jam, but making a core mechanic like placing cows on Earth S was extremely intuitive. It was easy to internalize it as I'm sending cows *down* to Earth, so I never had to take the seconds it normally would to remember what the control to do so was. And surprisingly, the seconds mattered during waves 5-10! There were multiple times where I was in the 10s of health down to the wire, and some clutch teleport + cow plays saved my life.
My high score was 8136 at 2x speed :) I really appreciate how quick and snappy it is to try and go for a better score. I'm not a huge fan of games that expect me to spend more than a minute trying to beat a previously set score, so attempts in this one generally being less than 20 seconds made me keep trying.
Easily the best implementation of the theme, in my opinion. A lot of games (ours included) conflated the idea of being surrounded with avoiding contact, while this game legitimately wants you to avoid being surrounded. Very creative!
Especially about the AI, since that's what gave us the most heartache during the project, haha. There was a really bad bug on the second to last day that had us up until 4am on a discord call debugging where seemingly randomly, ALL of the letters would freeze in place and start spinning in circles firing in random directions endlessly (it'd even affect newly spawned enemies). A handful of hacks later, and you get the current solution that's in the game, which involves the C letters listlessly staring off into the distance for some reason. But whatever, we were just happy the game was playable :)
As for the map, you're totally right in that it was primarily a template blockout. Myself and the other programmer were more interested in making the shooting/scoring/AI systems the best they could be, so we didn't put that much time into map design. And yeah, the game's connection to the theme is admittedly pretty weak... we latched onto the notion that an echo was a copy of something early on, and figured we could pretty conveniently work that into whatever game we wanted to make, which ended up being a score attack arena shooter :)
Gotcha, will keep that in mind. I didn't know that was an issue since doing the "Extract All" option on my computer automatically generated a folder for the files, but I guess it behaves differently on other machines.
This is pretty fine for a first game :) one piece of game jam-specific advice I'd recommend is to try and incorporate a scoring system into a game like this! It doesn't have to be anything complicated, just adding 1 to an integer whenever you defeat an enemy, and displaying that to the player. Heck, you could have even just made it output in the console.
I also think it's important to scale the difficulty as time goes on. I'm not sure if the current version of the game had it, since I only played for about two minutes, but it felt like the enemy counts weren't increasing and they weren't moving faster. Again, it doesn't have to be anything complicated; making them spawn slightly more often as time goes on, or making them spawn with a slightly higher speed as time goes on, would really make the game more engaging.
It's rough around the edges, but I had fun with it regardless. Give me blocks and a character to jump on them, and you can never go wrong :) though I was damn near ready to tear my hair out at the second to last challenge haha, landing on the half of the blocks that didn't have the side arrows was a nightmare!!
I don't think this game hits up the theme at all, but whatever. Hope you had fun making something :)
The echo effect looked cool, but I don't think it added much to the game for me. Avoiding the turrets and the guards was engaging on its own, while waiting for the echolocation to recharge just kinda felt annoying. Though I guess without the mechanic, the game wouldn't really adhere to the theme, so I understand why it's there.
This is SUPER polished!! I really appreciate the amount of effort that went into making it FEEL good to play, such as the pitch-scaled sounds when destroying the various shape types, the camera shake when firing, the particle effects when the shapes blow up, etc.
While I did find the gameplay fun and engaging, I personally think there were two flaws that tarnished the experience for me:
1. Having an infinitely scaling score multiplier felt bad to me. It makes it so that what matters most is building it as high as possible in the early game so that you can have a 100x multiplier in the late game where the most enemies were. The moment I lost my multiplier in the late game, it felt as though the run was pretty much over already, since building it back up would take too long. I think having a multiplier cap of like 5x or something would have made it feel a lot better to me; you'd be rewarded for going on streaks, but not immensely punished for losing it. I also think needing to build to each new X multiplier would have been nice (e.g. 5 kills for 2x, 10 kills for 3x, and so on)
2. The recoil gimmick was more frustrating than it was entertaining. The vast majority of the three games I played I spent blasting myself into a corner, and pretty much staying in that corner for the rest of the game, because I believe there's logic that prevents shapes from spawning too close to you. It's good that nothing spawnkilled me in the corner, but not good because I don't think I was engaging with the game the way you wanted. I found myself wishing I could just move around with WASD, which part of me thinks would have been fine, since I don't think the recoil was important for the game's theme.
With all that said, this is still definitely in my top 3 entries for this jam!! My high score was 2,489,500, with a 182x bonus streak :)
Unless I missed something, it felt impossible to play because there was no way to differentiate between a tree and a bear trap. I died twice and couldn't muster the energy to try again :(
The atmosphere was pretty spooky, though! And the first time I got snagged by a bear trap, it gave my heart a jolt that horror games don't typically do to me, haha.
This is a solid entry for someone that's very new to gamedev!
It was an alright experience to me. The echo not being on some kind of cooldown made it fairly trivial to get a feel for the map, and I think the player was too slow which made it annoying to maneuver around.
Again, though, this is a fine entry for a game jam :) I hope you keep at it and make new stuff as time goes on!
This is a rare situation where I think a jam entry was way too short!! I was havin a great time and getting a feel for the game, and it ended really abruptly.
I'm sure you were strapped for time, but I think it would have been valuable to invest the time it'd take to make the waves infinitely scale in difficulty. It wouldn't have had to be anything complicated; just spawning X amount more enemies per wave, giving them X% more health per wave, etc.
As for the main gimmick of towers only being able to shoot around the generator, I didn't really feel its presence. I played this one as I would any other tower defense I've played, which is to say I spammed all of the towers towards the start of the track and let them run wild. The only real difference is that I kept them within range of the echo generator, which didn't really affect the game that much to me.
It took a minute to figure out what was going on, and I lost my first run because of that. On the second run, I had a much better idea of what I was doing, so it was starting to become enjoyable to me. I do like this idea of herding something into an area to gain points! I found the tornado to be more annoying than engaging, but I understand why it has to exist. I think making the player a little bit faster would have made it less annoying to chase down the balls it would kick away? I'm not sure though.
I didn't read any of the text the NPCs in the levels would say, since I felt like I was always on a really tight timer to keep as many reinforcing ideas in the zone as possible. It never felt like there was any downtime to take a moment to read what they were saying.
