itch.io

Very cool idea, and nice job on implementing all these different items. I can see the RoR inspiration.

However, I feel like some of the time you spent on these could have been better spent on properly introducing the mechanics of the game. I'm guilty of the same, on my first jam we were so infatuated by the gameplay that we forgot to put any menu or tutorial. So nobody played our game :(

Once I read the description I had a bit of fun ! 

Still, it felt a little pointless. Some kind of progression system, like a boss or more varied enemies, would've been nice. Without points of interest or anything to show that I'm advancing in the game, I didn't really feel like anything was happening. Waves are coming, but that's it. I also didn't understand that the items were upgrades until I read the description. 

I hope I don't sound too harsh, I think you've got a nice start that can be expanded upon ! Being able to unlock more and more wagon, and the cahotic fun of having to manage all their cooldowns, is a nice starting point for a fun game. I also like a lot what you're trying to do and your ambitions for this jam

<3

Here's a few design hindsight. It's not to devalue your feedback at all, it's just that I thought it was interesting to share, and may give you another perspective on what we tried to do with the game. 

I feel like getting punched from behind isn't that much of an issue because you can heal a lot. Our combat design was inspired by doom eternal, where you can't really dodge damage but you also heal a lot when glory killing and stuff. 

So for this reason I chose to not dedicate too much time to give players ways to avoid damage. Because I wanted to create tense moments when you lose all your life and have to run for it, until you find an opportunity to heal (which requires agression, so there's tension between dodging and attacking)). 

With that said I can understand that it may feel bad to get hit without any way to know about it. There are a few things we've identified that could help with that (namely, lack of sound to tell you when an enemy is about to hit / when you get hit, and enemies spawning instantly and often too close to the player). Sometimes you take damage and there was nothing you could've done, it's pretty frustrating. There's a middle point we couldn't find yet. 

Also, you're absolutely correct that we could've communicated better on a lot of the mechanics. That's a lesson I've taken from this jam : tutorialize and explain everything, the fun is playing the game anyway.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks again for sharing.

Thanks <3

Cool game and weird aesthetic experience (I say weird in a good way. I like weird stuff). 

Too bad there's no checkpoint :(

I love how the camera zooms in when you turn. Controlling the train was very satisfying

Thank you <3

Thank you so much for the praise ! 

Don't be ashamed about your score, people in top 10 are monsters lol

Very fun and polished entry ! 

The panic of building train tracks while the train is moving is pretty fun. Simple but effective design. The additional stuff (esp the trees) were where thought out and implemented. Had fun playing through the levels. 

I made my train blue :3

The copyright free music is annoying to me though. 

Small neatpick : 

- The red arrows looks like a speed buff, not a slow. Once you know it, you know it, but it's pretty unintuitive visual language. Inverting the two colors would've made more sense (or change the sprite to something less that indicates a slow).

Great submission, I had lots of fun ! 

You nailed a minimalist approach of the fun of combining additive and multiplicative upgrades. That's great game design, congrats ! :D

Once you get 4-5 turrets the game gets very fun. Unfortunately at some point I got stuck in the buy menu. I could buy stuff but there wasn't a "done" button, so it's a softlock :/ 

Audio is very agressive and loud. The sounds don't really add up properly so they end up scratching against each other. It is pretty hard to do though.

Strong contender for top 10 this jam. At least I hope so. 

For me I prefer lack of audio to bad audio, still makes for a better experience, so I rate 3 stars games with no audio. 

The graphics are incredible. Extremely charming. The gamefeel is also great, sure there's only movement, but running around feels awesome.

The enemies are also very interesting and scary, as they can detect you from very far. I enjoyed the level design a lot, there was just enough mechanics with the noise stuff to be interesting and varied. The levels where you had to run from enemies were my favorites.

My only gripe with the game design is that I hate mash mechanics. 

Awesome achievement for a jam game ! Having a level editor is incredible.

As others have said, the turns take pretty long. An idea to counteract this is could've been to automate turns until something relevant happens. For example, when you press the next turn button, the trains could go until there's a train station with a red light.

In the level editor, it would've been better to have the ability to rotate shapes rather than have one variation for each angle. Still, the level editor is pretty smooth which is NOT EASY to achieve. Congrats. 

I didn't play much beyond the tutorial and trying out the level editor, because this kind of game is not easy for me. Nevertheless, I can definitely see the potential with this puzzle system

Good job for reaching 4k ! There are a few strategies that can get you up there, I'll let you discover them ;)

Thanks a lot for playing the game ! <3

The game is pretty hard indeed. Maybe a bit too challenging for a jam game ? Idk. (To survive longer, here's a tip : grab kills almost fully heal you.)

Can you elaborate on what made the controls difficult for you ? 

Thanks a lot for feedback !

Very good audio and graphics, soothing experience. Gameplay was a bit unclear as other characters appeared and disappeared all the time. I managed to pickpocket 350$ and escape, but I'm not sure if I killed the right target.

Bug : on game restart, you can escape the train immediately

I use chrome and AZERTY keyboard

About the audio, if you want to you can lower the music, it's a bit less overwhelming this way I think. The base settings put the music too high compared to sound effects.

Fun game. Could've used a bit more enemy types. Gameplay loop is a bit too simple and repetitive and gets boring very soon. I didn't see an end, so I stopped after a while, is that correct ? 

I don't want to be harsh but the audio work was very problematic for me. Some sounds (like exp pickup) were way too high and ear piercing. Also, the music could use a lot more contrast, it's too repetitive.

Edit : map didn't work for me. So I think I missed a big part of the game. M didn't work for some reason and I couldn't rebind the controls. Shift also didn't dash, only right click worked.

HELL YEAH I FINALLY BEAT THE LAST LEVEL.

Very good game. You turned snake into a fun little puzzle platformer / rythm game. I like it. The powerups were very well introduced, great level design. 

Looks very charming. Strong contender for top 1 this jam I think

Very fun weird little game. Lots of awesome design ideas

only 9500 but I claim that I was distracted by my sister coming into my room to ask if we can play street fighter 6.

I said no, but I still lost points :(

Funny game ! Feature creep haha.

At the end it goes very fast but it's still readable, congrats on that ! The feeling of speed is what makes a simple game like this fun. (Also, the gamedev jokes are always welcome after a gamejam lol)

Design-Wise, I always wonder why allow full 2D movement when 1 dimension is the only thing that's needed ? If there was trains or bonuses coming in from top to bottom sometimes it could incentivise you to take risks and advance to the right of the screen !

Incredible polish ! 

Very cool game ! great concept 

Both, actually :/ I'm really sorry. 

Great feedback, thank you very much ! <3

The hit sound was planned but lost to production unfortunately :( About the hit anticipation, the screen borders were supposed to emulate that a little bit, we took inspiration from killbug on it. But I think it lacks sound and other stuff to really be useful (also blues and yellow attack you from outside the sensor range so it's barely useful for them). 

<3

Sorry it's a bit too buggy for me to try :(

I like the graphics from what I've seen !

Cool idea, cool graphics, ambitious game. But it could've used a lot more polish. 

For me, when making an fps game, it's important to nail the gun. Here are a few points that could be improved :

- Enemy hitboxes were wayyyyy too small and hard to hit

- The bullet effect was inaccurate. If you have a hitscan weapon, you need to make the visual projectile way faster. Also, it shoots to the side. 

- Sound design can be improved a lot for the gun. It lacks oomph, guns should have a noisy percussive sound, with big attack and lots of noisy mid frequency

Huge congrats on a successful game entry ! I don't want to seem too harsh, I'm writing these quickly to test as many games as possible. I hope this is useful feedback !

Also I liked it when enemies arrived on horses.

Hope to play soon, notify me once it's uploaded

Cool artwork. Lack of checkpoint made me stop at the third level though

Very strange and surrealist game. I love it when jams bring up this kind of stuff. 

Unfortunately the game is prone to softlock. Why put a weird ammo system ? 

Sound design is awesome, although mixing could use a bit of work (enemy voices were too loud for example).

Suggestion : remove door collision when it's opening xD Although it made me laugh the first few times when I got splat into a wall.

Sometimes you don't need much to make a great game. You really nailed the production part I think. You really prioritized well and put work where it matters : level design, enemy visuals, polish. Awesome result. 

Game design is great, level length is perfect and having 3 hp is the correct amount of challenge. The range on the pistol is also well calibrated, it's the most important design decision you took. It forces you to actually dodge projectiles, but also gives you a bit of leniency for positioning yourself. This kind of design stuff often goes unappreciated in games but it's very important, so good job and great vision. 

Also, the fast respawn and constant checkpoints. Sooo important. Jammers, take inspiration, I don't want to restart your 5 min games for 1 mistake. With that said, segmenting different challenges is very hard, I can tell you spent a lot of time on level design.

Small polish neatpicks : 

- the train separation kinda looks like a hole. Maybe it could be transparent ? Idk.

- maybe enemies could've had a different color ? Sometimes they were hard to tell apart until they attacked. Could also be corrected by having more contrasted shapes. I understand why you kept all the projectiles though, I think it was a good idea (makes the bullet hell segments easier to read).

Very, very cool game design. Had to cut the audio because it was annoying. I would've played more but it lacks some quality of life, like a button to speedup the falling train, and a bit more explaining of the mechanics. By the time I figured everything out (I think) I had lost the game, and the start is a bit too slow for me to want to replay.  

Just read that space accelerate the train. Now I want to replay. Let me do it. 

Edit : ok the game is AWESOME. Very very fun. With a bit of polish it'd be perfect.

Ideas to polish : 

- Highlight the current path the train is taking, at all times. This way you can see where it will crash if you speed it up.

- Correct bugs. I lost to bugs, tiles where locked into place a few times, I couldn't move them so I lost :/ I had a plan to victory ! 

- Make sure the powerups don't obstruct the tracks, or that you can't crash into them (basically the tracks that are under them doesn't matter, you can reach the tile from all sides). Sometimes it was hard to see and I lost a train because I didn't click on the powerup. 

Idea for player expressivity : 

- Allow a limited resource of tile replacement, to turn a tile into either a cross of straight lights, or a double turn tile. Maybe you could get one of each per train, something like that. It also allows to replace powerups if you don't want them. 

Overall it's a lot of fun to manage both your tetris strategy and the tracks. The core game design is perfect. 

Release this on an appstore and become a millionaire. Wtf are you still doing here, you genius.

Everything is perfect. Only thing I can say is the magnet upgrade felt a bit too powerful and invalited a bit too much of the challenge of the game. It's because it lasts a bit too long I think. 

Edit : editing to emphasize the incredible animation work

Beautiful game with a great concept. Very fun and tense. 

The textbox at the start was too fast so I didn't know I could EMP for a while. 

Very fun little game ! Browser version was a bit laggy for me.

Could've used a checkpoint, I missed the exit at the end (I didn't know this was time gated) and I didn't want to restart everything. The frog implementation is very good, the lockpick mechanic was an awesome minigame, although it comes up a bit too often imo. Overall very charming and polished game. Congrats !

Edit : some of the dialogue disappeared too fast, I didn't have time to read

Funny idea but I didn't understand much, needs to be tutorialized 

Awesome graphics ! The artstyle is soo beautiful. 

Gameplay reminds me of jump king and getting over it. I don't know if that was the intention but it's pretty hard. Difficulty curve is a bit messed up, with the 3rd level being the hardest. I almost gave up there but I stuck to see all the art :)

The frog physics are hilarious. 

It's actually a server ! I saw your score before your comment haha. So yep, this is our actual scores.

Thanks for the compliments ! I'll try your game tomorrow.

Hello everyone, I hope you enjoy our game ! We put our heart and soul into it.

Try beating my score ! <3

- Adrien Place aka Elidef, game designer