The graphics are outstanding for a compo!!! The voices of the spirits are way too loud. And there are so many bombs on the slots!

@el-pepi Thank you for your feedback!
Yeah, I didn't realize how loud they were, but now that you mention it...
Also, about the bombs, they have as much chance as any other items to appear and I agree that they appear too often... but you know slot machines :D If I ever explore this game more in the future, i'll definitely change the frequence of bad items!

Really nice graphics! The concept is interesting too.
I do hope that the spirits' voices were softer too and the slot spins to be slightly faster.
A way to recover your health (even if the chances are low) would be a nice touch as well. :)

@riordan Yes, as stated, I ran out of time. :) The health item would have been the first I would have added!
About the slot spin, it's actually because it's the easy mode. I intended to increase difficulty as you get more items, but yeah, i guess the slot wasn't the only thing that was slow :p

Graphics are gorgeous! The gun however, while definitely interesting, is WAY too hard to use. I think the enemies have too much health as well and combined with the slot mechanic really slows the game down and you have to be really lucky not to blow yourself up before you get anywhere. Quick easy fix is to make bombs much rarer. The mechanic itself is really cool, fits the theme well and I can definitely see how it can be expanded upon. I really wanted to see more of it because it's so ecstatically polished but it's just too frustrating to play right now.

@silkworm-sweatshop Thank you for your feedback!
Yes i was told about the health and slowliness of the game; these were intentional as I wanted the player to focus on the slot machine more than in his movement; so design wise it seems that I should have dealt with it differently.
Although the reason there is a delay for shooting is due to a bug i didn't manage to fix otherwise.

And I should have definitely made the bomb rarer, especially since I didn't manage to add an healing item.

I will try to fix those in a ppst-jam version, but if i ever take this idea again for an actual game, i might simply have the slot machine always displayed somewhere and shooting wouldn't require to load (i'll be honest, i made that in solely because it was cool; but didn't think it would make the gameplay that worse)

Also thanks for the compliments!

I agree with everyone else, the graphics are _soooooo_ pretty, my puny low res pixel graphics are exceedingly jealous, but I had the same problem of getting far too many bombs on the slots and no way I could find (at least not in the small part I could get up to before bombing myself to death) to recover health.

I can see from reading your comments that you're already aware of all of those things though, so I'll just add to the chorus saying it's a great idea with great graphics, just needs a little more time (like basically all of our games)

@Slashee-the-cow Yeah, the eternal game jam frustration :p
Thank you for your feedback!

I'm pretty much in the same boat as everyone else here in saying that you have some very lovely visuals but the core gameplay was lacking, mostly due to the overpopulation of bombs and the high health of the enemies. I can definitely see where you're coming from on this, and I think you already have a fix for a lot of the problems by adding more pieces to the reel (so that you're not always getting this colossal failure, just an effect you might not have wanted at this time).

Rather, due to bombs being equal to any other items in population :p
I think that's the most problematic one, there should have been a swarm of bullets.

Really nice graphics and music - got the mood right away. cursed /again/

But indeed, the gun was more of a suicide gun. :P Got to the end of the level by jumping and weaving past the trees though!

Ways to improve:
- Whatever you roll, you get 4 shots with (so you don't have to roll every time)
- Less bombs
- Coins cancel a bomb?

But you know all that probably ;)

@joror

* _"Whatever you roll, you get 4 shots with (so you don’t have to roll every time)"_

In this specific game, if you get a bomb, that's basically like dying (4 bombs...),_**but**_ ...

I intend to make a full game (with a different gimmick however, sadly for the tree design that I liked) out of this mechanic, where the slot machine is constantly on. One of the issues it raised was fast shooting. I was thinking about holding fire to shoot whenever possible AND some bullets would have a "machine gun effect" where you can shoot them constantly as you hold fire.
"locking" a bullet might however be an interesting alternative. Maybe instead of shooting, you actually lock into a bullet? And once that slot ammo "runs out", you have to roll the slot again. Or maybe more simple, it only locks specific bullets (like, regular bullets allows 4 shots and bombs only one). That's actually what I might need to make the game a top down instead of a side scroller (as there is no "rapid fire" option, it is less enjoyable in a top down. Side scrollers allow more these "slow shooting" mechanics).

* _"Less bombs"_

This one is fairly obvious! :p

* _"Coins cancel a bomb?"_

Since the patterns are new everytime you shoot, it can't work in that game. But again, the full game version won't have such randomness. (you pick new slots that are directly added into your stack of slots, in that order. further items would allow to change the order, etc) So maybe some items could destroy some others. (for example, a water type of shot would get rid of all fire shot)

_"But you know all that probably ;)"_

To be honest, these suggestions are new, and although I might not take them as they are, they are indeed interesting directions to look into. I think it might even be _**the**_ suggestions I needed to figure out how to balance the fun out of the future of this mechanic, that I sometimes think would be pretty bad in an actual game. But these ideas actually makes me feel like it could work!

...if I manage to make it work, of course.

First, have to say that the graphics are good, probably too good in a sense, since the gameplay suffered terribly. That's one of the interesting things about this jam though, everyone has their own strengths, and that tends to influence what they spend the most time on =P. The only thing 'negative' I have to say about the graphics is that it would have been nice if you had put more variety into the paralaxing background layers. I didn't actively notice them my first time playing, and while in some sense that might be desirable, it's also a graphical feature, so it would have been nice if you could have added in some more contrast between the layers of trees to draw more attention to it.

In terms of clarity there were a couple of issues. Sometimes when you were low health, it could look like you had no health. The heart arrow would simply be colored red, and the health bar it was pointing to would look completely empty. The bullet icon, as it appears in the slot, is too cluttered to clearly make out what it is at that scale (for me anyway.) It's obvious once you select it and it zooms in however. The bomb, while obviously a bomb, is ambiguous in whether it will be a good or bad thing. Both of these are one-time problems though, you pretty much learn each of them after one usage.

I actually thought the audio design was quite nice in this. The echo-y tone of the text/talky noise, while loud, was very thematic to the mood of the forest and the little spirit fire creatures. The way the game over screen sounded like sort of a detuned variation of the main music loop was a cool effect too. Many of the sound effects were a bit loud though, for me, I want to be able to follow the music even when a sound effect is playing.

My favorite game mechanic was the huge amount of knockback when you hit the trees (and their relative slowness). That struck me as appropriately sensitive to the amount of time needed to successfully line up a shot with the slot mechanic. I did notice a bug of sorts associated with that though, when you shot a tree it would move backwards based on its facing direction - not based on which direction the bullet came from so if you tree in the back it ends up sliding toward the bullet. It was also really unusual how much horizontal movement you got in the air. The biggest frustration though, was that unless you got lucky, you had to learn the pattern of each new wheel as it came up which took way too long to fight without cheesing the geometry. Having a small 'deck' of set wheel patterns the game picked from, the player could at least learn to recognize them quicker over time - kind of like the matching card game in SMB3. I also had one roll with no bullets =P. Its a shame that not only were there only three items, but only two of them were implemented. It would have been better to do an easier to implement item (heart instead of coin) or put in a coin counter and a cost for 'playing' slots and skimp on, say, a few of those ground cover art assets =P.

There was a nice touch of self-depreciating fourth-wall crushing humor in this, which I personally related to a lot =P. Still you got more done and with better quality than a lot of games. I could sort of see where you were going with this. I just wish I could have really experienced your vision for how to make those genres come together to make a fun game.

I think the slot shot mechanic is absolutely brilliant and I wish you could've shown off how you planned to do upgrades. I actually disagree with what others are saying about it. IMO you should treat the slots like a deck of cards, and much like a deckbuilder (say, Slay the Spire), you should be able to purchase new slots to bring into the deck, or even pay to take out harmful ones like bombs (or get cursed and have more bombs thrown into it). Then you'll kinda have this running list of upgrades going on through your gun and the progression would feel awesome. I think the wheel so remain random whenever you bring it up, as it's implemented now. What I liked about that mechanic was that it was a quick memorization game where you had to quickly identify a pattern and then execute on it. This could also be the cost of stacking your gun so that you have tons of bullets in it. If you popped in 15 bullets, it would take much longer to cycle through and you just inherently go through a level slower, assuming they even wait a full cycle to memorize it.

Sorry I just kind of minddumped there. I think your game has massive potential and it just sent a lot my gears turning. It sounded like you had a ton of great ideas yourself and I'd love to see them implemented!

Amazing artwork! The slot machine mechanic is awesome too! Personally I think the controls seem a bit too floaty, other than that, really good work. Well done on getting finished in time for the compo too!

It's neat idea for a game. Your art is quite great all around. I love the colours of everything. The way the slots spin is quite satisfying how the things seem to drop faster once they're past the center. The animations are all good and quite subtle so they are easy to miss. The forest sprite guys have a nice flowy animation, the muzzle flash and gun smoke are nice for the gun. Very cool attention to detail there.

The sound effects really fit for everything. The bullets and bomb sounds had a lot of weight to really sell their impact which is great.

I think a potential easy fix for the slot being 2/3 bad would just be a add a smaller bullet. It would be functionally the same as the bullet, but just do less damage. That way, if you pulled the small bullet, it would still suck because it wouldn't do much, but it wouldn't suck as bad as the bomb killing you or the coin doing nothing.

The amount of downtime in the game made it very slow. You have ~5 seconds in between every shot and even when you start up the slot machine, it seems to be impossible to select the first 2 items in the list. You said this is a bug so I guess that's that.

Seems like most of the bad parts of this just came down to time constraints so that's too bad. I know I've totally missed stuff that becomes painfully obvious once I release it and people comment on it.

The gun gave me the feel of the sniper in Risk of Rain if you've ever played that game. It's a little bit of a different mechanic, but it does feel quite similar.

@gamecarpenter

* Gotta point out that if the art part is better than the rest, it's mostly because I overestimate my capacity to code. Since I code terribly, it takes a way longer time for me to make something functional than to make sprites. The slot machine mechanic on its own took a big chunk of time. So I'm not keen on blaming my art time use there, cause if I was a good coder, I would have had the time to implement everything I wanted. :p Since I enjoy doing art more, (and it's also one of your point) I tend to do it to make it look(/sound?) good enough to at least distract from my terrible coding.

Though it's not an excuse, it feels strange for me as an artist to have a functional game while not putting in front my speciality. Especially cause I make visuals faster than mechanics; It also stems from improvable organization. Perhaps a bad scope too; I should adapt my scope to my coding skills. But each game jam, I try to push myself out of my comfort zone (by coding something I've never coded before), so I don't regret it.

* About the parallax, that's mostly because I'm not very good with backgrounds ^^'

* About the health bar, not sure if you noticed, but the red heart gets empty as well when you're low on health

* About the bullet, It's just that the bullet is pretty thin while most items are rounder. To make it clearer what item you were the closest too, I tried to make it rounder. An easy fix would have been to add in a border

* Oh, you're right, the bomb isn't clear in that regard. Perhaps I should add a skull or something to make it clearer.

* _"The way the game over screen sounded like sort of a detuned variation of the main music loop was a cool effect too."_

I... didn't know it sounded like a detuned variation of the main loop. Which would it be though? There are three different main loops (I only intended one but since I made th other tracks and didn't manage to place them where they were supposed to be, I added them as alternative tracks; which, although it offers variety, is bad for making the game consistent)

* Interesting thing about the music. I should perhaps simply include control over those, as it's hard to know what a prefer likes.

* Oh! Glad you liked the appropriate speed and knockback of the enemies. I wanted the pace to be slow, so for the player to be able to focus on the shooting, I needed the enemies not to be too fast. About the bug, it has to do with the position of the bullet on the tree hitbox. This would have shown more obvious to me through more testing, but with my playstyle, it isn't always easy to know how to test things out since each player plays differently. I'll try to be more careful about that

* _"you had to learn the pattern of each new wheel as it came up which took way too long to fight "_

I agree! Didn't think about it, but there should be 1 pattern for 1 run. In my full version planned, this is already addressed as each run will start with a pattern that won't change until you die.


_I'm sorry for the gigantic wall of text, I can't help it_

@peachtreeoath

If we disregard the random pattern each time (sorry), it's _**exactly**_ what I planned to do. You have a basic pack loaded with bullets and through your run (rogue-like) you get packs with new items. often it's "several good items, one bad item", "a midly good item and a mildldy bad one" or "a very good item, but a very bad one" and you'd stack them in your current pattern. Some items would mess the order etc. That way, there is a feeling of progression and no game is like the previous one. (well, à la rogue-like)

The difference would be the pace: since Skaart is too slow (imo), there would be, instead of a popping slot machine, a slot machine constantly rolling. (maybe a key could make the slot machine pop above your head too when you aim for a specific effect)

Now one of the obstacles would be my coding skills, as I know it will require me to learn some stuff to be able to make it work!

@pur3

Thank you! Yes, it's a bit too floaty :<

@solrun

Thanks!

For the slot, I simply need to make coins and bombs less frequent :p Although adding items would also improve it (but changing frequency is an easier fix)

Yes, one of the game's issue is its pace. I thought the delay would help the player to better focus and aim, but it proved more frustrating than helping. (the bug is kinda unrelated)

Gotcha, I could see it going either way. I agree that most people will lean towards a faster pace unless you completely changed the mood of the game to a slower platformer.

@Kwisarts Yeah, I noticed that the heart empties too, it's just the visual effect as you're looking at it. It looks empty with a red heart icon saying "see, here's all the health that you have none of" =P.

Yeah, I think the game over music was just really stylistically similar to one of the other pieces. At first, I thought it was the same music playing pitched down and in the minor or something (which isn't a bad idea, and would be kind of cool, especially if you're tight on time). I think there being three different music tracks probably just confused me when I tried to understand what I had experienced the first time I died =P.

Based on my file time stamps, it took me about 3.5 hours for the two short tracks I did for my game, I can't imagine doing an extra music track without having an area for it to play in first, but that's probably just an indication of the direction in which I make games =P. I'm more likely to have a mechanic with no graphics/sound than graphics/sound with no mechanic. I think it worked well for me though overall. Its easier for me to scale back on the amount of time I put into music and art, compared to code especially, where it kind of works or doesn't =P.

I understand what you mean about the bullet sort of not fitting as a slot piece. There are all sorts of things you could try with color and thickness to make it stand apart from its ornamentation, but I'll leave that to you =P. The border idea is a decent choice in general, especially to help make the game feel fair. I'm guessing those lines that are sitting there were meant to animate with the slots eventually? In any case, something along those lines would be a good idea, especially if the player can see for themselves which slot they stopped on.

One thing I left off last time is that the control choice for the slots felt odd to me, but that might be personal preference. If you use J and K (presumably to avoid using Q and E since E is close to R?) then I would use J to take out & put away the slots, and K to activate it. That way you're using the characters left to right, they each have a clear function, and you get to type JK every time you want to use your slot gun =P.

@gamecarpenter

I think it's probably preference; in my case, even though I'm not into typewriting, i tend to place my fingers on the asdf jklé configuration (replace "é" with the key you have next to l), so the middle finger would be of use there. Of course, I made the game based on personal preferences, but knowing what controls feels best would require a poll or something. I'm basically treating ijkl as an alternate of wasd because I dislike the arrows (also mines are broken). I'd only use Q and E if they were linked to a stationary mechanic, as they're to close to the movement keys; I chose K cause it's "down" and J cause it's "left" to cancel (go backward on my decision).
So in my case I decided to have "ready fire then fire" as the same key and "cancel" another key (you don't often want to cancel). Considering you'd be preparing and shooting more often, requiring the player to use two different key for one action felt redundant to me.

Take out/away is the same function, but i'd find it weird for something as simple as shooting to use two keys. That's why I only made it one key. (there was no cancel at first)

@Kwisarts

Unusual way to think of those keys, but I guess it makes sense if you're using them instead of arrows =]. In general, I like to use Q and E if I'm using WASD, or with only one key space. For me, I'd rather keep the mouse available if possible.

If I were treating it as arrow keys, I'd probably do something even stranger =P. Maybe up to raise the gun, down to lower it, and left and right to shoot left or right XD. I guess I just really like to do that one to one thing, as long as there are enough buttons XD. Now that I think of it, hold and release would be a pretty good feeling way to do it if you wanted to use one button.

Who knows, maybe I just don't like it as much because I've gotten used to Colemak and my Qwerty skills are slipping, or maybe I don't have a good grip on slot gun lore XD. Anyway, interesting stuff to think about =].

Congrats on your first compo!

The game looks very good. Its visuals are charming, interesting and cute. The idea is pretty cool as well. It has a random factor, but still gives you some sort of control over that, which is always fun for me.

I do believe that you should've made the Trees with less health. Also, one thing that was kind of annoying is that the slot only reads the 'fire' input after like a second or so once it begins spinning. That made me hit tons of bombs at my initial attempts.

Despite that, I think that you have created a really interesting world in so little time, which is absolutely amazing and inspiring.

If you have time, please, take a look at my Compo entry as well. The link is: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/last-stand

Cheers!

Lovely game! Graphics are beautiful and the randomized gun mechanic was a lot of fun.
I wish the bombs dealt less damage to myself and that the gun could potentially heal me.
The jump audio clip sounded a bit off compared to the rest of the audio.

Great game, lots of potential!! I hope I see more of this.