LudumData

Danmakoïd - Bullet hell metroidvania by Talops

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made by Talops for LD 41 (COMPO)

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Hello and thank you for picking and playing Danmakoïd! It is a solo gamejam project made for LD41 compo, in 48 hours. Jam theme was "Combine two incompatible genres". I went with a mix between a metroidvania and a danmaku (bullet hell), hence the portmanteau name!

A shoot'em up with upgrades, exploration and a bit of backtracking!

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Difficult, puzzling patterns!

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Power creep! Blaze your way through lategame, and defeat the alien queen!

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It is very hard and might require you multiple tries. Be methodical, clear rooms and plan your upgrade route to make it the safest until the last boss.

I hope you will like it!

HOW TO PLAY

wasd/arrow keys - move

space(hold) - shoot (once you have the upgrade), you cannot turn around when shooting.

Game over might not display correctly, if this is the case, press Enter to retry, Esc to quit. Do not press escape (pause) outside of the game over or end screen, this will freeze your game! gif7.gif

WHAT DO I DO?

Explore, grab any ship upgrade you find and hunt the alien queen down! You cannot shoot or turn around before first finding the upgrades. Your weakpoint/hitbox is a circle located on your cockpit. If you clear a midboss room you will regenerate one life. Figure out which route is the safest for you and you might be lucky enough to meet her majesty! The game allows for sequence breaking and speedrunning, especially if you manage to find the 3 secret rooms! gif4.gif

HOW WAS THE JAM?

I tried using an upside down workflow in order to evaluate how much time asset creation takes me. Assets first, risky and weird but fun! Needless to say I got late on schedule, as planned :p As you will have noticed, some stuff is missing: no music, lack of a good looking background and UI, and sound effect volume is all over the place! I am happy with what I got though, working on the level design was especially fun! I hope you will enjoy the game besides its flaws! gif5.gif

WHO ARE YOU?

My nickname is Talops, I am a belgian technical artist student (jack of all trades with shader magic!), currently in the 3rd year of my Bachelor and undergoing an internship. I love hard games in general, and especially input/movement-heavy ones. My adoration for the metroidvania and bullet hell genres are what inspired me to make this one! Drop me a tweet! -> talopsit gif3.gif

Coming soon (Separate post-jam v2)

Music, better feedback, a decent UI, backgrounds, more sounds, bugfixes, balance (less in-your-face stuff when entering a room)!

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Other (platform) https://talops.itch.io/danmakoid
HTML5 (web) https://itch.io/embed-upload/863323
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/danmakoid-bullet-hell-metroidvania

Ratings

Overall 111th 3.806⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Fun 86th 3.823⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 289th 3.484⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Theme 285th 3.726⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 126th 3.823⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Audio 329th 2.875⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Mood 228th 3.293⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Given 21🗳️ 20🗨️

Feedback

Pixels Everywhere
23. Apr 2018 · 03:41 UTC
Your instructions said space to shoot, but nothing appeared to happen. The pixel art and sfx are nice, but i dont really know what to do... Unless im just dumb XD
Apples_mmmmmmmm
23. Apr 2018 · 03:48 UTC
Cool game! I was confused that I couldnt shoot at the beginning after reading the How To Play until I realized I had to grab one of the power-ups. It seems pretty strange that you can fly backwards before grabbing the power-up that lets you turn around. It would be cool to see what kind of progress you could make given more time!
🎤 Talops
23. Apr 2018 · 11:11 UTC
@apples-mmmmmmmm
I first wanted to allow sequence breaking by allowing a no-u-turn run but designing the map so that it would work would have taken too much time. Glad you liked it!
🎤 Talops
23. Apr 2018 · 11:14 UTC
@pixels-everywhere
You have to get the upgrade in order to shoot. I updated the game description to make it more clear thanks for pointing it out!
Leonard
23. Apr 2018 · 16:32 UTC
Really cool concept and well made. Basics of metroid and bullet hell are here and it works pretty well :)
malobil
23. Apr 2018 · 16:33 UTC
Concept is fun and I really enjoyed to play it. I can easily imagine a full game with this mechanic ! Great work.
Arthur Amorim
23. Apr 2018 · 16:48 UTC
It's an interesting concept for the theme, i like it. It's kinda confusing that you couldn't shoot at the first moment, but when you realize that there are a few powerups that you can grab it gets way more fun and self-explanatory. Great job!
ROBOWARRIOR1982
23. Apr 2018 · 16:55 UTC
Interesting concept and nice graphics !
That Guy
23. Apr 2018 · 17:03 UTC
This was a good one... unfortunately now I have to rate you low on the theme because apparently bullet hell and metroidvania are indeed "compatible Genres," who'd have thought that. (jk about the poor theme vote)
Torak Whiteleopard
23. Apr 2018 · 17:52 UTC
I really liked the game, it was a really good blend of bullet hell and metroidvania and a lot of fun to go through. I liked how frequently you seemed to pick up upgrades, as it meant that you felt a constant sense of progression and exploration. The graphics were also amazing - would just have liked to see a music track of some kind perhaps to finish off the game. :)
🎤 Talops
23. Apr 2018 · 17:55 UTC
@torak-whiteleopard Glad you've enjoyed the game! As for a soundtrack, I will work on a v2 this week, adding music, a focus mechanic and many balance/difficulty and bug fixes!
selfsame
23. Apr 2018 · 22:49 UTC
Good combination of genres and I found it pretty challenging.
Impossible Realms
24. Apr 2018 · 14:20 UTC
The game was nice for what it was. I had a heck of a time getting it to run though. Make sure to export builds for other platforms when using Unity, not everyone has Windows on their gaming PC, and it helps with accessibility if everyone can play.:wink: That aside, nice concept, and wish you could've gotten more of it done!
JCMonkey
24. Apr 2018 · 21:56 UTC
nice game! you could almost mix in rythm elements with this like shooting on rythm and dodging bullets on rythm. but over all this was a fun game. nice job!!
jf1989
25. Apr 2018 · 15:48 UTC
This game definitely had the best music of the games I've played so far this jam - I really appreciated that.
lum
27. Apr 2018 · 15:18 UTC
The graphics were really simple and great. I liked the idea of a bullet-hell metroidvania! The rooms felt more like navigating little micro-puzzles which was a cool feeling.
🎤 Talops
27. Apr 2018 · 15:28 UTC
@lum thanks for the feedback! The puzzle-like level design is something I really wanted to put forward, since simply dodging bullets gets repetitive quickly. Happy it went noticed! :D
King Kujito
27. Apr 2018 · 16:39 UTC
Very ambitious to take on a design heavy genre for LD. Good execution, solid entry. Well done
🎤 Talops
27. Apr 2018 · 18:44 UTC
@king-kujito since most of the games i've been working on the past few months/years have had their level design kind of on autopilot, I specifically wanted to make it the main priority for this one. Really risky for a compo game but it seems to have turned out well!
King Kujito
27. Apr 2018 · 18:48 UTC
@Talops I agree, cheers.
cowa
27. Apr 2018 · 19:13 UTC
Very cool game! Really liked the graphics.
Good job!
Rs11s21n
27. Apr 2018 · 19:50 UTC
seems not bad)
Honest Dan
27. Apr 2018 · 22:20 UTC
Very impressive game, regardless of jam or not. A good level of difficulty, I do enjoy the satisfaction of bullet hells. You really nailed the metroidvania concept too, the gating felt balanced and intuitive. Visuals were all consistently good. I feel a good atmospheric sound track would have really added a lot to this game, as the few sound effects are good - but in isolation sound quite feeble. Goodluck developing v2!
Brent
28. Apr 2018 · 03:39 UTC
Really good game, could use a save point or some code to be revealed to start with more progress. The art and controls were very good. Really spot on, great work on it.
TinyCastleGuy
28. Apr 2018 · 04:07 UTC
I especially like the concept for this game and I'm pretty impressed with the overall length. Unfortunately I couldn't get far enough without dying, so I feel like some save points would be useful. Anyway, I like how you took the basic elements of a Metroidvania and mixed it with the gameplay of a bullet hell. My main criticism is that areas can often feel cramped and you don't get much of a break to explore between rooms because you're constantly preparing yourself for the enemies on the next screen. I also accidentally used the teleporter before exploring further, so... whoops. I really like how the rest of the game design turned out, though. Looking forward to the next version!
BeamKirby
28. Apr 2018 · 04:24 UTC
I see we both tackled what seems like practically the same genres: Metroidvanias and Space Shooters. Although, there is certainly a fundamental difference in what we did, whereas you used specifically Danmakus, and I used specifically Shmups. I think it's interesting to see another game with similarities to mine, and it's especially interesting to see the differences, not only in the games themselves, but the genres used.

Your game starts the player off with no powers at all; no shooting, no turning, no nothing except movement, whereas my game starts the player off with shooting and turning (albeit, only after the first screen). This is just a simple difference between games. Your game also allows the player to roam freely, but my game has the player constantly moving forward. This is an example of a fundamental difference between our two genres. In Bullet Hell games, the player always has free movement to roam the screen, and enemies typically float in front of the player in place at all times, but in classic Shmups like Gradius, etc. the player must keep moving forward, and enemies move forward past them. Your game also has a much bigger focus on avoiding bullets, but my game has more a focus on avoiding obstacles, as well as enemies charging at the player. Another big difference between our games is that in your game, subweapons are automatically added to the player's default weapon, but in my game, subweapons must be used separately from the player's main weapon.
trivial171
28. Apr 2018 · 06:12 UTC
This game is rad as heck. Its strongest points are the wonderful graphics and very smart level design (the effort you put in really shows).

I do have two small complaints. The first is that, while the powerup progression of the game is generally well-balanced, I found that with certain combinations of powerups, the final boss takes an unreasonable amount of time to defeat. The second is that it is very easy to get hit right after exiting the teleporter; this happened to me at least three times.

Thank you very much for making this game, and I am looking forward to playing the new version!
Jonathan Lorenz
28. Apr 2018 · 13:20 UTC
You respected the main elements of the genres you are mixing. This was working very well and made us retry several times the game. Would love to see this turned into a full game. Good work!
LeReveur
29. Apr 2018 · 00:03 UTC
Nice and challenging, if you miss what you left behind due to the short time allowed, you really should finish that game to the state as you wanted to, because I think it deserves to be a full game. Good job! :)
drprettypatty
12. May 2018 · 21:44 UTC
This is my favorite game so far, after writing this I'm going to try your post-jam version. I'm impressed by your design chops and making this work in such a short amount of time, especially considering you started with the assets. I think you're already aware of the improvements that could be made (e.g. saving progress, audio, some balance tweaks), so I don't really have much to add to what others have covered. An interesting direction this could go in would be to make it more of a roguelike with randomly generated worlds, although that would contradict some of the speedrunning concepts.

Awesome job, I would buy this if it were developed into a full game!
MichiPantera
15. May 2018 · 16:41 UTC
Great level design!!!! I love how you how teach the player the different elements step by step. Good job!!! :D