Running Low

Pretty fun, the window sizing things confused me at first, but setting the resolution down helped. There seems to be a conflict of goals going on between killing spiders and surviving. Not being able to do one without doing the other. Which sounds like a perfect game for the theme "sacrifices must be made". It kind of falls flat in the arcade genre, which I'm assuming it's going for, because of how low the replay-ability is. Otherwise, very nice for a first entry!

@baggef thanks for the feedback. I understand, as I had to (like many others) reduce the scope of my project. I wanted to make a small roguelite in the vein of nuclear throne or BoI, but didn't have time to implement different rooms or the random layout generator (which I do have an algorithm for), or other more advanced features. Hopefully this serves as a good starting point because I am interested in making the full game someday.

It's actually really fun! The biggest issue is that I noticed all the enemies were spawning from the same area, so I could literally just camp them.

It got really tense once there were enough spawns at once on the map, but as @benburgh mentioned, the enemies spawning in the same location made it feel somewhat repetitive. It's got potential though, and I think it has room for more variety of enemies and different gun types in a post-jam version. Great job!

@legavroche Thank you, I agree I made the enemy spawner a bit hastily, as it was one of the last things I implemented and was running out of time. I'm glad you think it has potential though, as with a proper development period, along with what I learned, I just might be able to make it all work

Interesting game, completely forgot about love (the game engine), best part of game jams is all the different ways people make the games.

Yeah love2d is great, especially for smaller projects. It's pretty underrated I think.

Nice game! As others have said, it's always lovely to see games made with Löve!

Personally I think it should have been a bit harder. It could be done by either making enemies have more health or spawning more enemies, or something.

I have a hard time seeing how it relates to the theme, but still a solid entry!

little confusing at first but really cool when i got the hang of it. Only real problem is its a little too easy to cheese. Good job!

This is quite good! I like the core game mechanic and the art style is very pretty. Some more variation as to where enemies spawned, as well as a greater difficulty progression, could really enhance the games engagement. Additionally, I'd reccommend adding some screenshake or other forms of visual feedback. Good work, I really enjoyed this!

The core mechanic is a fantastic concept and on theme.
I think if u added a few more pieces, such as energy packs, it could make for some tense gameplay, (i.e. at times you might need to let the screen fill up and dodge shots to conserve your energy, but wait too long and you will start taking too many hits).

Great pixel art too

Not bad, for some reason this game reminded me of a robokop, nice graphics, dynamic game and a good idea, for a solo project it is super)

The screen resolution is very strange. Just as a note, square moniters are not (commercially) available. As the game was distributed, I couldn't see half of the screen, as the width was right, but the top was trimmed. Oddly enough, the bottom was aligned to my screen, and I had no clue that I was a character or that I could move, because all of this was happening offscreen. I would recommend using more common resolutions, or maybe making this important setting available on the main menu.

It also feels weird that there is a custom mouse cursor (indicating mouse usage) but the menu doesn't interact with the mouse. My default assumption was that the menu was broken. I would recommend a dual control scheme, with mouse or wasd to control the menus.

The animations are nice, but the game is lacking variety. There could also be more complexity to the game mechanics; maybe there could be a way to revitalise your energy? Otherwise the game is quite nice, and is quite a feat for 72 hours. :thumbsup:

@justcamh thanks man. The decision to make the game's resolution square was a conscious one, to make the arena/room square. I could have chosen a better default resolution though, I have a 4k monitor so I was kinda working for myself when I made the default big. Still I wrote that if it's too big and the options doesn't seem to fix it, and if you're on Windows 10, then that could very well be a problem with the way Win10 scales windows on high dpi monitors, and I described how to fix that on this page.

The mouse cursor not being able to select menu options wasn't broken or an oversight so much as I didn't have time to make that functionality. I understand the confusion though, and I'm sorry, I could have hidden the cursor until the game started or something to avoid that. On a post jam version I'll rework the control scheme to be more intuitive.

I was planning on adding a way to replenish energy (as well as have multiple rooms in a randomly generated layout), but time management and creating things on time was my biggest weakness, so I had to make the minimum presentable game which is what you got.

As I said, I'm interested in making a post jam version (and it would likely be from scratch so I can properly organize my code), so thank you for the feedback!

I managed 81 seconds. I kept clicking out of the window because I had to use windowed mode as fullscreen didn't show the entire level. The cursor seems a bit too large (on 800x800; maybe related to the smaller window?) and sometimes it got stuck on the shooting sound (enemy stuck somewhere?). The idea is nice and fits the theme.

I enjoyed the game and had a good time killing robots.
The window res was a bit of a problem but could manage.
I was missing a health bar.

My laptop has a resolution of 1600x900, a lot of the game was cut off. It looked cool but I could not fully enjoy it and will therefore not give a rating.
Would it have been possible to run it in a window instead of full screen?

I really liked the concept and the pixel art is cool! The sound of destroying the spider robots is very satisfying as well. I think this is a solid take on the theme and encourages choices and a focus on accuracy of shots. I would have liked shooting to be more satisfying (e.g. bigger bullets, screen shake, etc.) as well as more feedback when I get hit (e.g. white flash). :robot:

I had a few technical issues running the game. Obviously the big one is the resolution scaling issue. I think you should treat this as an issue with the game to be learned from (instead of blaming Windows) and next time test in a VM or with different resolutions of screen.

The second issue I had was with Itch's app trying to run the game. I got the following error:


Now I could understand a non-technical person having an existential crisis about the meaning of love not being in their path. I can't really suggest a fix you could do for this though, and it's easy enough to just open the download location and run it from there so it can find some love. I reported this issue to the Itch team as it seems like something they could handle on their end.

The sound fits well with the graphics, making for a nice mood. I got the resolution to work properly. I agree the game is a little repetitive at it's current state, but it is a very cool concept. It reminds me of an old DS game I used to play called 99 bullets. When you got hit, it also counted as your bullets. I played that game for hours, it was so fun, so I am a bit biased into loving this concept for this game :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zdaY_J9BfU

Awesome job on this game, good luck!

@simon-parzer go to options, change your resolution by using A and D keys. It is always in window mode, just the window is so large it looks full screen at the highest resolution.

@ajayajayaj Thank you I got it working now!
The game is pretty cool even though there is not a lot of content, i.e. only one enemy type and one weapon. The idea of using health as ammo is executed pretty well here. My best so far is 101 seconds. I think it would be cool to have an in-game timer and a high score.

@simon-parzer yup the default resolution was too high and that was my fault. I use a 4k monitor so it was no problem for me but I didn't have the foresight to make the default smaller. Thanks for playing though!

@ecmjohnson The resolution thing is really the fault of both. I did make the default too high, but Windows 10 is really annoying when it comes to high dpi scaling. I've had issues with plenty of other apps or games where changing the option helped. As for the itch app error... I have no idea, I'm sorry. I can offer an explanation that the game data is located in a .love file which is really just a zip folder. The RunningLow.exe file basically appends the .love file to love.exe to run the game (Love2d is the framework I used to make the game). I'm not sure how itch's app works so I don't know where the problem is. Maybe it didn't recognize the shortcut? I really don't know.

@ajayajayaj Thanks man, sorry about the resolution once again. I'm glad you enjoyed it!