It's really cool! I liked the boss and its phases. Awesome entry!

WOW! This game is incredible! The visuals are so sick, and the background song is catchy too. I would have never expected to have a boss fight in a Ludum game, either. Very impressed with this entry, great job guys!

Thank you very much for your kind words!

The global mood is good, very techno. Art and audio is great. A little difficulty sometimes to understand where I am. Is it possible to lose ? Very fun experience.

@gistnoesis it is not actually possible to lose in the game. In fact nobody dies during the entire thing so you can call it a pacifist playthrough :)

I __absolutely__ love this!
I only wish restarting would bring you back to the character selection screen so I can play as a different character next time :D

I really loved the graphics and the music. It felt a bit frustrating to get knocked down all the time, maybe adding a roll move to make it faster to stand up would make it feel nicer. The boss Queen was really cool.

Nice! I loved the art style in this one.

Didn't expect a Boss Fight.
But i'm the new Techno King so 10/10

Great art and sound! It was fun playing it!

Graphics looks great. I like this neon lighting.

Enjoyed playing this and thought the Techno Queen was an interesting idea, can she be defeated?

@ed3187 yes, you actually can. But some times the boss glitches and starts spamming charge attack, or just stands and rains bullets nonstop. Is that what happened in your playthrough?

Yeey! I am the new techno dance king!

Yes, Queen can be defeated, didn't have any problems with difficulty.

Very nice and fancy art. Gameplay a little bit easy for me, I can't find anything that can kill me (or make me loose), but I think you'll tweak that.

Simple and cool game, maybe a little bit of game design will be nice. And more ideas! And it will be a great start as a standalone game.

Graphics and music are freaking awesome, i love the the fact that the dance floor goes with the rhythm of the music, and its sad that the game is short i wish it had more. Overall everything is pretty cool!!

@interpol Ye, you actually can't lose. We haven't got time to test the numbers on damage and HP, so we decided to make you Undying being. But we plan to change it in some way in the postjam version.

Amazing mood and feeling through the game, I loved playing it. Actually, you can't die, what makes you feel that your effort is kinda pointless, but I just realized this after I finished because when inside the game the atmosphere is so involving and nice that this isn't even a problem. Solid work guys!

The gameplay is a little too simple and brainless to be honest. Having the player be stunned on the floor everytime they’re hit didn’t feel good at all, pretty frustrating on the long run. AMAZING graphics and music however, the post-effects made the pixel art look so good, and the music was on point ! (loved the responsive dancefloor)

Wow, that was great ! Thanks for the fun :-D The graphics and music are really cool ! Nevertheless I do have some troubles with the game design, there is little reward in using the hit mechanic that is necessary to the progression in the game. (altough the animations and visual fx are cool and fun ! Big GG for the Dance Queen !). There could be more feedback here and less punishing/unability to move when you're doing what you're supposed to :-)
That's my opinion !
If you wanna go and check our game (darker ! I hope you like it x)) it's over there : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-darkest-light
See you and good luck and inspiration for the following jams ;-)

What's good:
- Having art of the area around the floor (stage/bar/bathrooms) really helps set the mood
- The floor glowing in time with the music. I want to know how you did that.
- The crowd dancing around and/or fighting each other. It feels hectic, which is what I imagine you were going for.
- the unfocused glow on the edges of the screen and the bloom effect on glowing things is very nice!
- the boss introduction. Having the crowd suddenly back off and disperse really communicates that there is about to be a bigger challenge
- No deaths! I think that was the right decision given how wild and unpredictable the dance floor gets. I think I would have gotten very frustrated if I had had to start over a bunch of times. It was enough to get bounced off the dance floor and have to wait on the sideline for the crowd to stop hitting me :P

What would make it better:
- more animation! bartender could wipe down the bar, dj could bob its head, lantern things could fade on and off, bathroom doors could swing, stools / tables could be knocked over, more varied dancing / combat animations, etc.
- a block or dodge action:
- I got stunlocked by the boss in the top left corner of the area for what felt like forever when she was low on health. being able to avoid that with player skill would be nice
- same goes for the crowd in general. Maybe moshpit simulator is what you were going for, but having to wait while I get knocked down repeatedly is not fun =(
- More boss actions. It was super cool when I figured out I could trick the boss into crashing into the glowing lamps! More of those sorts of little puzzle things would be nice.

On the whole, well done! I got a lot of hyper light drifter vibes from this game, would love to see it refined/expanded.

Feels good to be the king! Graphics and sound were incredible! It just is a cool looking/sounding game.
It not being possible to lose meant that the game had no challenge...it would have been nice to have stakes!

The Linux build works, although I spent 30 minutes getting all the dependencies together (needed the following 32-bit libraries: libsdl1.2:i386 and lib32stdc++6)

Amazing graphics, good audio, solid workmanship. Yet there is a massive problem! Where is the challenge? Played through the whole thing in a few minutes, no tension, no excitement; affects the mood hard. What a letdown!

Challenge is the root of fun, something to consider for the next time.

Overall: *Average (3.0)*
Fun: *Terrible (1.0)*
Innovation: *Average (3.0)*
Theme: *Bad (2.0)*
Graphics: *Amazing (5.0)*
Audio: *Good (4.0)*
Humor: *Above average (3.5)*
Mood: *Average (3.0)*

@HuvaaKoodia not everyone is looking for a challenge from a game :wink:
But yeah, we know that the game misses the challenge aspect. We kinda ran out of time and were not able to polish the mechanics. Anyway, thanks for your response!

@annie-owl
Imagine Pacman where the ghosts could not hurt Pacman at all. Would you play that? Would it be fun?

Here's the deal. If you want to make interactive media without challenge then you need something else in its place, for instance: an interactive story, a simulated world, an immersive virtual experience (of some sort...) There are a lot of options to choose from.

Looking at the description and gifs I see a top-down action game. Had I known you ran out of time and the entry had no challenge then I would have set my expectations accordingly. So ah, consider adding that to the description.

Hey nice game ! I'd love the graphics and sounds, realy pinky but sweet !
I'd killed the Dance Queen when she was about 60% of her healthbar...
This game sounds like Hotline Miami ;).

@huvaakoodia i understand your point, and i agree with it. But the thing with our game is that you don't realize that your are invincible until you bit the game. And yes, it's really short game, but we don't have much time, just like everyone else, and that was the limit of our abilities for this jam. I really don't get your disapointment abaut this. Nobody said that this was a fully finished game, i think you should expect that sort of things when you launch JAM games, but i'm new to this so maybe i'm wrong.

Amazing Art and of course the music. In general, awesome game. A lot of fun to play.

@annie-owl
"until you bit the game"
*Quit* the game? That was not in doubt, I can assure you.

It is always good to set the expectations of your audience, whether dealing with a jam entry or a full blown commercial release. Whenever expectations are set they can be broken and thus disappointment can occur. I've learned that the hard way over the years.

I'll reiterate my point. By reading the description and looking at the gifs a certain expectation is set: top-down-havoc-causing-action. I was reminded of many similar titles all of which have challenge, a way to lose as well as a way to win. Action without consequences is ultimately boring, so I sure didn't expect that.

Now, of course, we are talking about a short, free, jam entry. In this context "letdown" does not have the same gravitas as when talking about an expensive AAA title which received lootboxes up the wazoo in a post-release patch. I've lost nothing here, but a few minutes of time (and I enjoy having discussions like these, so I've already made up for those!)

In conclusion, it is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Yet it is worth thinking about. What is the point of my project and how do I communicate that to my audience without causing false expectations?

Fantastic neat, fun experience. Graphics and sound work great together and love how much personality the game has.

very atmospheric

Loved the music and mood! Not a fan of chromatic aberrations, but I enjoyed the dance floor visuals! I think that the indicator in the beginning should be less hidden with semi-transparency and stuff though! Don't know how I feel about the player invincibility, it takes away the boss challenge, but as the maker of several too hard LD entries I understand that it's not that bad for the game to be easy :-)

@markopolodev Sorry for the late response but better late than never. You asked how we did dancefloor in sync with music. There is a great multipart tutorial on the subject by Peer Play which we followed to achieve the effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Av788P9stk

Excellent atmosphere, the sound design and graphics are really great ! After that, the gameplay is very simple and the game is short. It is fun to play anyway but may be an other type of gameplay could have let the player enjoy in a better way the excellent mood of the game.

Very good mood, audio and visuals!

Great game, really fun. Loved the whole retro feel, art and audio. The dance moves were also really rad.

On the final battle, I felt it didn't really matter what I did. I kept being tackled and in doing that the Queen ended up getting hurt most of the times. I couldn't really manage to attack her, so I won not really winning. Also, instead of spamming the same move maybe some key combos with different effectiveness (based on dancer and enemy) could be added to add some variety to the game.

Overall it was fun to play, really short but also polished, which will aloow in expanding if you want to. Congratulations!

WoW! Our squating character would have fitted perfectly into this little game I think! :D

Really cool visuals and the audio matching with the dancefloor is a very good idea and sets the mood just right!
In my opinion it was kinda lacking some sort of challenge, as I was hitting every body to the ground and they started attacking me I thought it would be over, but my girl just stood up everytime she fell.
I Really like the idea in one of the other comments to implement some sort of dodge skill, that would be pretty cool and fit the overall "fast paced" theme.
The fight vs the techno dancing queen was very fluent in regards of the animations and abilities but again I felt to strong as she was kicking my ass really hard but didn't punish me in any may.

But maybe thats just because im the real techno dance queen!

Thanks for this beautiful game :-)

Neat little game. Reminded me of Party Hard. The art and the visuals were fantastic. The game was well-polished for what it was, but there wasn't much to it. Pretty much just punch things, and there's no way to die/lose. With some game mechanics paired with the excellent audio/art, you'd have an incredible game.

Nice! I had to replay it a few times to see all the characters, ha. The art was cool, especially the style you went for, well done... I really liked the effects as well! Gameplay was solid, obviously it was pretty easy.

My favorite part, personally, may just have to be the music, hehe (I might have to check out this 'chiptone' you speak of).

I appreciate that the boss' bullet pattern is actually avoidable, so I can see why you wouldn't implement health points, because it's actually quite a challenge!

Really nice graphics! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzMlvyUelZw