I like it! Definitely a fun little game, looks pretty good too.

200 points was my score hahaha really fun! I have just rate the game, you are welcome to check out mine!! :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/naziverse-1

I enjoyed the game :D, would be nice if I could also kill enemies by jumping on their heads, other than that its pretty good. Oh, maybe the bullet speed could be a bit faster :P

I was a spaceman once. Then I shot dinosaurs and army men until they overwhelmed me.

That was really fun. Nice little survival shooter with a good difficulty curve.

Lovely looking game. The shooting mechanics were pretty simple but the Nerf dart riding was great. I wish there were more levels, or just a bigger level (perhaps vertically) to make more use of the Nerf dart; being able to fire your own platform on which to jump could be a lot of fun.

Cool simple game. All game over a bit Derek Zoolander with the controls though! The graphics were nice and clean.

Very fun! One of those games I'm terrible at, but am totally okay with.

Cool little game.
Nice variation in power-ups and good increasing difficulty.
Bullets feel very slow. Music is well made, but I personally think it's not a great match with the game.
Other than that, good job!

Neat, the power-ups made a nice change and the enemies upped their game at the moment when I felt like there was nothing left to do but shoot from a corner!

I'd say make the enemies a little more solid, there didn't seem to be anything stopping me from walking from pickup to pickup and ignoring the enemies. Overall I had fun though!

Good one but it feels somewhat boring for me.

Well executed and beautifull!

Super Crate Box meets Toy Story - I like it! There's a good variety of enemies and weapons. All the platforms and weapons seem to match the tone of a child's playroom. The only thing that seemed out of place was the look of the powerup pickups, which looked like candy bars. I guess they sort of tie in to the tone, but it would have felt more consistent if it was all just toys. I like how you put the menu buttons as candy bars like the pickups, though. The music has a melody that plays well with the "child and his toys" concept. Pianos and bell sounds were a good sound scheme.

Some other things:

- I was unable to face and shoot in the left direction. Whenever I walked, it was always with my character facing the right. This also happens with the download version, so I assume it was intentional, but it doesn't seem like the ideal character movement for a game where enemies can spawn all around you.
- I wish the top of the screen wasn't solid so that the player character wouldn't have such a stunted jump. (the player should be able to make a full jump when they go off the top of the screen.
- Because this is about a child playing with his toys, it would have been interesting to incorporate child-like sound effects - like when a dinosaur dies, have a childlike "RAWWWRRR" sound. I think it would add to the humour/charm.
- Sometimes standing right behind a bucket will cause an enemy that spawns at the opposite end to immediately die, and you never even get to see that enemy come out.

Overall, this was a small but all right entry, with a good whimsical tone.

Hey Random, just as a heads up- it looks like arrow keys provide that mirroring issue, but WADS flips the character normally. Thank you for all your input, if we do another build I'll definitely keep it in mind!

Fun and cute little game of toys. The nerf powerup was pretty cool. Congrats for making the game!

I liked the idea very much. The different weapons made the game fun to play and different enemy types required you to actually switch tactics every now and then. The dreamy, childish soundtrack fit perfectly! Sound effects, however, were a little off.

It was nice to have jumping that easily cleared the height I needed to get to. I also enjoyed the nerf weapon. Great job.

Looks like really simple but it's really cool when you begin to discover new weapons and the way to interact with them. Becomes harder the longer you survive. A funny challenge and a funny game. The music fits nice with the aesthetic but sound effects are very low. Overall is a nice game.

Aw, it's really nice. I like your interpretation of the theme. The visuals are very cute and the audio fits well and is quite relaxing. Changing up projectiles was a good idea.
Overall, a great relaxing experience with a bit of childhood nostalgia. Thanks!

Now I know how the dinosaurs became extinct: I wiped them out with a nerf gun mwahahaha.
That was a fun little game, the nerf gun did seem to have trouble hitting multiple enemies that were close to each other, but other than that it plays very nicely. Cool use of physics on the ball weapon. The visuals were very nice. I think the musical arrangement could be a bit more coherent but the tone was appropriately cute for the setting. Nice work!

I like the idea and all the enemies and other elements which fit great together.
The different weapons are cool and bring variety into the game.
For example I like that the nerf dart can get stuck to the wall and you are able to use it as a platform to reach higher ones.
What is missing, is more visual feedback for the player. For example an effect when you hit an enemy or a dying animation.

@iron-leonem Ohhhh that probably explains why I didn't have a problem playing the game the first time around. I didn't even realise I was using the WASD keys on the first attempt, that means. Typically I use the arrow keys, so that's strange.

Anyways, I tried playing again but with the WASD keys in mind, got to a score of 810. I then saw you had lollipops for health restoration, which at first I thought was generous, but definitely became useful as more buckets were placed and the difficulty progressed. I have one more quip that I think is a bug: when using the Nerf gun on a dinosaur (mostly when it's in the air it seems), the bullet pushes it back against the edge of the screen and doesn't kill it. That almost makes this weapon useless if that's intentional, so I'm thinking maybe it's not? But I like how the Nerf gun bullets travel slowly so that you can land on them as they're traveling across the screen. :D

@random-storykeeper Thanks for checking back in! I'm glad to get more feedback. I'll have to take a look at the nerf dart's damage code. I've got an idea for how to work that a little differently next time. Again, thanks so much for the input!

@nofuel Thanks so much for the input!

The music is great, perfectly fitting the art style and theme. The gameplay has a very gentle dificulty curve. As you get new weapons, the game becomes more interesting... and difficult. Nice entry. :)

good job i really enjoyed it. while this type of game is rather common it was still fun for the future i would recommend adding more levels other than that good job

loved the power ups, first thing that sticks out is no death ani on the baddies. they just pop into nothing, also when they run into the player they died real quick. then everything with seemingly the same physics seemed odd, BUT it's a toy world so... maybe that's just me haha.

great take on the theme, love the art concepts. the nerf gun bullets YES & ball bouncing mechanics were really nice. seems like a very solid team build here, congrats!

Fun game. My biggest issue was that I am not accustomed to W being jump in a platformer and it was really throwing me -- but that isn't something I would dock you for.

As for the game itself I think you executed the mechanics well and had a consistent artistic direction (graphics and audio). I also think you hit the theme well. The only thing is that I think you played it very safe. It is a pretty standard single screen shooter. I think the powerups were a good touch, but I would have liked either a few more enemies or control mechanics -- like maybe the kid comes in and everyone has to freeze because toys can't move; anything to add a bit of unique flair to it.

Overall though great job! Thanks for making it :)

Wew, I'm glad I gave this a second shot after I died the first time. My first round lasted for (what felt like) a couple of minutes, but I only ever got the nerf gun once near the end, then died soon afterwards. Because it took so long to obtain a powerup, I had just assumed that I saw everything the game had to offer.

However, this game becomes a LOT more fun when the powerups come into play more often, particularly the balls. There's just something so satisfying with how they bounce around destroying everything in their way.

I should also say that it was a good idea to include your little tid-bit about riding nerf bullets in your description, because without that, I would never have even thought to jump on them. I absolutely LOVE the idea of firing projectiles to jump on them to get to higher places, but I feel as though the level doesn't particularly encourage you to ever do that. I could only ever jump on the nerf bullets when they were stuck to the walls, and by that point, there were several opportunities for me to jump to other platforms and get to higher ground faster. I would love to see you experiment around with the level design in a way that encourages the player to forge their own paths with the bullets in order to get an advantage.

Aside from a few bugs here and there (as to be expected from a game made in a weekend), I'm lovin' the Toy Story vibe you got going on here. Fun game overall!

I liked the different power ups and the art, fits the theme well. The controls felt good for me, no awkwardness moving around.
I later discovered you could stand on one of the power up bullet types which was very exciting to me as I had suspicions you could earlier, love it!

I was a bit confused about the enemies, they seemed to pop into existence out of no where and I wasn't too sure where to expect them to appear. it wasn't much of an issue except for when the difficulty ramps up and more enemies appear on the screen, I was mostly just overwhelmed by them appearing from out of nowhere I actually like how the number of them rises and the screen becomes more hectic.

Thank you all so much for your input! I definitely found myself nodding my head at a lot of the criticism that was offered, it was all very on point! I'm so glad it seems like over all people were having fun with it!

This was a really cute entry. The gameplay was fun and the powerups gave me a reason to risk my neck going through enemies. The music was good, though, as mentioned above, I don't think it fit perfectly with the gameplay. It fit well with the theme you were going for but just not the gameplay in my opinion. The art was a strong point for this entry. Very well done, though I think that the blocks needed a *little* something to indicate that you can just walk through them. A couple other small thoughts that I had while playing are that I would've liked to have seen my score when I died and that the controls were a little confusing for me. I kept feeling like space should've been the jump button. Those two points are pretty minor, however, and overall I'd say that this was a very fun little game. Nice work all around.

I love the Toy Story vibe and the bouncing ball's were a nice weapon. I found myself want to double jump a lot, especially to reach the higher platforms, so maybe that's some functionality you could add. Good job!

It felt odd that the player can move faster than the nerf darts. The movement and jumping control all felt right. The music while childish felt too calm for how much action was happening. Nice take on the theme.

Well, that was cute :slight_smile:

I've played a bit myself and I've been reading the other comments... I have to ask, why not reduce the amount of time to the powerups by a huge ammount? I couldn't even get to one before the first time I died (they appeared much faster in the second time). That may or may not have been on me, but I think 'time to awesome' should be reduced as much as possible :grin: Or maybe just have one or two spawn right from the beginning, then 'business as usual', just to get the players interest.

@valmay I think they spawn from the buckets? But then more buckets *do* appear out of nowhere? Not super clear, but I could see it working with some more polish on visual effects.

A very nice game. Especially the fact that it is done in 3 days!

Though the game could do with some juice to it. For example, a muzzle flash on the gun when you shoot, bullet impact effect or a death effect for the enemies.

This video will be able to help understand the basics of "juice" (Whats makes a game 'feel' better).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Oh nice job, guys!
Simple but very fun to play. I found the controls a little uncomfortable because I'm used to jump with SPACE, now with W. A solid entry overall!

I know other commenters have mentioned this, but I really enjoyed the Toy Story-vibe here. It's like a spinoff of what might've happened if Buzz never accepted that he's a toy! So kudos on a great idea. I also really appreciated the scattering of powerups and enemy spawns to keep things interesting. Maybe considering adding some kind of objective as the difficulty progresses, like riding the nerf bullets to another location, if you decide to expand on this game in the future.

Unrelated, but @iron-leonem reviewed my game rovR a few days ago on twitch. I just wanted to say thank you - I really enjoyed watching, and you gave fantastic constructive criticism. Thanks for taking the time to do that :)

Solid little game, though seemed pretty simple. I had to deliberately die during my playthrough because after a certain point it stopped progressing the difficulty and for a high score game I don't think that is particularly good. The fun of that type of game should come from each time having to get better and better to get the high score as opposed to getting bored in my first playthrough and dying on purpose. A slight tweak in how often power ups come up or a scaling amount of damage done by enemies quickly fixes this though. So not as terrible as I think I've made it out to be.

That aside, the music went well with the toy theme, the sound effects were decent and the art was very good. A bit of a graphical hiccup when standing inside the right bottom toy block where my guy would spazz out, but it didn't effect the gameplay. (I was playing the windows download). For theme, it came across well that it was a small world but you didn't do anything particularly clever with it.

Overall great job! Had fun for most of my playthrough and I really liked the powerups. Surfing nerf darts for the win!

I did like the toy-aesthetic of the game, as well as the music. In regards to the actual gameplay, though, I felt the enemy AI was too erratic to find fun in. As mentioned above, a lot of the actions the player takes doesn't feel like they have weight to them, likely due to the lack of juice. It would be more satisfying if the enemies had some sort of effect when they die besides just a single sound effect playing, and same story for getting hit.

As probably an early game for a few team members, I do think it's a great start. I think more can be done, though, to create a more satisfying experience.

At first I thought it was a pretty standard shooter. When the powerups kicked in though, I was super impressed. Very creative implementations of the extra weapons, can't say I've seen that nerf gun idea before. In terms of art, I wasn't as impressed with the game itself, but the title screen looked fantastic, so kudos to whoever did that. Lastly, great use of the theme, it's more on the original side compared to the others.

The upgrades are kind of fun, but I think the game overall is in dire need of better game feel (or "juice" as others have called it). There's almost no feedback when anything happens, which makes the action that's happening seem very distant and detached. A bit of knockback, a few visual effects, and some better sound effects would go a long way. That said, I do think the enemy AI is a bit arbitrary, and it's not really possible to play strategically because of how the level is laid out. There's no benefit to climbing on top of the platforms, and eventually enough enemy spawners appear that no matter where you stand, there will be enemies falling on your head that you can't shoot.

Suits the theme well, and the power-ups were fun (bouncy balls OP!) but the overall game felt quite plain and unpolished. It's a shame - the actual graphical quality was fine and the audio was serviceable but little details weren't there.

So, I never was able to get the browser version to load, using multiple browsers on different computers with different operating systems. Some of the linked resource files just give 403 errors. That said, the Download version worked fine.

I think the main problem, as you've already alluded to, is that the power-ups spawn _really_ infrequently. I never saw one until the second I was finally overwhelmed, when two appeared at once (one health, one a weapon change, I believe). Honestly the player should _start_ with a random power-up available, because they're a big part of what makes the game fun.

Other than that, though there's not a lot to complain about. The graphics are cute and the audio is fun. I guess overall the difficulty is too high, at least for me, but fixing the power-up problem would probably also fix that.