The game is really great. The mix of theses two genres has already made a lot of time. But your game is really well made. Graphics are simple but great. The bad point and the core point : the rythm. I think that the music is not enough clear to understand the beat. If it would be with more drums or just big hits. it could be more understanding.

@leonard Thank you for the feedback! I hope you liked it.

As for the rhythm, there was not much I could do. I didn't make the music myself, I don't know music theory. I was limited in my choice of songs, and this was one of the best choices I had. For me, its really easy to find the beat in the music, but that is only because I am a percussionist: I am used to finding the beat in a lot of songs. In the future, I will make sure the song has a heavy kick drum on the downbeat to make it obvious.

I liked this idea, a lot, but I think the rhythm part would be better if other game parts followed it. For example, the health bars should pulse with the expected rhythm (unless they already are and I'm just bad at rhythm games), maybe some enemy patterns could follow the beat, etc.

Rhythm games are very hard to do right. A really good attempt in a short period of time. Nice Work!!

Loved this. The graphics are simple but effective and cute. The UI is pleasant. The game mechanics is fun and overall it is a lovely little game.
Actually it was a bit difficult to avoid projectiles and actually stay in the rythm, but it runs so smoothly. Well done :)

Wow! Would love to see this expanded into a full game!

Super fun! The graphics are lovely and the game runs smoothly. My sense of rhythm is really bad, so this was a real challenge!

I REALLY enjoyed this game a lot. I think this is something you should attempt to take this further as it was so much fun! Good job!

good game, love space theme)

The art design is really good, and the gameplay feels great.

But the rhythm feels off. The music is way too quiet, you can't hear it over the SFX sometimes. I also believe the rhythm is off time. The UI doesn't move properly in time with the music (off by a whole 1/8th it seems), and when I tap perfectly in time it doesn't work consistently.

I play a lot of rhythm games and am a musician myself, and the rhythm just feels off. You may need to increase the time period in which the player can hit the note. There should be at least like a few hundred milliseconds.

@GiovanniBarrottu thank you for the feedback! I definitely think that the rhythm could use some improvement too. I think adding a calibration screen might help.
Thank you for playing!

Very nice!

Nicely done on this, got to the boss but had some trouble :-D I really like the way it plays, gameplay is good. Could definitely work out as a complete game with more content! :-)
Good job!

The visuals and the music are so fitting. This boss actually puts a smile on my face.


Congratulations on making such a good gem on your first jam. This kind of rhythm game gave me the good flashbacks of Patapon and Crypt of the Necrodancer, so it's quite well worth a playthrough or two. At first it's a bit hard to mix between remembering which button is which color and dodging the bullet hell, but it gets so satisfying as time goes on.

I encountered a small problem though. In the screenshot I sent, on my second playthrough, I faced that boss again. After 2 full minutes of fight, the health was still not dropping. I mean, it was tanky the first time I fought him, but the second it was outright invincible. Or at least it gave that impression, since it wasn't so hard the first time around. Do check on that.

All in all, great work. [My team](twitter.com/whalesandgames) would really like to see what you can come up with in the future, since this submission was a blast. Cheers! :whale:

@Moski Thank you so much for the feedback! Believe it or not, Crypt of the Necrodancer was one of the inspirations I had for making this.

As for the boss, I feel that his mechanic was unclear to players. In order to damage him once you need to hit 3 shots consecutively. Since he changes color every time you shoot him, you have have really good reactions to shoot the right color on the next beat. If you shoot the wrong color, or you miss the beat, your combo is broken and you will not deal damage to him. Looking back on this, I felt like there wasn't enough feedback to let the player know whether they are fighting him correctly. I have actually modified him in my current version to fix this. Now, hitting him will deal one damage as normal, but if you miss a consecutive shot, his health will immediately reset back to full health. This means that each shot, you can actually see his health going down, and when you miss a shot, you can see it go back up. This also means that you only need one "combo" to kill him, apart from three in the original version. I'm not sure if I should upload these changes, would that be against the rules of LD?

Again, thank you so so much. Btw, that twitter link in your message doesn't work. :(
I would love to keep in touch with you guys! <3

The one time someone genuinely wants to check the twitter, the one time I make a typo.

Well, glad that you're addressing that. Now I can't tell if I was not fighting it right, or I was just having terrible reflexes. I maaaay have just spammed buttons to the tempo the first time I fought it, and happened to get them right. Oh well. Hopefully that'll make for a better experience for others.

Great game, @Bodaciouslycrazy! It took me a moment to catch the beat, but it was quite fun once I got the hang of it. I loved the color mechanic too. Keeping to the beat, hitting the boss with the right sequence of colors, and dodging the bullets all at the same time was very engaging.

The only negative I noticed is that the tinier yellow bullets are hard to distinguish from the stars from the background, but the animation helped with that. I couldn't agree more with @ Moski -- "it gets so satisfying as time goes on." Very well done.

@jcgamedev Thank you so much for the feedback! I'll keep that in mind. I might change the color of the small bullets to stand out more. :)

You got two genres that had been mixed before... but you mixed them GREAT. Nice game and lovely visuals. Funny to play and gives you that feeling that you want more

Yeet! This is probably the best game I've played this LD. I actually felt myself learning to get with the beat and memorizing the laser keys.

Damn that was good - even if you mentioned in your comment that it was your first time making a bullet hell (yeah, base spawner class next time ;) ). Loved how you added the rhythm to this, and it actually flowed with the rhythm - so props. Great entry!

Interesting game, great use of the theme. The web version lags quite a lot, making it difficult to keep with the beat of the music.

Awesome! That was good! Very well executed. Once you get the hang of the beat it gets you into "the zone" and it's super fun to play! Good job!

It took me quite some time to figure out the "beat" (I only figured it out in the boss battle, actually). It would probably help to match the bounce of the UI elements with it.

Aside from this, if you do get the beat, it's fun. The color mechanic certainly made the game more enjoyable.

I gave most of my feedback on stream. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing it!

This was a great idea, and really polished! You had great feedback on everything so it felt nice to play. Good job!

I gave you most of my feedback on my stream (https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames), but it's probably worth repeating in writing so that you can act on it better.

You executed on this idea very well, the level leading up to the boss felt great, but the colors in the health bar for both the player and the boss were somewhat confusing since color has a specific meaning in the game. And I probably would not have been able to figure out how to damage the boss if you hadn't told me in chat. It was a cool idea for a boss mechanic, though. It was difficult to do, but felt good when I got it right, so it really just needs to be communicated to the player somehow.

Pretty cool, I also made a rhythm shoot em up and had considered trying the Ikaruga style colour match mechanic also, but took a different approach in the end. I found it fun, maybe a bit of issue with the rhythm, it did feel like a half beat off (I played the web version, in case it matters), and probably could have used a more obvious big kick on the beat to make it more obvious to the player. Played through twice, but failed to beat the boss. I spent a couple of minutes shooting him and then read the comment to figure out i was doing it wrong, but couldn't pull off the right approach. Definitely need to make that more obvious to the player, but I think as an idea it would be cool. Also agree the player health should just be a single colour not too confuse things for the player. Also some more enemy movement variation would be nice instead of appear and then wait to be shot while firing their pattern, but given the jam time constraint, fair enough. Art was charming and functional enough too. Overall solid entry, had fun.

It clean, smooth and easy to learn. I didn't notice any problems with the rhythm, which can be a hard feat with these sorts of games, and I think the graphics were pretty clean as well. Good job :musical_note: