PROTECT THE EGG

Classic, with good 2d pixel graphics, and good sound in general ... it's very good, congratulations

Great work Jake! Nice game with excellent graphics. I would have loved an auto fire because I think my spacebar broke :D

@cg-fred Thanks, Fred! There's actually a hold-to-fire toggle in the settings. Not quite auto-fire, but I find it helps for when our thumbs get tired, or if repeatedly mashing a key isn't possible for the player. Still, I wanted to hold to that classic feeling of smashing the fire button to shoot bullets like you would in arcades. Glad you enjoyed it though! :v:

Good job for a game developed by only one person in 72h. Graphics and audios are very nice. A score and a feedback on the number of life remaining will be nice.

Great job!! Really nice audio and visuals!!I liked the idea, I'm really really bad at this genre so I couldn't get really far sadly haha. Solid entry!!

I didn't play the game myself but watched a stream on twitch. You did a great job with the parallax, the graphics and the audio is well blended in the atmosphere! The idea is classic, but I liked the chase effect of the egg. As I said to you in the twitch chat, imho the Hud needs to be refined a bit to let the player better know the difference between the ship getting hit and the egg getting hit (and maybe how many hits it can still withstand). Anyway, great work!

I'm not much of a fan of shooters but this one is an exemption! It's really polished out I must say. Love the art and the feedback given!

This is a very well made an polished game. The graphics and audio is all really good. For me the gameplay was way too hectic. Overall a good jam game. Well done.

Really cool game and feels very polished. Congrats on making. Really enjoyed it! Really cool idea to protect the egg while protecting your ship and how the strip colour on the edges changes depending on damage taken.

@muchobestostudio I agree, the HUD needs some work & a score was originally in the plan, but had to be cut to save time. Originally there was going to be an accuracy multiplier too, which is why there's press-to-shoot & hold-to-shoot controls (in case players want more control over their shots fired). I'm planning to add score in after the rating & everything is done, along with some other quality of life improvements to the HUD to make the life counter more informative. I also need to add in menu & boss music.

@webox Thanks! Yeah, it's a really hard game even in this genre, lol. The whole "protect the laggy egg" concept really pushes against standard bullet hell strategy, so I like to think while it feels very much like a classic side scrolling SHMUP (like Gradius), it still brings something new to the genre.

@hyunkelw I'm glad it was interesting even to watch! The spectacle of games being played is just as important as the game itself, and if you get excited & frustrated with the player just by watching, then I count that as a success. Also really glad the atmosphere blended in well! I uh... really know very little about music making, so I did my best to push through & produce something that would be both interesting & fitting. Glad I managed to work a miracle lol.

@grizzliusmaximus Thank you! I try to focus more on polish, since my past attempts to do crazy ambitious amounts of gameplay resulted in not finishing in time. A good, well made short game is way better than a barely-working, half-baked epic. Hopefully though as I get faster & better at doing this, I'll be able to make slightly longer equally polished games.

@jk5000 Thanks! Yeah, it's really fast-paced. The game actually has a very short runtime (2 minutes of moving track, followed by a 1 minute or so boss fight) so it gets hectic fast to push you as a player. I had to make sure every bit of those 3 minutes was a fight to get through, and rely on dying & sitting on the death screen as a chance to breath & relax. If I had more time, I'd have made the level two or three times longer & built up more gradually to the intense pace the end has.

@zerohbeat I'm glad you enjoyed it! The damage indicators were my way of trying to show how much damage you'd taken without outright putting numbers on the screen. I feel like I could have done better still, but I'm trying to take up as little of the screen space as possible so that you can always be aware of bullets flying at you.

Loved the sounds and flow of the game. It got very tricky at parts but that's what an arcade-style game does! Love it, thanks for making it.

Cool sounds, beautiful and onpoint Graphics and a simple Concept new interpreted, which gives a very different feel. I like it alot. Props for the Oldschool, arcade style. I found it a little difficul though.

@westmave yeah the difficulty curve is a little intense lol. I ran out of time for level design. Ideally the level would be 2-3 times longer and do a better job teaching you the various enemies & situations. Instead though, I went for a game where every section has its own unique challenge, and getting past it all to the boss doesn't take too long since, really, the boss is going to kill you a few more times before you finally win.

I don't remember retro arcade games being easy at all. I remember them looking like there was a way through, but being punishing hard enough to eat all your quarters for trying lol.

@drums it warms my heart whenever people get the arcade vibe I aimed for. Those games were stupid punishing, threw the kitchen sink at you, but were still beatable if you figured out all the tricks and patterns. Thanks for playing, and for the feedback!

Lots to like with this one: Great usage of particle effects. The ships/enemies and terrain both look quite good. Smooth controls and solid gameplay. Decent variety of enemies that behave pretty much as one would expect. Nice use of sounds and custom music.

My first run, I didn't quite kill the mini-boss, and he didn't kill me, but I died immediately after. I managed to take him out on my second run, but died again in pretty much the same place. :)

My only suggestions/criticisms: The level feels a bit hectic/cluttered, but I saw you have already addressed that in your comments. I concur with hyunkelw's comment about more distinct player vs. egg damage feedback. Finally, there's not a whole lot going on in the humor/mood departments (which is totally fine for this type of game, but I couldn't in good faith score you as high in those categories).

Nice solid shoot em up mechanics! Well done on getting so many of the traditional elements done. Waves, multiple enemy types, turrets, bosses, etc. I'm not sold on how the theme was incorporated as it felt kinda tacked on, but that's OK.

The chunky particles are nice and colorful, although they're a bit low-rez for the rest of the graphics. I would change them to smaller circles or stars instead of chunky squares. Good job on the graphics BTW, good 3d renders and tiling. I wonder what software did you use for those.

The music is decently good, I'm guessing you used Bosca Ceoil for it? It has a lo-fi vibe that goes up alongside the number of enemies :thumbsup:

The game seems to be a bit too hard... I resorted to cheesing it by keeping to the left of the screen in hopes the bullets would de-spawn (which I think was unsuccessful, so good job there as well :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) I only managed to get past the first "big" enemy before failing my egg again. Maybe some tips in the death screen would help players get better as well.

I like the small cinematic at the very beginning, where the egg finds you. Good little detail :slight_smile:

@yellowlime Yeah, the particle effects were something I lacked a bit of time with. My main issue was that my tablet I use for 2D anything had display issues, so I was stuck with my laptop & trackpad, thus the 3D models lol. I know some people can do amazing pixel art with a mouse, but I lack that skill, so I relied more on colours & the particle system to get the job done. I couldn't crank up the pixelation of the screen more without a lot of the 3D models becoming unreadable. The struggles of being a solo dev in the jam ^^; The dream was to have more classic metal slug era explosion effects. I settled for what I was capable of doing. Maybe with some quality shader knowledge I could have make something that looks more like a real explosion lol.

I definitely used Bosca Ceoil for the music. I uh... don't actually know how to make music, so it was a journey in experimenting. It was mainly me going to the complex drum kit and filling the space with a lot of percussion hits, plus random piano roll for the bass melody. I'm glad it worked out, lol. I tried to pair the enemies / gameplay / challenge moments to the music so that it would feel like it was meant to be there, when really I have no idea if that's the kind of music that should be playing for this game lol.

The game is definitely hard though! It's meant to take a long, gruelling while (and eat up all your quarters) to beat, despite only having about 3 minutes of actual level. I believe there's parts that are flat out too hard, such as the corridor after the mini boss, but that's because I accidentally filled it with gun corvettes instead of regular corvettes, so the ships that fly out at you also unload a wall of bullets before they go too far lol. Someone has beaten it before though, and I've both beaten the final boss & the level, but I didn't have enough time to really playlets & fine tune it sadly. Tips is a really good idea though! The death screen needs more content, and it would be an easy thing to slide into the next Ludum Dare I enter.

Thanks for appreciating that little cinematic. I actually figured out I could do it without changing any of my code just by setting the ball to follow the camera cart (that causes the camera to scroll) until the player spawned event triggered, sending it flying behind the ship. That same code is used to make the egg fly back to the ship after it's destroyed, so it just worked out really well. Before I made that switch, the egg would fly in from behind, and that felt like it was a lot less relevant (and a lot less clear what you were protecting!) so between the big text & the initial spawning sequence, I hoped it would portray the main game hook better.

thanks for playing, and for all your feedback! :smile:

@stanleygray Humour is kind of my weakness :weary: I mostly focused on other aspects and figured I'd take the hit on humour, either getting no rating on it or a poor rating on it. I don't believe every game is meant to be humorous, otherwise darker, moodier, or more serious games would be considered "bad." I definitely wanted to add more fun elements to it though, like an announcer voice for a score multiplier (score also had to get cut for time), a score multiplier, sillier sound effects on death & game over, etc. But again, those were all meant to lend themselves more to an "arcade" mode as opposed to a "humorous" mood.

I tried to make feedback different with the yellow vs red screen effects, as well as the different sound effects for the egg being hit, but I clearly needed to do more (like an actual, small screen shake, a *more* different sound effect, heavier emphasis on the screen effect). My main goal was to portray as much of the information as I could without using numbers or a typical health bar (or anything else that would take up more of the screen), and I do believe this was a good attempt, but there's definitely room for improvement. :sweat_smile: Thanks for the feedback and thank you for your time.

@rsim Thanks for playing! I really wanted to pay proper homage to Gradius & the classic genre of auto-scrolling space SHMUPs. The theme is definitely not the largest part of the game, but the interesting aspect is actually how unusual this style of protection gameplay is in bullet hells & SHMUPs. Normally your ship is everything, your life is everything, and you have INCREDIBLY fine-tuned control over said ship. With this, you have the laggy egg that moves to sort of follow behind you, and is therefore far less accurate in its precision navigating a storm of bullets flying every which way. You can keep your ship safe but end up killing the egg, or you can purposefully fly back quickly to take a bullet for it, keeping it alive but making your ship more vulnerable. The death of your ship isn't the loss of a life, but the opportunity for your egg to be hit unguarded & stationary.

I agree that it's not the strongest showing for the theme, and there are certainly other games that have done the theme better, but I hope this explanation at least clears up the theme's use from the perspective of a SHMUP player. I had other ideas that were more fitting for the theme, but this idea, for whatever reason, really struck a chord with me. Such a small change to the SHMUP genre, yet really heavy implications to how you have to play the game compared to other nearly-identical SHMUPs.

Wow this game is super polished! I love your use of particles on everything. Making a bullet hell game in a jam is pretty ambitious. I would have liked some indication of the eggs HP but that wasn't a major issue or anything. also some turrets are placed so that you cannot shoot them without crashing. that may be by design but those turrets annoyed me. great work all around!

@1punnyguy44 Thanks! I don't know if you played the bug fixed version or the original submission. The bug fixes included the yellow damage indicator actually reacting to egg damage, and primarily menu fixes / the game actually ending fixes. The menus were the most rushed part, lol.

the way it actually works, and I should have made the lines thicker / larger in hindsight, is each hit your ship takes, it adds another circle around the screen edge in red (after 4 hits the ship explodes, the final red screen outline appears, and all of the red screen outline fades away. With the egg, a hit does the same thing but with a yellow outline. The egg can only take 3 hits before the game ends completely.

In hindsight, I should have made the yellow more clearly distinct & taken up more space, as well as made the egg's hit sounds more noticeably different. It does produce a different sound when hit from the ship, but I could have done more to really drive home that the egg has been hit.

Anyway, thanks for playing!

@jesterseraph:
> You can keep your ship safe but end up killing the egg, or you can purposefully fly back quickly to take a bullet for it, keeping it alive but making your ship more vulnerable. The death of your ship isn’t the loss of a life, but the opportunity for your egg to be hit unguarded & stationary.

ahh - this is what I didn't get while playing, especially the last point. Thanks for the clarification. Went back through and played again and updated my rating to match! That's actually a very, very good use of the theme then! Well done.

@rsim Seems we both missed the mark a little on each other's games, lol. I'm glad you were able to enjoy it more! We give so little time to each of these games we rate, when sometimes they need or deserve hours.

I really like all the particles going on around the screen! The trails behind both the player and the egg are a nice touch. The enemy ships have a lot of variety, both in design and attack patterns. As you mentioned, adding a score would be a great way to incentivize the player to keep going. Great work!

Liked how you were keeping accessibility in mind during the jam! Keep up the good work.

Awesome work, Jake! I loved this jam entry! Very fun... very polished... very hard. I'm surprised this was made during a jam! Good work!

A well executed bullet hell game!

The art style is wonderful, the music and sound effects make it feel like a real old-school shooter. My only problem with it was that it's difficult to judge collider sizes in some places. To shoot down some turrets you need to get really close to those ships, and sometimes even though it looks like you should be OK, the ships collide and you get destroyed.

Overall, it's a really solid entry. Good job! ;)

Well polished and balanced game!!. Reminds me of the retro side-scrolling games. loved the pixelart style. great game!!

Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!

If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/615937007?t=4h27m40s

Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin