Gameplay Guide

Hey, visually this is very nice. Although it gets boring quickly, because not much is going on.
I think spawning more robots with far less health would make it more entertaining. Also because of cramped space it is difficult to avoid bullets.

Congrats on the submission! I think the sound effects could be better mixed so they would be on the same level (e.g. the train horn was suuper loud compared to the rest), and the upgrades better tuned. Increasing the train length and putting some objectives to protect could be a cool way to change things around. I'm glad there was some enemy variety, and upgrading your character was as fun as ever (although damage is clearly the best upgrade haha). had fun for awhile, so nice job!


I'm not sure if you need many more robots on the screen at any one time, but there could be less downtime between one wave and the next.

I did like the little detail of the train carriage wobbling around a bit rather than being locked in a fixed position behind the engine. Really sells the feeling of being on a train.

Top-down shooters are not really my jam but I finished! Maybe that means the game is too easy :wink:?


Everything worked fine and I didn't encounter any big bugs. Took me a while to realize that there is an upgrade buying menu but I found it. It felt like it was responding a bit slowly to input but was fine otherwise.

I liked the sounds in the game. Especially the "there you are"!

I didn't really see the "Stuck in a loop" theme here.

@darkhex In a post jam build were working on we've already buffed player speed and added in a adaptive difficulty system to keep constant action and make it more fun!

@fabula-rasa @aquanim The adaptive difficulty system I'm working on fixes all those things :smile:

@scharma Hey thanks for all the valuable feedback I'm glad you enjoyed!

this was such a fun project to work on with you, I am looking forward to doing more with you! I love our final project, this was well worth the time.

@draxis I'm very glad!

this game is cool. overall the game is somewhat jank but smaller details like the train cars jiggling are sick, but i do find somethings like the sounds and menu kind of awkward. overall keep it up man.

@lees-pac In the interest of constantly imporving what did you find jank other than just the menus which yeah I know didn't really fit the theme (Woops!)?

Looks really good. The main issue I had with it was that it was almost impossible not to get hit, which seemed unfair. A lot of times I would try to access upgrades and I would sound the horn instead. Not entirely sure how it fits with the theme, but the audio was pretty good too.

@cwazywierdo Yeah you got to stick to the left side where the bench is to access upgrades, as for theme it's cause your stuck in a loop of killing robots on the back of a train (Yeah I know, weakly tied in...) Getting hit is a bit unavoidable because of the setting, definitely something we'd like to change at some point, anyway thanks for playing and leaving feedback!

Gave me the feel of some old flash games.

Fun little game, I see a lot of potential with upgrades and different carriages on the train. I felt I moved a little slow, but apart from that, it felt tight and fun. Good job

A very nice entry! Making the main menu part of the game world is a very nice touch. The upgrade system and difficulty seem to work very well together. The sounds were pretty harsh and monotome. Making them have a slightly random pitch would be an easy way to break that monotomy. Leave some more time for the sounds to die off, now they stop harshly.
Overall very nice entry, you managed to do a lot!

By the way, I am part of 'The Battle of Neptune' team and I have to say that our game indeed has similarities, but I think you should buy OUR copyright :3 (come play our game too <3)

This was a fun little game. I like how you're stuck on the rails. It would have been great to have more chances to dodge enemy projectiles.

Once I got into the swing of things I enjoyed this game. It had its frustrations and they were frustrating because they were easy fixes. So the delayed movement of the camera was nice but it was too loose, I should not go out of view so I would reduce the slack. My player speed would have been more fun if it was faster, it just felt too sluggish. I would have like a quicker access to my upgrades too, it felt needlessly slow. That being said it did not get in the way of this being a fun little game

@arron-fowler Hey thanks for the feedback! Defenitely things we'll take into consideration. Thanks for playing!

I can't move, wsad or arrows aint working

[based on pre-version] It's an enjoyable game because of the most important thing - the combat feels good. I had trouble dodging enemies' bullets, especially when they were nearly lined up with the train. I like the effect of the wobbly carriage. I find that the camera shifts up and down pretty slowly, especially since I often have to abandon the shop on short notice to get back to combat. I appreciate the option to continue in endless mode. The graphics/sound work well with the gameplay, especially the weird effect when I defeat an enemy. The voices are great. There are two voices and two enemy types, so why not match them up?

@slavturtle You have to hit start, it's a little hard to see.

@reheated Thanks for all that feedback!

Would have loved some music with this game and more variation on the enemies. It quickly got quite repetitive. I liked the concept though so keep working on it. A boss would have been awesome!

@cg-fred Yeah we have some things in the works - we've decided to keep working on it and make it into a full game ish so bosses are defenitely something we will be adding in to break things up.

Very cool, I love the constant feeling of the terrain flying by! I feel like to fit the theme a bit better, it could have been a train that slowly looped around in a circle instead of just going in a straight line?

The ranged enemies were a bit tough, especially when they spawned at the bottom and it was much harder to dodge their bullets when they were going vertically (as there isnt much room to move side to side).

I didn't realise until about half way through playing that there were upgrades! That was a nice surprise, though I think it should be made a bit more obvious to the player :)

I think the camera follow should be a bit more responsive, and the UI on the main menu should be a bit more obvious / stand out a bit more from the environment.

On the whole it was good fun though, the combat was nice and the aesthetics were good :D

@joedev Thanks for the comprehensive feedback! It really helps! I'll make sure to check out your game as well, much love!

I love the idea of the shop and the settings being game objects :D

The game played exactly as smooth and wonderful as I predicted, yet I did feel it was a bit harsh to not pause the game while in the shop-menu.

Other than that, it seems you really wanted me to play both versions, and yes - the post-jam version felt a lot better with minimal downtime!

Great work overall! :D

@trexxak Thanks a bunch for your feedback! The thought of pausing while in the shop had never crossed my mind but it definitely is something I think would help out, at least just slowing down time!

I love the idea of a train shooter. I think there could even be more cars, with a whole bunch of different possibilities. Or even a customizable train. Lots of possibilities. Trains are always a good time. :smile:

I tried playing on both the difficulty settings, and I don't think either was particularly hard. I did feel swarmed a little bit at times on the adaptive difficulty, but I managed to pull through.

I think the upgrade system is a little awkward, though. There are a couple awkward things. First is it's not really clear what each upgrade does. Health and damage are somewhat clear, but the numbers are pretty meaningless--I would thing 800 health would be a lot, but apparently not?

And I have absolutely no idea what the fire rate system does. On an endless game I cranked it up to around 100 and yet there was still no apparent change in my rate of fire. I think maybe it effects the bullet velocity? In which case it should probably not be called rate of fire.

I found that a lot of the time I would hit the whistle instead of actually opening the upgrade menu--particularly when I was trying to grab health when swarmed by a bunch of guys. The upgrade menu should probably be very easy to open and the whistle a bit more incidental.

As it stands right now, the endless mode doesn't feel particularly meaningful. The exploding enemies start coming so fast that you can just keep shooting them and killing everything, and then buying upgrades... I ended the game with 100s in every upgrade, and 40000 robot parts. I mean, I think it's relatively self-evident that a true endless mode would probably need a larger variety of enemies and scenarios that involved those enemies, so there really isn't too much to say there.

One nitpick: the player momentum feels a little weird, not like a person walking around.

But all this is to say that I think this is a very solid foundation for a game. I think this game naturally fits the idea of an endless shooter sort of thing, and it's somewhat obvious that an endless shooter probably needs more than two kinds of enemies. As I said, a shooting game on a train just seems kind of intrinsically fun to me, so it's definitely a game that could be developed into a bigger project if you wanted. Anyways, I hope there's something useful in this feedback! :smile:

Good idea, seems a bit unbalanced (playing the org. version), the machine gunner is very hard to dodge but you have plenty of health. More chaos and enemies I think would be more fun as the waiting gets a bit boring. Solid entry.

@emkani Thanks for playing! Yeah the original version does suffer from a lot of balance issues.

@honey-pony Thanks a lot for playing and rating! And thank you for your in depth feedback! The endless mode was more of an option we threw in there in case people wanted to keep playing, but the actual game is only balanced and 'polished' for the first 2 minutes, adding in more enemies is something we'd definitely want to do if focusing on the endless mode, but even with our future vision for the game endless isn't something that we particularly are focused on! Thanks for playing that long though, it seems you discovered the hilarious issue with thousands of bombers spawing and causing each other to explode! :joy: I maybe sort of forgot to actually make the fire rate upgrade you know... change anything. That's a good point about not really knowing what 800 health means in the grand scheme of things! Player movement was something I struggled with for a very long while, I still wanted to redo it, I know what you mean there, I just couldn't get it to be like what I wanted. We have quite a few plans for trains, more trains, more cars, customization... you name it, trains *are* fun! Thanks again for all this in depth feedback! I really appreciate the effort (and I'm sure my teammate does as well!) and this sort of information is just invaluable!

Nice idea with the train shooter.
May be a few more enemies which don't have tha much HP to add to the chaos would be a nice addition i think.
Like this you sometimes have to wait along time until the next enemie shows up. But then you would probably have to resort to a wave system to make sure you have enough time to buy the upgrades.
But anyway overall a really nice entry i enjoyed it a lot. Keep it up!

Hey, I got your game on stream, and enjoyed playing it! Here's the vod if you wanna rewatch; https://www.twitch.tv/videos/779148172

And thanks for submitting your game!

I think the theme would have been stronger if endless mode was the default mode

@meo-benderson @cedric86 Thanks for playing and leaving feedback, appreciated :)

**(Thanks to JUSTCAMH too, I just don't want to ping him)*

@sharks

Yeah I guess I was little presumptuous focusing on the endless mode. Probably because of the "stuck in a loop" theme! :sweat_smile:

@honey-pony Yeah the game didn't really end up tying in with the theme much, haha!

The enemies are really though starting from the second or maybe I'm just a noob :(
Cheers!

The game is not easy but I had a lot of fun playing it. I especially liked the graphics, artwork and voice acting :)