The Call of the Unicore by sndr

Take care of the big little Unicore by making sure it is kept well fed, healthy and entertained, and do so while making sure none of those weird looking entities get to it! Your work is to Keep it Alive!
CONTROLS:
Use WASD keys to move around, Mouse to aim and Left Click to shoot. Stay close to the Unicore and use Right Click to feed him, heal him or play with him. Use the Scroll Wheel to switch between the different items that you have collected.
TOOLS: * Unity 2019.3 * Asesprite * Beepbox.co * BFXR
Ratings
| Overall | 120th | 3.9⭐ | 97🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 168th | 3.771⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 602th | 3.193⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 174th | 4.042⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 46th | 4.333⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 213th | 3.563⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 318th | 3.176⭐ | 93🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 375th | 3.392⭐ | 95🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 103🗳️ | 170🗨️ |
Art, music, sound effects, controls, everything is great.
You made a great work. It's awesome you could make it in just 48 hours. Congratulations
Overall pretty good.
Such amazing art and enemy variety! From a game design perspective this is balanced REEEEALLY nicely!
The pacing of the enemies at the start vs how much time you had to get the food. In general the fact that you can strategically tank certain shots if you have the resources gathered to heal it back up! The way enemies target you if you get close enough, letting you kite them away from the unicore! It's just REALLY well designed and FELT fun to play! Great great job!! :D
If you maybe add some different kinds of ways to deal dmg to enemies, maybe a super chrged one hit kill shot on a decent cooldown, or sometimes instead of resources, a bomb will spawn that you can detonate for wide reaching damage, then I could EEEASILY see this selling really good on itch.io! :D
It was super fun playing, and this is by the way my first 5* Graphics rating during this jam evaluation. The graphics are nice, clear and comprehensive, and the color design was cleverly put together to convey information about the effect on the unicore. Thank you for creating this experience <3
#### My advice:
1. Add a sound queue, or explosion, or some kind of graphical change to signify an enemy dying. I always was a bit
unsure of whether an enemy died, because they slowly fade out.
2. Add a fire rate limiter of some kind, or implement a system for holding down to shoot - It feels a bit weird when the best way to kill enemies is to walk into their face and spam the mouse as fast as possible. It's also just a nice quality of life change for lazy people like me who don't want to keep clicking.
@bigtinygames - Yes, they need a decay indicator of some sort. Good point. :muscle:
@wheffle - yes! Totally agree with you. Writing those down.
@plantprogrammer Thank you for the feedback! I wanted to add hearts around the map to replenish your health but unfortunately run out of time. Thanks for playing it and rating it! :heart:
@alex-davies That is actually super valuable advice. Thank you for spending the time to write that down! I'm adding it to my list!
@norris-eldridge - But you did yours in a lot less time AND I don't have a cool intro like you. :heart:
@denglishdesign - WOW. Really encouraging feedback. Thank you for spending the time to write that down. Means a lot. :pray:
@mhykah - Thank you for playing the game and spending the time to write that comment. Means a lot!
If I were you the only change I would make to the gae is reducing the life down of the enemies and upping their speed, so they are still challenging but you don't have to clock like mad.
But all in all I really enjoyed the game, well done for getting such a good game done so quickly! x
I did however, have a few things to mention with the gameplay. When I first started, before i'd finished reading the controls, i was being attacked by zombie cacti:

Now there's a chance i'm just super slow at reading, but i feel like the game should be paused or this should be displayed on a screen beforehand. Once i got into the game, i noticed the difficulty increases, fast! So I really didn't last too long at all, every time i played. Since it's a compo game i recognise you don't have as much time for testing and balancing out things, but if you wanted to continue working on it, those would be the things i would first address.
Great achievement! Really well done :)
Very nice entry!
https://youtu.be/enn-76VtPn8?t=1112
I can't thank you enough for putting time into it.
Nice graphics and pleasant gameplay. I didn't experience any issues really. So: a great jam job!
I never got the chance to do a respawn as my unicore died too quick. If there was potential to level up the Unicore / Player, that'd be good. Once the 3rd/4th wave hit with the muliple bullet enemies, it's hard to keep up.
It would be cool with a nice explosion when killing enemies - as it is they just kinda fade out which is not as satisfying. It's also pretty hard, and I'm more of a fan of "faster enemies with less health", but that might just be personal preference.
Not sure whether the item spawns were entirely random or not, but food seemed a bit low on all of my playthroughs... my Unicore eventually died of low health each time, but if I'd been a bit more competent at fighting off enemies I think it might have died of low food, despite me picking up every single piece of food that spawned, which would have been a bit frustrating.
629 Highscore... really wanted that 666... XD