BulletWell by SecretPocketCat
Some say The Well goes on forever. Some say it goes even deeper than an endless abyss.
(Those people are endlessly stupid).

You are a bucket flying down the BulletWell - a bullet hell bucket simulator.
Dodge and weave all the bullets thrown at you or catch them and shoot them back at the weird flying-projectile-flinging cutlery. Also avoid those pointy spikes - not event buckets like those...

Changelog
- 0.1.x - bugfixes (no balancing or content changes, just fixes of game-breaking stuff like resolution and major collision)
Credits
- 16x16 dungeon tileset by Genewheel
- Cursed Weapons set by Elthen's Pixel Art Shop
- m6x11 font by Daniel Linssen @managore
- Cephalopod by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Ratings
| Overall | 1262th | 3.317⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1051th | 3.25⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 571th | 3.517⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1186th | 3.433⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 867th | 2.722⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1548th | 2.917⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
A great concept that can be polished a bit more.
It's a simple and super fun game.
Great work!
My favorite thing is the way the bucket on the music slider turns as you drag it... just a nice subtle touch.
Also it could be a good improovement to add some kind of powerup. And an upper wall: i lost multiple times just by going up
The game is quite scary to be caught in the middle of multiple enemies. While you CAN carefully pick up bullets from multiple angles, it's not worth the risk as it's easy to mess up such a thing and lose a precious HP. I usually just flocked to the furthest bottom area (that couldn't get hit by spikes) and turtled it out. I wouldn't say the game is terribly hard, but you do need to make sure you don't get caught in bad situations.
Regardless of that, I do like some of the hecticness the situations generated. It wasn't always easy figuring out the best way to prepare to absorb hits so I was always kept on my toes. An impressive game, especially for a solo effort.
This game is simple in its core design, but somehow I just can't stop playing it. Made it to the third wave, keep dying under mysterious circumstances. :thinking:
Bullet catching mechanic is clever and gives the game an interesting twist, but for the most of time it's easier to just float around. Spikes appear suddenly and without any notice, which is not so user-friendly, but I guess it's okay for a bullet-hell game. I love the fact enemies die on them too, otherwise I would have a very hard time. X_X
Here's the video of me playing the game with no commentary if you'd find it useful:
https://youtu.be/uM0NuF2958s
EDIT: Just saw the Linux build. Thanks!
Interesting mechanic. Feels really good but I find it kinda hard to tell if the bucket has caught a bullet or not, maybe some visual and sfx feedback on the bucket would help.
Cool concept!
If you continue working on it after the jam, adding more enemy types and obstacles this could be turned into a fun little commercial game.
Graphics look great with nice colours and animation, and the music fits the gameplay well.
Great work, especially for one person!
Also sorry to everyone who played it before yesterday-ish and got damaged out of nowhere - I fixed a bug with dmg colliders staying longer than they should and similarly, on some resolution the scaling was off, so the top spikes weren't visible, so I'm sorry if you got murdered just by going up.
@matthewrobo @ryannielson I don't like super stiff movement, but the I might have overdone it with the inertia given it's a bullethell.
@thatanonoword Sorry, the random dmg should be fixed now. Were you dropping frames? I was missing the catches when I was recording thru the unity recorder, which was droppig frames quite a bit.
@thatanonoword @tyrannas @kromeboy @thomas-bringer The shooting after the bucket rotates was a design decision to make the player switch between shooting and catching (so they just don't catch and shoot out immediatelly). But it's clearly not the best way to handle that. What I think I could have done is either catch without pressing anything (ideally sucking in the bullets as mentioned by @ryannielson ) and the shooting, which would disable the catching, but would be way more responsive than the forced rotation. Oh well...
@joskerdu I'm glad someone noticed that. :wink:
@peachtreeoath Yeah, turtling at the bottom 4-ish tiles from the side is probably the best way to go. I wanted to add in SuperCrateBox weapon pickups to change things up, add actual score to the game and also to make enemies drop HP to incentivize riskier play.
@yngvarr Good to be back and finally ~~finish~~publish something again. The spikes are only on the walls to be fair. Originally I had them on every platform, but that was just ridiculous. I'm quite pleased people like the enemies getting obliterated by the spikes. THX for the video, that's super nice of you. (BTW. the -997 HP should be hidden - spikes do a flat 1k of dmg - but I found it slightly funny, so I just left it in :sweat_smile: )
@one-seed-fruit THX for confirming the :penguin: build actually works :) Yeah, I should have certainly added better feedback for the catching.
@okamit I don't think I'll go for an actual release, but I'd like to take this and make a better version (with the stuff mentioned in this post), but rewrite it in a different engine (in Rust with Bevy) as a learning experience. Could be fun.
https://youtu.be/VNVzN6DagTA
Having inertia in a tightly designed bullet hell means that some dodges may become almost uncontrollable because the ship basically doesn't reflect the inputs.
Sorry for being overly critical. As a big fan of shmups there's some pretty weird misconceptions of the genre and euroshmups deciding to stick in inertia because "it's realistic" is not fun.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007659333?t=07h48m42s
Just 'cause you prefer direct one-to-one input-to-movement approach doesn't make it the only 'proper' way to go. And this's not about realism for me (obviously none of this stuff is realistic and actual realism rarely makes for a fun experience), but I just don't like the sudden stop-start movement of direct input mapping. To me, it looks and feels bad. I realise that's a very subjective description, but so is your description of euroshmups.
It's about expectations, really, and learning the controls and how it's reflected in the rest of the game. I do prefer a slight messiness to the whole thing - less bullets with slightly less control, which is clearly not what you were looking for and that's completely fine, but it doesn't make your way the only correct one.
I'm gonna reiterate - the controls are not great and I'd have definitely liked to have more time to work on those, but I wouldn't likely have done the direct input-movement mapping.
Shooting back seems a bit imprecise, or maybe I'm missing something?