Don't know if I've ever seen an arena shooter quite like this, so high marks for innovation. Love the old school Atari/arcade vibes and the range of different levels to play. Would've liked to see a little more player feedback about the power-ups generally, like a text pop-up telling you what you picked up/used, and more visuals. Cool game!

Addictive surviving game with a cool concept. One thing I missed was the possibility to crash missiles together with your movements, but maybe it would make it too easy then. Keep going with this project in the future as well!

@polymathld thanks! Yeah there's definitely a bit of an issue around communicating exactly what the powerups are doing, I think it's one of those things that's a bit harder to spot if you already know what they're all meant to do. It is hard to spot the exact effects of things when there's a lot going on on the screen for sure. Thanks for the feedback!

@mibehu definitely would have been cool to be able to crash the missiles into each other. We leant a bit on the inevitability theme and thought that being able to destroy the missiles might make them chasing you down feel a bit less inevitable. Definitely a good idea though, might have a play around with it if we come back to this!

Love the classic arcade feel and the music I did run into some issues trying to navigate around corners on the harder levels.

Real fun survival! I didn't realize i was taking negative powerups! and end up dying a bunch of times haha! It has plenty of stuff, will come back later for some more, great work! :v:

This is a very good game! The theme is seamlessly integrated, the game is fun to play and I've played it a few times, the only thing I noticed is that the character slows down a bit when walking near a wall, I'd like the movement to be a bit smooth, but overall I enjoyed the game!

Thanks all!

@blumber and @jesse-martin yeah the collision detection on the walls is a bit janky - would definitely have been good to spend a bit more time to try and get the wall edges to be a bit more forgiving so you could sort of slide past if you were close enough to being round the corner!

@ds-nahogara definitely sounds like the powerups overall probably weren't super clear when communicating what they actually do

Glad you all seemed to enjoy it though :smile:

A nice little game! Good graphics and music/sfx. I especially liked that the rockets are drifting so you actually have some chance to outsmart them by planning your path. Multiple levels offering different types of strategies added longevity to it. Good job!

Thanks @lantto I spent a lot of time trying to get the movement of the rockets right (I think there's still a lot I'd like to improve mind you) so I'm glad you enjoyed that in particular!

Quite the interesting concept! There's a lot I like about this entry, so let's dig in: for starters, the entire premise to the gameplay is nice. Having to navigate a level, scramble for powerups for extra chances at survival is real fun and I enjoyed it a fair bit. Congrats on experimenting with map types too! I feel like the concept can be taken further as well: as of the few games I played, the struggle became immediate at the 2 minutes mark. It becomes very difficult to navigate or even avoid the rocket without power ups, so when you deplete them it's essentially game over - which is intended! But because of the traps/debuffs laying around, you're also often locked out of half the map at all times. Were downgrades to despawn over time (maybe they do, but I couldn't see any of that), I'd be encouraged to strategize my routes way more. The rocket movement with its velocity mechanic, is really cool! You're encouraged to dodge close calls, to have the rocket drift aside entirely. Had my share of fun here, so: cheers!

Good, solid game. Dodging missiles is a cool idea. Good style.

I love those tiny graphics. Please let the Y/X Keys do the same (because of qwertz keyboards). Good job

Nice job, fun idea and well executed! You made the rockets move in a really cool way. If you worked on the game in the future you could try adding some juice and tweak the character movement a bit to improve the game feel even more.

Thanks @fusionnist sounds like you had a good time, glad you enjoyed it! We wanted to try and make it so you'd sort of have to weigh up whether if was worth going through negative powerups to get to certain areas a bit but it does definitely make it tricky. I think if we do any post jam changes it might be cool to have different modes where powerups can spawn / despawn differently - maybe let players tune their own set ups!

Glad you enjoyed it @ternox

@phoenixofforce I've added some alternative keybindings for some of the powerups to hopefully make it a bit more comfortable to play on qwertz / azerty keyboards - bit of an oversight that one! Happy to hear you got something out of it anyway though, thanks!

@weirdybeardyman Thanks I spent a lot of time on the rocket movement! I did start putting together a particle system that I was hoping to use to add a bit of juice / flair to a few different things but it took me a bit too long to get it working for the rocket booster so I didn't have quite enough time to generalise it so I could use it elsewhere. The player movement could definitely feel a bit better too, I think maybe a circle collider rather than a square one might have been a quick way to make it a bit nicer when you're close to the walls or trying to get round corners

Very cool idea, I had a lot of fun playing through all the levels a couple times. The library's probably my favorite level as the narrow halls can be stressful. I think it would be nice if the game communicated effects vs power ups a little better, maybe power ups could have a square outline instead? Either way, great game and very well executed.

Cheers @bytomancer glad you had fun! I did have plans to make the powerups have a little floating animation that could have maybe varied a bit to emphasis the different types of pickups a bit better, but got a bit caught up with other bits.

Cool game, I liked how the missiles followed the player, and the movement felt balanced. It was a little confusing remembering which power-ups did what, I kept having to look up at the "inventory" to know what I had to use, and on-top of that I didn't really know what they were so I was just spamming the button as soon as I acquired any pickup. The power-ups felt good once they were used though! Perhaps some more visual indication of which keys had which power-ups, plus some kind of, easier to interpret power-up graphics.

Music was awesome too - I felt the pang of anxiety when the pitch changed and a new missile entered the arena. Great job.


Creative take on the theme, fun to play. I was initially confused on what everything did, but once I figured it out, it was really fun!

The game's objective became pretty clear as soon as the missile starting flying towards me. I really like it when games can communicate the goal so succinctly, especially in a jam where reviewers may be going through many games in one session. I think understanding what the various pickups (or traps?) do is the biggest challenge. One possible solution would be to dedicate some UI space somewhere to show some text anytime a player picks up something. For example, a banner could scroll something like "Increased speed for 10 seconds", or "Reverse controls for 10 seconds".

I loved this one, easy to learn and understand, great audio, several modes and the art style rocks!
Had so much fun playing InevitaBallistics, great job!

Very great game. Like Bomberman, this game could be a four player game!

Really awesome game. Its addictive, keeps you engaged. Well done.

Thanks for the feedback @ominusgalaxy44, @defrag, @danielg-98 and @tan-games! Glad you all seem to have had a good time with it (and yeah, powerups definitely needed some clearer messaging!)

@fifut cheers, happy to hear you thought it was great! I did start thinking I might be able to squeeze in a multiplayer mode but sadly didn't quite have time! Might be something to play around with post jam though!

Thanks @junklab too (sorry, your post was off the top of my screen while I was typing the other one). Well done on the time, definitely ramps up towards the end of the third minute. Glad the music worked well too!

An interesting take on a maze game that I've not seen before. I had a couple of issues with getting caught on corners, but other than that, the game ran smoothly and it was genuinely quite fun to dodge around the missile and dash for the next powerup! :grin:

I did also run into the issue of having to spend too long looking for which button to press for which powerup and getting blown up as a result. Not entirely sure how you could make that any more intuitive and it might just come down to the player having to learn the muscle memory through trial and error.

(And you get humour points just for the clever title... :wink: )

Great job! :smile:

Cool idea. And so cool PixelArt Graphic

Im impressed with some of the extra features, like level select and saving personal best times. That adds a nice level of polish to the project.

I like the mechanic and gameplay. There's a lot of stuff in this game, it's really impressive! The audio was a bit loud, but I found the slider quickly and every thing after that went smoothly. You made me want to check the pixelbox, looks nice!

Really nice game concept, quite unique! Nice old school music :) I made till 2:23.4 as my best. Well done with the game!

I love mazes and rockets, so it was super fun! My record is 3:50, decoy really did its thing :) I was impressed by the amount of available maps. And even could choose a character! Amazing, solid, retro-style jam work folks! :)

This is the game I've played for the longest so far, I went through all the maps. :D I think this would've been quite a popular arcade game back in the day. :D Apart from the slightly wonky collision already mentioned by others I have no complaints, I mean, it even has character selection!

The music! <3