Controls are simple to understand, a the way you explained it withe the background is really neat. A restart button could be nice, maybe.

Sometimes, i felt that the game was a little unfair, and that managing to make a good score (more than 35 is a good score for me, it seems) is almost more dependent on luck that dependent on skill. But maybe I'm just not skillful enough. :D

Solid entry, the game feels well polished, and I haven't spotted any bug.

Nice game! Enjoyed the gameplay and the art! congrats!

Played it and loving the minimalistic colours

Very solid idea and execution. Definitely feels like a game one could put quite a bit of time into and keep getting meaningfully better.

On one occasion I had two enemies spawn on top of one another, followed by them both shooting and destroying each other.

Might be nice to be able to see where the next enemy is going to spawn so one can plan ahead a bit. But maybe that would make it too easy.

So much polish in this game! I love the idea and the atmosphere, it's really well executed. It was very pleasant to play, congratulations for all your work.

Love the simple but nice graphic effects, good job!

Very nice particle effects and thus impact to hits. Tune was minimal just like the overall graphics and very fitting. Only thing I would do, would be to highlight the top bar at the beginning, as well as when inputs are added because I was very confused in the first round and only understood what's happening in the second one. Third one was the first round where I didn't mash buttons to evade, but strategically planned my moves.
Still, once you understand it, it's interesting which inputs you add when, but it always ends with the player running into a bullet because of previous inputs. A delete functionality would be interesting maybe.

I really enjoyed my time in this mind-bending and inventive game. The polish was off the charts - the visuals especially creating an instantly satisfying and engaging setup. I think there are a few 'games' that could branch off from here - maybe one where you are able to edit your movelist somehow, and are doing so to react to more dynamic enemy placement - or one where you always start from the center, and are perfecting a more rhythmic set of choices - with the ability redo your. Perhaps the best thing about this game is how much depth is hiding within such a well-made little entry!
All-in-all - super enjoyable, and I will definitely keep this game in mind when developing mechanics in the future. You have inspired me greatly, and should be very proud!

(In some way, it reminds me a bit of my first jam game oroboro, which also used a 'compete with your past self' - though your game is much a more beautiful and spectacular first entry!)

Okay! I reached the score of 204 and promised to get my strategy out :)

My strat was (turns):

1. Shot in enemy direction, start moving towards top right corner
2. Reach top right corner
3. don't move, only shoot up or right
4. Pray to RNG that, using probability, it will take a very long time for enemies to spawn on the top or right edges
5. If enemy is encountered and manages to shoot in your direction, try heading one tile and then immediately back to corner
6. Profit

Okay, now for the game itself:

Pros:

- Well executed, simple graphics
- Simple to grasp mechanics
- Scalability of the difficulty
- this looks like a nice game I would play on a Switch

Cons:

- The actual RNG of enemy spawns makes it either into high scores or not
- Once you get into certain level, it's nearly impossible to control the player in any shape or form apart from trying to override the movement you made

A well-scoped and polished entry nonetheless. Great job guys!

Great game! The idea was very solid and it was super easy to pick up. The graphics look nice and the game has quite a bit of polish for a jam game thanks to the minimalist base idea! Great job.

Quite well polished game with a neat logic behind it.

WOW! What a cool concept. Please add a "Score" to the game over screen. I believe I got to 54. It gets super hard the longer you play but that's ok. The theme is integrated beautifully. Focus is on the game loop which is fantastic. Really really good game!

This game is just plain fantastic and suits the theme perfectly. Initially I just ran around mindlessly but after a while I realized there is actually strategy in here (not going to give any spoilers).

I like the idea of this game and it looks well polished. But I think the game is not quite "controllable". It is hard to get better at this game. Maybe try to reduce the randomness？

Nice game! It's super easy to pick up and quite addictive with simple but really good graphics.

very good game and Very polished !! a bit hard to master when it become more populated, but its what it make it better^^

Really cool concept! Loved the art direction and the fact y'all did the music on a Pocket Operator haha! I agree with some others, like it might be better to have some way of knowing roughly where the next wave will appear. It's hard to develop a strategy based purely on randomness. The chaos of it all is pretty cool though. Well done!

I really dig your UI, the top time/action track is very well made!
I would prefer a predictable puzzly game rather than a RNG based on, where I would program my next moves. (Reading other comments, I am not original on that one!)

Okay, wow that took some getting used to. Very nice concept, good entry

Lot of nice polish on this game and eerie atmosphere! I'm gonna follow you and see if you ever update it. Could be great on mobile

Fun mechanic, my game mostly ended up in total chaos :D Nice job!

@austin-sierra I have quietly thought about how this could work on mobile.

But I'm not sure how the controls would work, though. Swiping could work for movement, but how about shooting?

On screen buttons kind of suck, right? :/ But maybe that's a necessary compromise...

@mikoziq I think maybe the record of 204 you got was on an in-development version of the game, before we applied a -1 point penalty for missing a shot. There was generally a handful of really cheesy strategies that involved shooting a lot.

If you could just shoot a shotload, you'll eventually become invincible and rack up infinite points.
But once we introduced the miss penalty, that strategy is broken.

I agree that a lot of deaths above ~70 points feel pretty unavoidable. Maybe this could be adressed by enemies shooting more rarely and/or much slower.
:shrug: The 72 hours are over now though, so I'll just leave it like this until the rating period is over - then maybe make some adjustments after.

Thanks for playing our game, and thanks for the awesome feedback!

Pretty tricky game! It gets chaotic fast, but slowly you think of strategies. :smile:
A bit more control in the game would be nice for predictability.

The idea of making your last movements affect your next ones is great, but it feels much RNG, you need to create some mechanism to give more control to the player.

The baseline of this game is great. I could see you taking this on and really developing it, the idea is that good. Top marks for originality, friend! :)

Very unique, and hard to wrap my head around. Negative points for misses feel pretty punishing, especially when enemies kill each other such that your old shot is now a miss.

I got a score of 66 after I realized that I want to provide as few inputs as possible and just be sure to always end up where I started. Remembering which moves I made previously to know if I need to change anything is tough!

Really interesting idea, unfortunate that it's so hard in practice lol. I agree with the above comments that negative points for misses seemed a bit overly harsh considering it's so difficult to even stay alive past the first few rounds. Points for innovation though.

I _really_ liked this mechanic. I agree with other commenters that it can be pretty difficult, you have to think pretty far into the future (and remember pretty far into the past) to have a chance, but I had a blast playing. Awesome work!

I love this take on the theme! Very polished entry. My only issue is that the recorded inputs only play... sometimes? Makes it kinda hard to strategize, though I understand it'd get very cluttered very quickly if all recorded inputs always played.

Kinda rage inducing but in a good way.

I swear the slime generator AI calculates my every move.

Very creative and unique idea and well executed!! It feels super polished. I had a really hard time trying to figure out a viable strategy for this one though and ended up moving either very randomly or almost not at all. But I'll definitely sleep on it and try again haha

I'm really bad at this but it's a pretty interesting concept. I ended up trying to return back to the middle each time so it was a loop. The complete randomness of the enemy locations made it pretty difficult to come up with a long-term strategy though, oftentimes I just got killed when the next enemy spawned somewhere and I couldn't react in time, haha. But I really like the idea here, it's really kind of fascinating and fun to strategize around, I replayed it a bunch of times.

Wow this was hard. The mechanic is really unique and theme-fitting but it felt really difficult to use when the enemies spawns are rng. I feel like with some more level design it'll be a really fun puzzle game. I liked the slime animation tho, it was so minimalistic but you could tell immediately that it was a slime, good frame timings :)

I think you chose a very appropriate scope for the jam, and, as a result, ended up with a polished product. I've not seen a game concept quite like this before, and I quite enjoyed it, especially the music that ramps up in intensity as you progress. Excellent work!

Really simple but addictive gameplay. It gets really satisfying later in the game. I would love to see a replay feature where it just loops the last wave forever without spawning new enemies, alongwith the highscore. It would be so satisfying to watch your work at the end.


@tsfreddie That's actually a great idea!

For a post-jam version I kind of want to fix up the death screen. Having a ghost of your character repeating the moves of th last non-fatal loop could be really cool.

Congratulations on 88 points! That's actually a really good score.

@labtoast This shouldn't be happening. It really should play every move every time.
Can you reproduce this reliably? I haven't experienced this bug.

Interesting, after trying to go back in and test again, it copies all my inputs every time... Not sure what could've caused the bug, but it's working now at least! I'll give it another go. ^ - ^

EZ


This is a pretty fun idea!

The principle is innovative. But I find it hard. Maybe the enemy spawn should always be the same between rounds

Interesting concept but very hard to play. I was fighting my past self the whole time (which is the main mechanic of the game which I like), It's just hard to strategize the movements as there's no other information we can base decisions on. The visuals are great, and the music is super good. Good concept for sure and I've enjoyed it.

Interesting and somewhat funny game, but it was kinda dificult to play and to understand what was happening at the begining

somehow the minimalistic mechanics make for a very hard game to master.

The concept was super original, quite liked it!

Altough th input combo can get messy real fast. Something to clear it now and then would've been helpful to keep the games longer! At somepoint I felt like what I did didn't have a lot of inpact since I had to fight off so many past inputs.

Pretty addictive gameplay, I really enjoyed trying different ways to score points but I think it just became too much of a mess after like 3 clears. The audio works nicely with the game too but I wish I was better at the game to listen to it longer XD.

Interesting idea! Struggled to actually use the repeating moves to help me beat the enemies, but that's probably just me :rofl:

The only problem I had was if I tried shooting while still waiting to reload, the bullet would immediately fire as soon as the reload had completed. Would've been better (IMO) if the "shoot" keypresses were ignored while the reload was taking place.

Good job!

wooow, very very interesting, i'm not good at this game lol but it's a really good mechanic !!

Love the idea of the music changing a bit with each loop! game looks nice for what it is, but didn't really felt like the concept worked. Maybe I just sucked at the game tho lol