Fun game and really enjoyed it. I will say I wish it punished you for spamming R on the reload, but besides that good job and congratulations on yet another game!

I enjoyed playing it. I had some trouble picking up the gun at the start, I didn't immediately realize I had to press E haha The bosses were quite easy to beat for me I just spammed a gazillion bullets in their direction and they were gone:D Oh and I really like the reload mechanic idea, however I was unsure what the advantage was of me nailing the button at the right time, maybe it makes me reload a little bit faster? Or I was also expecting maybe reloading all the bullets instead of let's say half as a punishment.

I love the music :heart: and the backstory is fun! I think the controls could be a little tighter but overall I had alot of fun shooting daemons, well done!

the graphics are also cool, you should add a thumbnail for the game here on the website instead of the default one, you will get a lot more people playing it I'm sure!

Fun little game with a nice mood.
Good job !

@maksimj Thanks! Yeah the actual balance was something I struggled with the boss was supposed to feel harder for sure but I didn't want the Level 1 boss to be too hard, a lot of any kind of balance was done in the last 8 hours or so before the jam ended. The idea was yeah was that the reload was faster, I considered making the bullets do double damage but I ran out of time to implement that. We plan on adding a real thumbnail, but we focused on adding the bat enemy over doing the thumbnail before the jam ended.

@joesturge Thanks! I love the music too @aaldrik did a great job for sure! and the story was @rot-god's idea.

@ampo Thank you! Appreciated!

cute game, love the style!
the difficulty spike did feel pretty large on level 3, but overall it was very fun

Simple and funny, well done! Take a candy! :candy:

such a great game! I love the reload minigame and i love the addictive gameplay with the art. I Only wish you had more time to add some more unique bosses and or enemies. My fav game jam game so far 10/10 good job

this is no need to trapped my characte in s small room just to agree the game theme,
I love this game and have a lot of fun shooting enemies,wish there can be more content of this game,maybe more upgrade for gun is need xD,,nice work

@bobbie Thanks! Yeah I really do wish I had more time to balance better.

@hagamosvideojuegos Thanks! Appreciate the candy! :candy:

@eli-heinrichs thank you! I was glad I took the time to implement the reload mini game for sure, and yeah I do wish we had more time for enemies, unfortunately new enemy variants didn't make it into the game until the last 4ish hours before the jam ended haha, 5 hours before it ended it only had 1 enemy type!

@olddog Yeah I also wish there was more content. Upgrades and stuff were planned but cut for time since other more pressing features took longer than expected like the level art, reloading, and the wave stuff.

really cool game :D

Smooth gameplay, great art and music! Good job!

Fun take on the theme. There are a lot of design decisions that make this engaging to play. You have limited physical space to move. The bullet hell aspect goes well with the theme as the enemy bullet spray further limits your space. The perfect reload mechanic encourages you to take your eyes of the bullets to nail the timing.

Sugestions:

I think that the pickup button is largely unnecessary. Heart containers could be used on collision as long as you have missing health. The guns are mostly upgrades so no need to manually pick them up either.

I also think that the wave progression is a bit slow. The first level is too easy has many waves with same enemy and boss. I think condensing the waves and introducing different enemies sooner would be better. That would also help with the difficulty spike at level 2.

If the quick reload benefit is only time then I think that the timing window should be a bit earlier. Or simply increasing ammo/damage/fire rate would work as well.

Overall, Solid top-down shooter.

A fun little game that ticks all the boxes. Simple, addictive, and has a huge potential if you choose to expand on it! And, as a huge sucker for juicy neon colours, may I say I absolutely love your visual design choices as well? Despite bright contrast, it's surprisingly easy on the eyes.

Nice work! The only thing I would change is the hitbox size, for a bullet hell is pretty big! Maybe just the center of the pizza boy would be enough. Anyway good job!

@neowhoru Thanks! And thanks again for the shout-out!

@lastuck I'll make sure @aaldrik and @rot-god know you liked the music and art!

@fahim-faysal yeah balance was something I didn't have a lot of time for. The heart containers could be just on hit but pickup is still needed because you can only carry 2 guns at once so once you get 3 guns you have to use it to choose which gun you want to keep. I do think that introducing the other enemy sooner(there were only 2 completed) would have just moved the difficulty spike sooner, the main reason for level 1 being so long was to introduce the revolver and reload mechanics, then give the assault rifle and give you just a bit more time with that before increasing the difficulty. On replays it definitely feels pretty long due to it being so easy in comparison. I think the addition of the bat should have been when the wave still only allowed 2 enemies to spawn, but introducing the bat the same wave we increase it to 3 enemies at once was overkill for sure. Good feedback though appreciated!

@shess Appreciated! We have another game currently in development with similar controls and stuff but we may come back to this based on the interest and performance from feedback and stuff. There was so much we still wanted to add more enemies more guns, more animations and stuff.

@contro1990 The hitboxes are pretty generous already, all the hitboxes are like 80% of the sprites size, the smallest hitbox is the player it's a small circle, but it's just around the feet not the body or head. If we touch this after the jam what I'd like to do is make the character like a more square-ish shape instead of a tall rectangle.

The pixel art was really cool. Felt like the difficulty could have scaled faster/the bosses could have been harder. Also I wanted there to be consequences if you didn't land the reload at the right time. Also, the game name is really good.

A fun, old-skool game. Once I got the hang of the controls I was able to make progress. A nice use of bullet mechanics. The fact that the revolver has to be reloaded from time to time is an interesting twist.

Wow, I really like this style, this game is good.

@keely-brown Thanks! Yeah I really wanted to get more content in and have like epic bosses and stuff not just scaled up normal enemies haha. Reloading was going to have a bonus originally of like doing more damage, and failing to hit the window would slow the reload down to half speed for the remainder. I wanted the high risk reward of going for the reload but time constraints T_T

@gamebuilder Yeah this is why the game starts off fairly easy, in order to allow you to get a feel for things before making the game harder. Reloading was something I debated from the beginning because I knew right out the gate it would make the game a degree harder, but seems that it's not as massive of a hurdle as I may have initially thought, I just wish we had more time to fully flesh out the risk/reward stuff for the reload timing and balanced a lot better.

@kazuma Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!

This game is really good, it was in the "danger" category before when I first bookmarked it, I have some free time this morning so I gave it a try. Glad to see that you guys have met the minimum rating requirement to be eligible for scoring, congratulation!

As for the game itself, the first impression was the audio, I really like the variety in gunshot and projectile sounds, they do make each attacks and weapons feel very unique and distinctive, and enhance the overall experience. The pixel art style was really nice, I like the color palette of choice, it portrayed the dark, demonic atmosphere and ambience of hell very well. Also I love the fact that you guys put a nice little twist there for the reload mechanic, you actually had to time it right to get the gun reloaded a little faster, it reminds me of the railgunner in Risk of Rain 2 which shares the same mechanic, super cool and creative!

But there's a few issues I came across during the playthrough, and I'd like to let you guys know for future improvements:
- First is the interaction mechanic, I think some objects like the hearts should be picked up automatically when you collided with them. And sometimes when I swapped weapons near the blue chains, the previous gun got thrown outside of the walkable area, which basically made you lost that said gun since it was possible to reach. I think a simple collider on each interactable object should do the trick just fine.
- Adding some sort of indicators or highlights to interactable objects when you came near them should be a great idea to consider, because they were hard to notice sometimes since the screen was covered in projectiles from enemies.
- Guns can be reloaded even if they're currently full, even though it didn't affect the gameplay too much, but it's still a thing worth to note down. Also the time it saved for timing the reload right wasn't too much, for that I could have just hit reload and ignored the timing entirely. I suggest moving the blue section more to the middle of the bar, and maybe give some damage boost for the next shots, those should take the fun to another level in my opinion.
- The overall balance seems a bit off, since the bosses were kinda underwhelming, and it was a bit repetitive as most waves had the same enemy patterns and boss. I think some adjustments like introducing different enemy types or making the boss stronger would greatly increase the playing enjoyment and make the progress of clearing waves more worthy and rewarding too.

Regardless, this is a very fun and engaging game, and a nice take on combining the theme with the bullet-hell aspect, definitely goes into my list of hidden gems of this Ludum Dare! Astonishing job on this entry guys, I'm impressed! But consider going out there and leaving helpful feedbacks to other games because your karma is rather low, so that your game has more chances to be discovered by others.

@constance Yeah for sure, the interaction stuff is not perfect, I didn't do it for the hearts since I didn't want them picked up if the player had full hearts e.g. Zelda games. The highlight was something I was working on but it was cut for time. The reload had a bunch more features I've mentioned in other posts so I won't go into detail, but yeah the being able to reload when full was supposed to be so you could reload a normal clip into an improved one. The balance of the game was definitely not there, simply because enemies weren't actually added to the game until the last 4 hours of the jam. We had planned for 4 enemy types and 4 unique bosses, but there was several reasons for them not being finished including not having the art throughput volume to make more enemy sprites, and some oddness with the wave mechanic system. The main reason for the low karma is that due to IRL stuff, most jams often don't have time to play games due to things like needing to go back to work right after hence being in 'danger' and past jams not even getting enough votes. So often I'll play the games during short breaks at work, but don't have the luxury to spend the time leaving feedback, and even worse, not being able to play games with no web versions, and not having speakers on the work computer so can't rate audio.