I really enjoyed the parallax effect with the vegetation. I didn't get a chance to see all the available upgrades, but something to speed things up a little bit might help make things a bit more interesting.

I love the idea how you combine the 2D platformer and Survival Vampire. It is fun game although the sound effects scares me a bit

Super creative aesthetic, I love it. I wish the sound effects were less resonantly filtered, they felt a bit too bouncy IMO. It's impressive how much variety in upgrades you fit in here.

These dithering graphics is awesome. Maybe too shady for me.
Nice and simple concept works efficiently as always)
May be too inbalanced sounds volume, it was scary.

As people have mentioned, the graphics are very appealing! For a GameJam game, this looks and feels very good to play, but maybe one more enemy type would be good? Besides that, this is a very good game!

Love the style of the game and it plays great too! At the start it felt a little slow and boring but around 5 minutes it really ramped up to being a super hard experience and it was really fun trying to get XP without dying to a swarm of wasps. Really cool blend of 2 genres just to drive home the innovative aspect!

This game was a lot of fun, I've been playing it for longer than any of the other games I've played so far. I had a look at the code to understand which upgrades are best and I think there is an interesting bug that allows you to get 1 more Shot Time + than intended - due to floating point rounding errors, when you have 2 upgrades your attack delay is 0.35000000000000003 so the <= 0.35 check passes.

@void4 Thank you for the feedback, glad you are enjoying it. It is actually fine getting the extra Shot Time +. I was thinking of having it go lower, however I needed a buffer because if the timer goes below 0; it will crash the game.

Really beautiful pixel art! Loved the background effect. Really liked the power up system and the chaos the follows past level 5 haha

Fun game, it lacks some animations but the graphics are nice, there was something that was really annoying for me is that i was pressing space all the time to attack, and then each times the upgrades appeared, since space is used to confirm, it would always choose the first upgrade and that was really frustrating. Also don't know why but at some point I was stuck at the top of the screen and couldnt move along the Y axis, only the X one. I think I could really play this game longer without these small inconvients but overall well played !

Solid game, simple at core but with added rich features through upgrades and increasing difficulty, requiring some strategic thinking and agile movement. Appealing retro styled art. The only complain is that shoot and buy buttons could be different so there wont be accidental upgrades.

@tyrannas @gdman Thanks for that feedback, I tested that and didn't run into that issue when I was testing. I will patch that when I get the chance since it can affect gameplay and decrease the chance of a successful run.

@paroxysmal I think that's because we were tapping each shot. This is not neccessary, it's just a habit and satisfying for player in shoot-em-ups. Actually there's virtually no reason to tap, you can just hold and shoot everytime. But that raises the question general to all shooters - if it's better to always hold and never reelase, why than button is needed, it could be just autofire :)

I liked the idea of having choices in upgrades in a shoot them up. I enjoyed playing it, thanks!

However, I had the feeling that the raises in difficulty were not very smooth: for a long time I took upgrade without really seeing the difference, because I could easily clean the screen at any time. Then, suddenly, I could not handle the enemies at all: a lot of them, really fast, etc.

Awesome shooter! I was surprised to see a boss there :D It was quite easy to beat the game, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Solid entry!

I liked the risk reward gameplay scheme with coins that don't move, you have to actually move closer to enemies to get your coins. The difficulty spike aroud level 10-ish was really sudden, because before that the game feel kinda slow

Pros:
- nice idea, fit well with theme
- nice graphics and effects
- i like the power ups

Cons:
- the audio is very loud
- the gameplay is a little static without different mechanics or different foes

Anyway good job!

Shooting sound got a bit disturbing at after some time, but besides it was really fun little game. Actually see no need to pickup Magnet as option power up, since I need to have some damage output for each stage of the game. Usually for Vampire-like games this power up drops randomly whenever you kill enemy of find it in tresure chests. Overal fun experience, wish there to be more content in the future :)

It looked pretty cool, although a little dark, the sounds were a little questionable, but I unfortunately didn't enjoy the gameplay.

+ It was taking too long and was pretty boring just holding space and occasionally picking up xp.
+ I didn't like how xp stayed in place at the edge of the screen, since when I tried to pick it up I was taking damage.
+ I feel the player had too much hp, to the point it felt like it didn't matter to take damage, and I always felt like it wasn't my fault for taking the damage, since xp was close to the spawn area, and later they got more hp and I couldn't kill them or avoid them.
+ I presume the upgrades were random and the game seemed to require you to keep getting stronger to be able to clear it, but bullet speed and the xp gathering (and I guess the shield, but if it eliminated enemies at least that was a little bit of damage) felt like a trap.
+ I thought that the xp gathering upgrade would resolve the problem of xp spawning too close or potentially outside the screen, but it was only temporary and it felt very bad as you spent a whole level just to get a 1/4 of a level essentially making you weaker.

I like me some shmups, and I like me some vampire survivors.
It starts somewhat slow, but it was pretty fun once i got some firerate. I also really liked most of the graphics.

A couple of points:
- The sound gets overwhelming when there's a lot going on, especially when there are many explosions at the same time. One thing some shmups do to remedy this is to have limit of how many sounds can be played at a time of a specific type (for example, there can't be more than 1 or 2 explosion sounds at the same time).
- The XP magnet upgrade feels like a trap. Most of the time, the xp you'll attract won't be enough for another level, so it feels like a wasted level upgrade (especially considering the difficulty seems to ramp up based on the level too).

But overall, good entry. Nice job!


Outstanding art style! Lots of fun as well. I'll be revisiting this one!

My only problem with the game is that it take a tad too long to ramp up. The sprites are great though some variety to the enemies would be great (maybe there are more unique sprites later on I only got to speedy red bees). Kudos for having a controller support that is always one thing I'm so grateful for cause I enjoy playing games way more that way. Overall pretty neat compo entry, I enjoyed playing it very much.


I beat the game! Addictive gameplay. I only wish there was some music :) Nice job. I liked the explosion sound

Nice game! Compelling retro pixel art and audio! I felt like the gameplay was a bit repetitive/lacked a bit of depth, but it was still pretty satisfying blasting those bees and getting upgrades, still an effective gameplay loop. Good stuff here.

Nice graphics for the wasp and bees! The XP drops staying at the very edge of the screen was a bit annoying but I found I could mostly play around that by waiting to kill the bees until they were closer to the middle. The power up selection UI was really nice looking (unexpected for a jam game!) although I assume the power ups were chosen complately at ranndom because one time all three of my choices were shield XD

Very cool little game, reminds me of the Amiga classic _Apidya_ where you also play as a wasp. I liked the parallax effect but the enemies were a bit too easy (all damage I took was from collecting the XP orbs at the extreme right of the screen) ... until level 10 when the enemies became too hard haha. I got 1549 points. Also nice CRT effect, btw!

The game has a very cool style, and I really like the art and music. The upgrades are also very interesting. It would be even better if there were more types of enemies and sound effects in the game.

Fun to play an LD game with a controller :) (selecting power-ups didn't work for me though). Quite a difficulty cliff at level 10, could be ramping up earlier. Fun to play.

Beautiful graphics with rotating pixels hurt my pixel elitist soul. But I won't let it affect my rating, your sprites are really beautiful. Everything worked together pretty well except the blurry grass at the front.
While playing I was thinking this is The War of Attrition: The Game but eventually I got to the boss. I would not have made it to the boss without the addicting upgrade loop. I really liked the powerups but gathering XP felt wrong to me. Some other mechanic for the XP orbs would have been better. Maybe make the float at the speed of the enemies. That would for you to move a lot vertically to catch them before they are gone. Then maybe the XP magnet could be less effective and permanent as well. I didn't take much damage until the boss and almost died during it which felt a bit of a jump in difficulty. But I didn't and I finished the game! Well made overall and I had lots of fun. Thanks!

Nice graphics, though the pixel inconsistency was a touch distracting. For me, this enemy movement pattern felt more like something from a twin-stick shooter than from a shmup - I kept feeling like I wanted to shoot backwards and couldn't. Overall, though, this is a neat game.

This is really cool! I really like the graphics, they're very stylish. I especially like the player/enemy sprites and the upgrade sprites. The upgrade system and the variety of upgrades were also very cool, though I will say I did not expect the "speed" powerup to also permanently speed up the enemies, lol.

Minor nitpick: It's a little weird that when playing with keyboard, movement uses wasd + space, but the menu selections use arrow keys + space. It's a little non-obvious.

This is nicely done for compo scope. I think future opportunities for expansion are pretty clear -- more enemy types, different upgrades, maybe different types of pickups, etc. would be great ways to build on what you've got here.

nice idea! Keep making games!