Glad you like it! Since this game was made in PICO8, there’s not much room left to add more in the engine. That said, I’m working on a sequel / expanded version of this game using a different engine. Hoping to release a demo / alpha version of the expansion in a month or so!
I love the game and have some ideas for a mod but I have no monies :(. would there be a way for me to get the code, make the mod then send it back to you? I just really want to make my idea.
Hello! Glad you liked the game, it's cool that you're interested in making a mod, sorry about the paywall. Feel free to email me at AbhiSunduGames@gmail.com and I can help you.
I love your pico-8 rogue-likes! They have a ton of charm and personal touch, and always guarantee a fun experience. I appreciated the large health bar, which pretty much guaranteed I could experience the whole game (something I have struggled with in the past...)
Hey, I'm not sure how to load the game from within Splore, but if you want to load the game from within pico 8, you can just drag and drop the "p8.png" file into pico 8. Does that work for you?
It works for Windows and Linux desktops where dragging and dropping is functionally possible, but not for raspi, where splore is launched by a frontend like Emulationstation (common for raspi handheld consoles, arcade cabinets, etc). When I add the file to the /carts dir, it doesn't appear in the File menu in splore either. And, when I try to manually load the .png from the commandline, PICO-8 says "could not load putrid_s4nd.p8.png"
Hmm that's strange, I'm able to use "load putrid_s4nd.p8.png" from the pico 8 command line, at least on windows.
Does it work if you re-save the p8.png as a regular .p8 file (by loading it in pico 8 and calling 'save' again on windows or linux, wherever it currently works for you) and then pass that new .p8 file to your raspi?
I just realized that the linux zip file contains a .png file but not a .p8.png file. So it seems I cannot perform the steps here because I only have access to compiled versions of the game.
Gotcha, if you want you can email me at AbhiSunduGames@gmail.com and I could send you the uncompiled p8.png file since you already paid for the game. Sorry for the issue!
I paid for this game but it never showed up in my library or let me download it. Itch have said the problem might be on your end, with being paid directly?
Sorry to have to get in touch this way, but I can't see any other way to contact you.
Sorry about the issue, not sure why the game download didn't work. We should be able to sort this out, send me an email at AbhiSunduGames@gmail.com and we can go from there!
Thanks for playing! Watched the video, you had a pretty good radial build going on! Sorry about the crash, if you got any error messages while running it, feel free to post them here; not sure why the game would crash there. Thanks for making a video!
This was so simple and yet so GOOD! The sprite animations are incredible considering the limited use of colors, and the gameplay was really REALLY fun! I never felt overpowered but also never weak. The balancing was really well done!
Fantastic little arena rogue-lite. Loved the bosses and enemy types and the overall progression. I'm definitely coming back to this to replay it on different difficulties. Amazing work.
I'm going to be inside and go for full Abhi mode. Basically I'll start on the fourth difficulty rating. Oh and I'm doing like last one and am writing on the fly, so if this is a bad decision (with hindsight, it sort of was, but it was a fun bad decision), then I don't know it yet. I'm already terrified :D.
[Note: I'll put everything that I thought after playing the whole thing in these square friends]
Music is a bop, perfect feeling for the game. [I would have liked a bit more progression to it though, like the melody changing as you progress or something like that. I didn't get tired of it even though I heard it for 50 minutes straight, which is something I can't say for a lot of music. Great work!]
Some SFX felt missing, like one for player death. [The SFX could also be utilized better for telegraphing, it felt like it was more for spectacle than function a fair bit of the time]
First level complete! I got completely smacked a good few times. So I got angry, read the manual. [I need to get better at that sort of thing, I just blazed past the title screens manual, and the challenge modifiers without reading them], and then beat it!
Got the piercing bolt let's go! It's pretty fun to use, and seeing go through all the enemies is kind of satistying.
I wanna fly with the pew pew! Being able to shoot down is useful for ground enemies, but being able to use it as a second jump would be really cool.
Keep getting caught off guard by the recoil of the gun, I fall of platforms pretty often due to it. [I did adapt to this but it took until level 6 or something]
Nice telegraphing on the shooting, it's visually very clear when something is going to shoot. [It was in the beginning, it got a bit cluttered later on]
The enemy types are hard to differentiate. [This applies mostly to the flying enemy types, as they both flap their wings and are ball shaped]
Second level done! The % meter is great, it gives a feeling of progression and makes you feel like you are going towards a goal.
Grabbing thous 2 extra hp, I feel like I'll need them. [yes]
The lobbers (that's my try at naming them, they are the sluglooking fellas that shoot sort of upwards) are an interesting switchup, everything before aimed straight at you. [It's really nice that there are two sort of ways they shoot (not counting the spinning one for the boss), it gives them all a different flavour]
The enemy distribution feels really off some runs, I guess the enemies are randomly (ish) chosen and then placed, which leads to some runs having a lot lot of shooty bois and others not having any at all. That would need some balancing so you didn't get completely blasted by fifteen bullets at ones. [This is sort of a peasant moment, I was getting blasted by that amount at the end and it was doable]
Third done! I got the two exploding fireballs.
THEY AIM HOLY SHIT [they do and it is amazing this saved my ass I can't aim for shit]
Damn you boss! I wasn't expecting one so soon.
Fourth level done [I think I took arrows here, or faster reload], difficulty feels pretty good, its hard but not too hard.
Fifth was a breeze, it felt way too easy. It might have been just a unfair enemy distribution for them. [I don't really know if the enemies are randomly distributed, I get conflicting feelings because some stages (one part of a level) feel like they are the same every time, where others really don't]
Sixth was a bit more spicy in difficulty, it went back to the hard but not too hard mode.
Picking actually feels like a tough choice here, like it is really important. I'm sort of thinking "do I want to be able to survive longer or go full rambo with 250 bullets on them?".
Second boss was here! I'm not a fan of scaling pixelart, even for bosses. I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to pixelart, so either I want it to really feel pixel perfect or go full ham with 3d and stuff. Anything in between feels a bit odd, like it was engine jank or just the devs being a bit lazy (which devs have all right to be, making games is really really hard). It does make it super clear that they are bosses though, which is a nice thing.
Seventh level was not that hard, I got through pretty easily.
There is not that much space to manuver on, and things are getting hard to read with everything going on. The hitboxes for enemies and bullets also feel pretty large, and I don't get those "holy shit how did I get out of that" moments that I'm used to. A good and bad thing at the same time, it means I have to be more careful.
Eighth (spicy spelling) was tougher, and now I feel like it's really taking off.
I keep rolling and then shooting in the wrong direction, I think it just shoots in whatever direction you were going last. I would prefer if it was the button you pressed last instead, so you could turn while doing a roll and then fire off in the right direction without having to begin moving in the other.
Ninth (also spicy spelling) was really tough, the tough I expected from the game. I feel challenged and I'm very happy about it. This is a de-stress thing, I really get to dig my teeth into it and fight towards a goal.
FINAL BOSS YEAAA [No explanation needed]
It's really hard to tell where it will go, the telegraph could be better, like a line or a shadow where it will go to.
Using the things that spin around you and almost explode when you touch the enemies are really fun to use, you can build up damage, use a roll and then just deal 40 damage in a split second. Very satisfying.
Alright, beat it! I was hoping for something more after the boss, some dialog or something to end of the game. Even just getting platform the whole way up and jumping up to a door or something would make winning a bit more interesting. Time for me was 54 minutes. (Not 5 as written, but it was on CL4 so I guess I'm going a bit out of standard here).
I should note that I didn't really read what the challenge level did, so forgive me being unaware of things like the enemies being pretty thick and there being a lot lot of them. [I didn't actually write that much that related to this before, so it wasn't that much of a problem. The enemies having a lot of health was a bit frustrating though]
Alright so that was a bop! Short but really sweet. I'm not ready for permadeath that would hurt my soul too much, but I like the challenge of CL4, although it felt a bit unbalanced at some point. The unbalanced things might have just been me though, being unable to not really think as creatively as I should. Most of the enemies are no that hard to beat, you just need to know their patterns, and how to dodge them.
Oh and here's a random thought about tryh4rd: I think it did so well on armored games (I they were the ones that uploaded it) because people are tired of easy to digest, really basic web games. Tryh4rd was fantastically polished, had a visual style differentiating it from everything else. When everything looks professional, then everything also looks the same. Your games have a pretty distinct style, maybe not as professional as other styles, but it's different and has a soul to it, and that is so much more important. The gameplay is also pretty deep, even considering the length of the game. It's almost like the first run is the tutorial, and second one is where the mastering really begins. It also presented the players with something that you don't see often enough anymore: a game where you have to work for your dopamine. Tryh4rd doesn't reward you for just playing, you need to really try hard (terrible pun, but it was intended) to get that reward (that spicy bit of dopamine). So I feel like all your work (especially recent ones) are a breath of fresh air. They are not accessible for everyone, but that's their charm. The would not be what they are if they weren't so difficult. I know I was close to screaming at dreams of d4rk, I know I was really mad at planed d4ark and damn it tryh4rd was difficult. But they all felt amazing when I beat the challenges. It was like winning an actual fight, something was on the line. Your games really hit a sweet spot for me, they are short (picking up a game the day after is always difficult for me, I have the attention span of a squirrel when it comes to games), insanely polished and really fills that itch for something difficult yet fair. Alright that's enough compliment showering, I'm done.
I always look forward to your walls of text, I'll respond to your paragraphs in a stream of consciousness of my own:
Wow starting with challenge level 4 is an insane choice lmao, I'm proud of you but also goddamn you're a trooper.
I feel like I kinda phoned it in for the music this time. I'm more proud of my previous 3 games' music, I think for this game's music I just wanted something that fit the mood. Same for SFX, I was originally going light on SFX cause I wanted to write a boss battle track (and needed the extra pico 8 space), but decided at the end to skip that. This ended up making the game light on SFX in general (enemies have no 'chargeup' sound before their shots, and most of them don't have a 'shoot' sound).
Falling off platforms due to recoil is something that happened to me a lot while playtesting, I think if I ever expand on this game, I'll probably prevent recoil from knocking you off a platform.
Sorry about the enemies all looking alike, I didn't put a ton of work into the enemy designs.
On the topic of enemy distribution: The game on Normal mode has handcrafted enemy encounters (each spawn is designed to be harder/different than the last enemy set). However, on Challenge level 1 and above, the game adds a random chance to spawn additional enemies. I got kinda lazy with designing this mechanic, so it ends up just being: It adds a chance to spawn a basic bat or a shooter bat randomly at the start of each wave.
That's why some levels feel randomly more difficult: you may have just gotten unlucky with more shooter bats being spawned due to challenge level 1+ (if you play on normal, the difficulty curve is a lot smoother). Sorry about that!
On scaling pixel art: This was definitely out of laziness on my part. I definitely had room in my spritesheet for some 16x16 enemies, but I really wanted to make this a smaller project so I just scaled up the boys and called it a day. I feel you on scaling pixel art, in most of my more recent games, I'm a little more of a purist with keeping resolutions the same, but I do think there's some humor to scaling pixel art. Like the big slime boss just looks so big and goofy with his thick-ass lines, I can't not love him.
For the hitboxes: I think I definitely agree, I usually make hitboxes a lot smaller than visuals, but for this game I'm pretty sure I just made them roughly the same size as the visuals, which gives you a lot fewer "can't believe I dodged that" moments. In the future / possible expansion, I'll stick with more player-friendly hitboxes.
Woof the final boss was tough to fit in the token limit. I wish I had room to add trails / some way of showing where the boss will go, but even the teleport animation was pushing the token limit. Same goes for the ending screen, I originally had a small story written about some "Putrid curse" that trapped you in the crypt, but didn't have room for cutscene code or anything.
Thanks for playing on CL4, impressed that you chose that first!
Also, thanks for the words about TRYH4RD and my style. I've been feeling a lot better about gamedev more recently, I think I've finally gotten my creative process and style fleshed out. I really like making difficult games, and I love that players (like you) care enough about my games to push through the high difficulty. Dreams of D4RK is probably the hardest game I'll ever make (even though it's unfinished) haha, I like the difficulty level of my more recent games a little more. Planet D4RK is coming out on ArmorGames on Monday Feb 14th, so I hope the folks there like it as much as TRYH4RD!
Thanks for playing and for all the feedback! Also I don't think I've officially done a CL5 run, shh don't tell anyone.
Try playing the challenge modes, they will surely give you a bit more of a fight. They are still not super difficult, but with permadeath the stakes are a fair bit higher.
Played through the web version and I liked it a lot.
The game starts out easy enough and ramps up nicely, with different enemy types. I find it clear what the power-ups do from the description and interesting that they're marked in the ammo bar for when they do activate. However it seems like some markers don't stack in the ammo bar, i.e. they disappear once other markers are in, if that's a bug I don't know but the power-ups still activate.
Would be nice with a better victory screen. ;-)
Graphics are simple yet effective and expressive. Quite juicy. Music is a bit simple and currently a bit too loud, some sound effects are hard to hear at times.
(above, the 'piercing bullet' and 'poison cloud' have stacked on the 4th bullet of the clip)
Are you able to see that when your powerups stack? If not, that's probably a bug, sorry about that! (If you can remember which powerups cause this, that'd be very helpful, no worries if not).
Thanks for the feedback on the music and sound, that's definitely something I can work on in the future. Thanks for playing!
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really good...i don't know how to say it in english but in french we say : c'est épuré, pas de fioritures... direct!
Thank you!!
this game ROCKS
also are there plans to update the game with more spells and enemies and stuff?
Glad you like it! Since this game was made in PICO8, there’s not much room left to add more in the engine. That said, I’m working on a sequel / expanded version of this game using a different engine. Hoping to release a demo / alpha version of the expansion in a month or so!
im so excited!
Can't wait!
I JUST BEAT CHALLENGE LEVEL 5
Wow awesome! I don't think I've even beaten challenge level 5 haha, nice job!
yeah im pretty cool B)
really good game by the way
I love the game and have some ideas for a mod but I have no monies :(. would there be a way for me to get the code, make the mod then send it back to you? I just really want to make my idea.
Hello! Glad you liked the game, it's cool that you're interested in making a mod, sorry about the paywall. Feel free to email me at AbhiSunduGames@gmail.com and I can help you.
I love your pico-8 rogue-likes! They have a ton of charm and personal touch, and always guarantee a fun experience. I appreciated the large health bar, which pretty much guaranteed I could experience the whole game (something I have struggled with in the past...)
Great game!
Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it, the big health bar is definitely useful for widening the audience of the game.
Hello! Love the game. Bought a copy. How do I load it from within splore?
Hey, I'm not sure how to load the game from within Splore, but if you want to load the game from within pico 8, you can just drag and drop the "p8.png" file into pico 8. Does that work for you?
It works for Windows and Linux desktops where dragging and dropping is functionally possible, but not for raspi, where splore is launched by a frontend like Emulationstation (common for raspi handheld consoles, arcade cabinets, etc). When I add the file to the /carts dir, it doesn't appear in the File menu in splore either. And, when I try to manually load the .png from the commandline, PICO-8 says "could not load putrid_s4nd.p8.png"
Hmm that's strange, I'm able to use "load putrid_s4nd.p8.png" from the pico 8 command line, at least on windows.
Does it work if you re-save the p8.png as a regular .p8 file (by loading it in pico 8 and calling 'save' again on windows or linux, wherever it currently works for you) and then pass that new .p8 file to your raspi?
I just realized that the linux zip file contains a .png file but not a .p8.png file. So it seems I cannot perform the steps here because I only have access to compiled versions of the game.
Gotcha, if you want you can email me at AbhiSunduGames@gmail.com and I could send you the uncompiled p8.png file since you already paid for the game. Sorry for the issue!
This is a great arena shooter. Really solid shooting and platforming, unique graphics, an interesting selection of enemies and some cool bosses too.
I paid for this game but it never showed up in my library or let me download it. Itch have said the problem might be on your end, with being paid directly?
Sorry to have to get in touch this way, but I can't see any other way to contact you.
Sorry about the issue, not sure why the game download didn't work. We should be able to sort this out, send me an email at AbhiSunduGames@gmail.com and we can go from there!
Thanks for sorting this. You rule!
Made a video
Thanks for playing! Watched the video, you had a pretty good radial build going on! Sorry about the crash, if you got any error messages while running it, feel free to post them here; not sure why the game would crash there. Thanks for making a video!
Really fun pico 8 game. I am trying to beat challenge 5 mode, it's hell, but fun hell. That's all I have to say. 9/10 game. :)
Challenge level 5 is definitely super tough, good luck! thanks for playing!
One of the best games I've ever played, thank you!
Thanks!
This was so simple and yet so GOOD! The sprite animations are incredible considering the limited use of colors, and the gameplay was really REALLY fun! I never felt overpowered but also never weak. The balancing was really well done!
Thank you for the kind words! It was really fun working with the limited palette!
Amazing game, simple and fun.
5/5 Congrats!
Thanks!
this game is so freaking awesome
Thank you!
YAY i beat challenge level 5
Wow that's insane, I don't think I've even done that haha, thanks for playing!
the game is awesome btw
Fantastic little arena rogue-lite. Loved the bosses and enemy types and the overall progression. I'm definitely coming back to this to replay it on different difficulties. Amazing work.
Thanks a ton for playing and for the shoutout!
It is time once again!
I'm going to be inside and go for full Abhi mode. Basically I'll start on the fourth difficulty rating. Oh and I'm doing like last one and am writing on the fly, so if this is a bad decision (with hindsight, it sort of was, but it was a fun bad decision), then I don't know it yet. I'm already terrified :D.
[Note: I'll put everything that I thought after playing the whole thing in these square friends]
Music is a bop, perfect feeling for the game. [I would have liked a bit more progression to it though, like the melody changing as you progress or something like that. I didn't get tired of it even though I heard it for 50 minutes straight, which is something I can't say for a lot of music. Great work!]
Some SFX felt missing, like one for player death. [The SFX could also be utilized better for telegraphing, it felt like it was more for spectacle than function a fair bit of the time]
First level complete! I got completely smacked a good few times. So I got angry, read the manual. [I need to get better at that sort of thing, I just blazed past the title screens manual, and the challenge modifiers without reading them], and then beat it!
Got the piercing bolt let's go! It's pretty fun to use, and seeing go through all the enemies is kind of satistying.
I wanna fly with the pew pew! Being able to shoot down is useful for ground enemies, but being able to use it as a second jump would be really cool.
Keep getting caught off guard by the recoil of the gun, I fall of platforms pretty often due to it. [I did adapt to this but it took until level 6 or something]
Nice telegraphing on the shooting, it's visually very clear when something is going to shoot. [It was in the beginning, it got a bit cluttered later on]
The enemy types are hard to differentiate. [This applies mostly to the flying enemy types, as they both flap their wings and are ball shaped]
Second level done! The % meter is great, it gives a feeling of progression and makes you feel like you are going towards a goal.
Grabbing thous 2 extra hp, I feel like I'll need them. [yes]
The lobbers (that's my try at naming them, they are the sluglooking fellas that shoot sort of upwards) are an interesting switchup, everything before aimed straight at you. [It's really nice that there are two sort of ways they shoot (not counting the spinning one for the boss), it gives them all a different flavour]
The enemy distribution feels really off some runs, I guess the enemies are randomly (ish) chosen and then placed, which leads to some runs having a lot lot of shooty bois and others not having any at all. That would need some balancing so you didn't get completely blasted by fifteen bullets at ones. [This is sort of a peasant moment, I was getting blasted by that amount at the end and it was doable]
Third done! I got the two exploding fireballs.
THEY AIM HOLY SHIT [they do and it is amazing this saved my ass I can't aim for shit]
Damn you boss! I wasn't expecting one so soon.
Fourth level done [I think I took arrows here, or faster reload], difficulty feels pretty good, its hard but not too hard.
Fifth was a breeze, it felt way too easy. It might have been just a unfair enemy distribution for them. [I don't really know if the enemies are randomly distributed, I get conflicting feelings because some stages (one part of a level) feel like they are the same every time, where others really don't]
Sixth was a bit more spicy in difficulty, it went back to the hard but not too hard mode.
Picking actually feels like a tough choice here, like it is really important. I'm sort of thinking "do I want to be able to survive longer or go full rambo with 250 bullets on them?".
Second boss was here! I'm not a fan of scaling pixelart, even for bosses. I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to pixelart, so either I want it to really feel pixel perfect or go full ham with 3d and stuff. Anything in between feels a bit odd, like it was engine jank or just the devs being a bit lazy (which devs have all right to be, making games is really really hard). It does make it super clear that they are bosses though, which is a nice thing.
Seventh level was not that hard, I got through pretty easily.
There is not that much space to manuver on, and things are getting hard to read with everything going on. The hitboxes for enemies and bullets also feel pretty large, and I don't get those "holy shit how did I get out of that" moments that I'm used to. A good and bad thing at the same time, it means I have to be more careful.
Eighth (spicy spelling) was tougher, and now I feel like it's really taking off.
I keep rolling and then shooting in the wrong direction, I think it just shoots in whatever direction you were going last. I would prefer if it was the button you pressed last instead, so you could turn while doing a roll and then fire off in the right direction without having to begin moving in the other.
Ninth (also spicy spelling) was really tough, the tough I expected from the game. I feel challenged and I'm very happy about it. This is a de-stress thing, I really get to dig my teeth into it and fight towards a goal.
FINAL BOSS YEAAA [No explanation needed]
It's really hard to tell where it will go, the telegraph could be better, like a line or a shadow where it will go to.
Using the things that spin around you and almost explode when you touch the enemies are really fun to use, you can build up damage, use a roll and then just deal 40 damage in a split second. Very satisfying.
Alright, beat it! I was hoping for something more after the boss, some dialog or something to end of the game. Even just getting platform the whole way up and jumping up to a door or something would make winning a bit more interesting. Time for me was 54 minutes. (Not 5 as written, but it was on CL4 so I guess I'm going a bit out of standard here).
I should note that I didn't really read what the challenge level did, so forgive me being unaware of things like the enemies being pretty thick and there being a lot lot of them. [I didn't actually write that much that related to this before, so it wasn't that much of a problem. The enemies having a lot of health was a bit frustrating though]
Alright so that was a bop! Short but really sweet. I'm not ready for permadeath that would hurt my soul too much, but I like the challenge of CL4, although it felt a bit unbalanced at some point. The unbalanced things might have just been me though, being unable to not really think as creatively as I should. Most of the enemies are no that hard to beat, you just need to know their patterns, and how to dodge them.
Oh and here's a random thought about tryh4rd: I think it did so well on armored games (I they were the ones that uploaded it) because people are tired of easy to digest, really basic web games. Tryh4rd was fantastically polished, had a visual style differentiating it from everything else. When everything looks professional, then everything also looks the same. Your games have a pretty distinct style, maybe not as professional as other styles, but it's different and has a soul to it, and that is so much more important. The gameplay is also pretty deep, even considering the length of the game. It's almost like the first run is the tutorial, and second one is where the mastering really begins. It also presented the players with something that you don't see often enough anymore: a game where you have to work for your dopamine. Tryh4rd doesn't reward you for just playing, you need to really try hard (terrible pun, but it was intended) to get that reward (that spicy bit of dopamine). So I feel like all your work (especially recent ones) are a breath of fresh air. They are not accessible for everyone, but that's their charm. The would not be what they are if they weren't so difficult. I know I was close to screaming at dreams of d4rk, I know I was really mad at planed d4ark and damn it tryh4rd was difficult. But they all felt amazing when I beat the challenges. It was like winning an actual fight, something was on the line. Your games really hit a sweet spot for me, they are short (picking up a game the day after is always difficult for me, I have the attention span of a squirrel when it comes to games), insanely polished and really fills that itch for something difficult yet fair. Alright that's enough compliment showering, I'm done.
Last question: have you beaten CL5?
now; BAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!
Hello!
I always look forward to your walls of text, I'll respond to your paragraphs in a stream of consciousness of my own:
Wow starting with challenge level 4 is an insane choice lmao, I'm proud of you but also goddamn you're a trooper.
I feel like I kinda phoned it in for the music this time. I'm more proud of my previous 3 games' music, I think for this game's music I just wanted something that fit the mood. Same for SFX, I was originally going light on SFX cause I wanted to write a boss battle track (and needed the extra pico 8 space), but decided at the end to skip that. This ended up making the game light on SFX in general (enemies have no 'chargeup' sound before their shots, and most of them don't have a 'shoot' sound).
Falling off platforms due to recoil is something that happened to me a lot while playtesting, I think if I ever expand on this game, I'll probably prevent recoil from knocking you off a platform.
Sorry about the enemies all looking alike, I didn't put a ton of work into the enemy designs.
On the topic of enemy distribution: The game on Normal mode has handcrafted enemy encounters (each spawn is designed to be harder/different than the last enemy set). However, on Challenge level 1 and above, the game adds a random chance to spawn additional enemies. I got kinda lazy with designing this mechanic, so it ends up just being: It adds a chance to spawn a basic bat or a shooter bat randomly at the start of each wave.
That's why some levels feel randomly more difficult: you may have just gotten unlucky with more shooter bats being spawned due to challenge level 1+ (if you play on normal, the difficulty curve is a lot smoother). Sorry about that!
On scaling pixel art: This was definitely out of laziness on my part. I definitely had room in my spritesheet for some 16x16 enemies, but I really wanted to make this a smaller project so I just scaled up the boys and called it a day. I feel you on scaling pixel art, in most of my more recent games, I'm a little more of a purist with keeping resolutions the same, but I do think there's some humor to scaling pixel art. Like the big slime boss just looks so big and goofy with his thick-ass lines, I can't not love him.
For the hitboxes: I think I definitely agree, I usually make hitboxes a lot smaller than visuals, but for this game I'm pretty sure I just made them roughly the same size as the visuals, which gives you a lot fewer "can't believe I dodged that" moments. In the future / possible expansion, I'll stick with more player-friendly hitboxes.
Woof the final boss was tough to fit in the token limit. I wish I had room to add trails / some way of showing where the boss will go, but even the teleport animation was pushing the token limit. Same goes for the ending screen, I originally had a small story written about some "Putrid curse" that trapped you in the crypt, but didn't have room for cutscene code or anything.
Thanks for playing on CL4, impressed that you chose that first!
Also, thanks for the words about TRYH4RD and my style. I've been feeling a lot better about gamedev more recently, I think I've finally gotten my creative process and style fleshed out. I really like making difficult games, and I love that players (like you) care enough about my games to push through the high difficulty. Dreams of D4RK is probably the hardest game I'll ever make (even though it's unfinished) haha, I like the difficulty level of my more recent games a little more. Planet D4RK is coming out on ArmorGames on Monday Feb 14th, so I hope the folks there like it as much as TRYH4RD!
Thanks for playing and for all the feedback! Also I don't think I've officially done a CL5 run, shh don't tell anyone.
Fun game, really enjoyed it.
Thanks!
Solid game man. I spent a few hours beating each difficulty. I'd love to see more upgrades or content in the future!
Thanks a ton for playing!
This is really cool, a bit easy, but sure a fun game!
Try playing the challenge modes, they will surely give you a bit more of a fight. They are still not super difficult, but with permadeath the stakes are a fair bit higher.
Thank you, I totally missed it!
Played through the web version and I liked it a lot.
The game starts out easy enough and ramps up nicely, with different enemy types. I find it clear what the power-ups do from the description and interesting that they're marked in the ammo bar for when they do activate. However it seems like some markers don't stack in the ammo bar, i.e. they disappear once other markers are in, if that's a bug I don't know but the power-ups still activate.
Would be nice with a better victory screen. ;-)
Graphics are simple yet effective and expressive. Quite juicy. Music is a bit simple and currently a bit too loud, some sound effects are hard to hear at times.
Short but really sweet! Again I liked this a lot.
Thanks for playing and thanks a ton for the feedback!
Hmm the powerups should be able to stack on the ammo bar, like this:
https://imgur.com/a/gMo6YX2
(above, the 'piercing bullet' and 'poison cloud' have stacked on the 4th bullet of the clip)
Are you able to see that when your powerups stack? If not, that's probably a bug, sorry about that! (If you can remember which powerups cause this, that'd be very helpful, no worries if not).
Thanks for the feedback on the music and sound, that's definitely something I can work on in the future. Thanks for playing!
Hi! Just played your game, and it's pretty good! Challenge level 5 gave me error at stage 4(as shown in the video) so I can't really finish it.
Thanks for playing! Ah crap, sorry about that, I'll take a look and fix it asap!
Just a heads up, the bug should be fixed now!