Mal's Game

Very interesting, captivating game. I included it in my GM48: Collect! compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/Lw5l602H5TY

Cool game! I didn't get too much of the story due to it often happening WHILE ENEMIES WERE RUSHING ME, so I wish that aspect was handled a bit differently... The gameplay was mostly good, but the level design and fairly dumb enemy AI made it possible to cheese every area, just sitting in one spot and farming one spawner, then pick up a bunch of stuff and rush to the gate.

Sometimes I got stuck on the walls, that was a bit annoying.

The music was great, but please compress it a bit. I feel like this shouldn't need to be 92 MB >.<

So aside from some small issues, I liked it! 👍

Woah what a polished entry, raising the bar for sure, and the ending was super charming it got a real nice chuckle out of me. What can I see about the art and sound design other than it is amazing, the glitch visual and sounds elevate the whole piece without being overwhelming. If I had to nitpick I'd say that because of the perspective some enemies can be caugft behind walls and you can't see them so they just ambush you out of nowhere, and also the laser scorpion blends too much with the gray gates of the spawner.

Other than that, I absolutely loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikA0R1z72y4

There you goooo

Lovely looking, great sounding, satisfying combat. Good job!

I did find the combat a bit repetitive towards the end but, it's a game jam so, it's not really a big complaint. I wish there was a way you could skip the last message too, only means you have to wait ~5 seconds but when you've died a few times because you're a noob it's like, be quiet!!!

Was cool to have a bit of a narrative to the game too, don't often see that in jam games, I'd like to see more of it! I don't really mind reading a lot of text if it's interesting. The only thing I'd say about that was I got attacked by cheeky green things twice while reading before a combat section as they'd wandered down the pathway a bit, I think it was the second area? And it would be nice to have a solution to playing and reading at the same time as I imagine it could get pretty difficult if it was more hectic - maybe slow motion or something? Could be cool.

Having to make the choice between fighting or collecting and moving the glitches was cool, a good mechanic. I liked that you could pick multiple up as it meant you could kill a load of them and then make a mad dash for the gate ... and hope you had enough haha, otherwise it may not end well for you :D

That was fun! I enjoyed the intensity as the screen started to get infected. Although it was easy to cheese it up and camp in corners it was still fun! Excellent job! If the text bar was translucent it would help see the enemies, or maybe if the enemies/cursor showed a color behind the text bar kind of like the main character does with objects, that could be cool too. Of course I could have just found a safe spot and mashed F2, but I needed the lore! Nice creepy sounds and visual atmosphere. I liked how the gun shots hit different notes instead of the same exact sound. Thanks for the fun!

One of the best games I've played this jam. The character portraits were inspiring...the pixel art in general was top notch. The audio was also killer, I didn't even realize there wasn't any music until reading the comments below. Really impressed with what you two put together in such a short amount of time!

Congrats!

Fun game! Reasonably challenging. Audio is stellar as expected though I was disappointed by the lack of music. The story was mildly interesting though it was anticlimactic. Stories are usually a lot to expect from a jam game though so I don't consider that a huge negative. Where it is a negative however is when I have to go through the text after dying and the F2 button isn't working.

Ranged enemies could use a baby nerf imo.

Good work on this one!

Gameplay was a neat idea, repetitive but fun. Audio was great, but the dialogue text sfx were very obnoxious only because of how often it played and how much text there was. The distorted/corrupted screen effects were fantastic, some of the best I've seen let alone in a jam game! The story kept me engaged all the way to the end. Would have liked to see another enemy type or a different weapon or ability. Difficulty was near perfect, story length was just a tad longer than I anticipated (but that's okay!). Overall a pretty solid twin stick shooter!

I like the premise and the ending was fun, but I think most dialogues overstay their welcome, especially when the textbox hides so much of the game, and enemies can still shoot while being you hidden behind it. The skip function also doesn't seem to work 100% of the time? I wish I was just able to press space to display all the text at once then skip it.

Now, everything else is pretty much top notch, especially the visuals. I've got two small complaints :

• the weird sound of the rebots being shot (I think) was really confusing in firefights
• not being able to shoot while holding the glitches is fun, but this lead to me always playing around the door area, which I'm sure ended up being more boring than if I had to go around the room to fight

Wow, incredibly well polished!!

My only complaint would be that sometimes the text was a bit tedious to wait through.

I LOVED IT. the gameplay was great, the story was there. there is a bug in the last room where you can go backward and break the door that blocks you backward progress. from there you can walk around the whole arena and activate the last cut scene.

What is this, some sort of professional game? I doubt you are even awake after making this. But it was worth it. Amazing graphics, great systems - the text flow, the shadow when behind something. The writing was great - incredibly engaging story. There is a bug where if you use the glitch pickups on the door behind you, you can leave the map and enemies will stop spawning. But otherwise, really great, and really difficulty. It took me forever to beat the last level. I would suggest adding a counter for how many glitches you need for a door, as I had to count in an external program. Also, you made really cool credits/logos.

Very impressive! Extremely polished and beautiful - great art, sound, smooth gameplay and tight controls- I thought the decision to make it so that you can't shoot and carry the corruption pieces at the same time was excellent - it created so much depth to the game because while you were doing your best to survive and shoot enough enemies to drop enough pieces, you were also trying to judge when to go for it and grab the pieces to blow the door - there was a lot going on - shooting, dodging, manoeuvring within the space, managing health, keeping track of where the enemies are killed so you can pick up their corruption pieces - and yet all of these activities were all working together as a whole to put the player in a really focused flow state - Sublime! Great work folks - a really amazing entry.

Very nice entry. impressed by the balancing. For a GM game its really good in terms of difficulty. I liked the tactical decision between shooting and collecting. But honestly, i got annoyed by many sounds, which is surprising to me, because i was looking forward to WangleLines work. Esp the text beeping stuff was really bothering me. Other sounds were high quality as expected.

Easily the best game I've played of this jam so far! Amazingly done, amazing graphics, great story, I feel like there's not a single thing I can criticise about this! This is near enough ready for a full release on Itch.io or Steam already!

I really like the frantic trade-off between blasting enemies and lugging data packets around! You have to think a bit tactically for when it's a good time to stop shooting and start running.

The ending sequence was a fun and suspenseful little gimmick, I enjoyed it.

There's a softlock if you trigger the dialogue on the second door and run back the way you came, but it's only really a problem if you're actively trying to make the softlock happen.