Witch Wanda: Protect the Island

This was a lot of fun! I liked the extreme knockback since it really makes you balance between shooting and dodging. The art is beautiful, the best I've seen in this jam. I loved the music as well. Excellent entry!

Its a cool looking game, but the knockback an dlack of a gui for how much life you have was a damper on the end product. Looking forwards to what you make next jam.

Super cool take on a shooter! I really like the mechanics-- the way the bullets push you back and the way that you bounce off the walls gives this a really unique feel, and that combined with the slight directionality of your bullets based on your movement means theres a lot of room to get good at this game and really master it. The way the island in the back is used to measure your health is also super neat, along with restoring it based on how many enemies you defeat. The art is also really neat.

There are a few weaknesses, though. You restore so much health from the enemies that you can just tank a decent number of hits without punishment. It's really fun to try and dodge some of the more complex bullet patterns, but you don't even really need to dodge them thta well most of the time. I also think the bullet pushback is a really natural and unique way to try and encourage the player to not spam the fire button-- I see your goal there, but I'm not really sure you met it. All that holding fire does is push me up against the back edge-- which, honestly, is where I want to be anyways, considering its the furthest point from the bullets, and gives me the most time to react. This means I basically end up holding shoot the whole time, and only moving up and down, never forwards. It's not unfun, but I'm certain that wasn't your intent. Maybe there could be some reason you need to move forward-- whether that be spikes at the back, or collectables at the front.

Overall, the game is pretty fun, and super well polished. It's not as stagnant as a lot of shmumps tend to be-- nice work!

Really sweet eye catching game. I saw you posting your progress gifs on discord and really felt: wowww seems like there are going to be some awesome entries! The bullet designs are very clear which is so important in a bullet hell. They're also super cute and fit the game perfectly. I love how the wtiches look as well. The background parallax and teh colours you pick are all just so perfect for the game. Not only does it look beautiful, but everything is so pixel distinct that I never lost sight of what was going on in the screen. Love the design of the floating islands in the background too. Whole setting is just gorgeous. I love all the different witch designs too. I never saw the same witch show up on the same screen which really helped with the immersion.

I enjoyed the story in the description. I would have liked to see more of that in the game!

I don't think I hate the idea of knock back in the game. After reading your description, and seeing the "control your fire in short bursts", I feel I get it. I do think that there needs to be parts of the game that changes to take advantage of that philosophy though. Playing the game, I felt short burts was inefficient. With how the bullets are spread and how much health you get back, it was actually way easier for me to just hold the mouse down and let the knockback happen. In most bullet hell games I have played, the holding mouse down and spamming the attack is just how it goes. Most of the brain power goes towards dodging the bullets. I think having to control your fire in short bursts works less in a bullet hell but probably be a better design choice for a more tactical shmup style game as most shmup do tend to have you just spam the button anyway. Though I don't often see knockback used in those style game as a "trade-off" mechanic. More like a heat meter where the weapon overloads. They do have less dense enemies/bullets than a bullet hell so a knock back mechanic I think fits better in those style games. Another thing, I think in bullet hells, being precise with the movement is just so important that I think the knockback kinda pulls against it. I can see it as an interesting trade off I guess. Like making the player have to decide "ok, I want to be precise and dodge bullets" and a "I need to shoot but this will make me less precise". It's an interesting balance I think can be explored too. Furthermore, the player can be pulled between those two things and also: I can't not shoot for too long or my island is gonna die. I didn't feel the balance in this game because it was just wayyy more efficient to hold the mouse button down and gain health from the witches. I tried playing a more tactical way where I tried not to get hit but the island takes so much damage that I basically needed to be killing witches all the time to keep it afloat it felt like. Most bullet hells are such spammy affairs I think adding knock back can be interesting but I think the game would need to slow down to make it feel significant. Or have attack patterns that are very wave like. Really intense dodge portions and slower portions where knock back might even help with the dodging.

Anyway, wall of text is just kinda me scribbling down an unedited train of thought lol.

I really liked the visual indication of the island teetering when it was losing health. I also found it a cool unique way to visualise health. Effects were also awesome and made the whole game so juicy and punchy. I love how it feels so dynamic. Not like a papercut out but that things had real weight to them. Sound and music were also great and the loop was pleasant and exciting. I'm just so excited by the visuals and world of your game. Though I'm a little biased as I literally made a game about a witch on a flying island in the last gm48 I participated in, haha.

I should have read the description more thoroughly too I think. This is on my end but I was dodging bullets for awhile and wondering why my island was slowly falling. I would suggest having damage indicator for the island as well but I think that might just be too distracting with how many bullets there are. And the real solution is that I should have read the description better....

Anyway, really nice work. I was looking forward to playing this one and finally got around to it.

This is adorable! I'm a big fan of witches so I had to play :D I love the pixel art, and all the variety of witches to fight. The music is nice! I love how the orb on island is an indicator of it's health. I found it pretty difficult to not get hit constantly, but at the same time it was pretty easy to keep the island alive as long as you defeat the witches fast. Great Jam!!

Game looks really nice and I like the cute little witches. It has been mentioned before but I'm not a fan of the knockback while shooting. I recall you saying it was to prevent spamming but I was so tanky I kinda just ended up doing that anyway and I felt unkillable.

I enjoyed it! The teetering island was a smart and neat way of showing how screwed you were in-universe without resorting to a more obvious and game-y health bar. It also served as a good cue to switch up your strategy and get more aggressive in order to save your little island.

Loved the touch with 'REVENGE!' >:) And all the little witchy character designs and their corresponding bullets / health - they all felt unique, which made them more fun to fight than a generic enemy. It's like in Bloodborne, the most exciting fights (for me at least), weren't necessarily the bosses or regular enemies, but the other hunters - feels like you're fighting another player or yourself from a different dimension.

This is a wonderful entry!

I really loved the use of momentum and the weight behind everything, including the knockback from shooting - I could see it being a little strong for someone good at bullet hells and used to complete movement precision, but I am neither of those things, so it was just satisfying to me.

As would be expected, it's graphically fantastic as well. Great spritework, great effects, great use of parallax and Hotline Miami inspiration, and against the odds, it all works together beautifully.

SFX and music fit the style, and the game seemed stable throughout too. Really don't have any complaints, for a 48hr game this is lovely.

This game doesn't play how it looks at all. I look at that gif and I think, 'oh that's a schmup' but this is not conventional schmup design. Not that it's wrong to be unconventional but for me it fell short of my gif-based expectations. I'm not a fan of the recoil or the bouncing but my biggest complaint is that the player does not take damage, you can sit right in the middle of a stream of bullets and be totally fine. It is an extraordinary gamejam game that does so many things right, looks and sounds amazing but as a schmup fan I had to nit pick it.

This was really fun to play, I'm absolutely in awe of the fidelity with which you managed the UI and visuals of this game; the background sunset and the artwork for the sinking island is absolutely beautiful, and seeing custom-designed menu buttons float in and out so smoothly made this game feel like it was made in far more than 48 hours. That's almost as magical as the game's concept itself! Enjoyed flying around and having fun bullet wars with other magicians too, always a blast and it felt fittingly difficult like many bullet hell/schmup games do.

Well polished game! The background is pretty, comfy colours, and all the witches are very cute. Good music too. Playing this game was a little bit of a rollercoaster for me:

At first I didn't understand how to play at all. Didn't get how the health worked like everyone else it seems. Even after I knew to not worry about dodging shots, but just shoot the enemy witches, I still had lots of problems. I'd try to fly up close to them to shoot them faster, but moving around too much caused me to bounce all over the place. I got a score of 666 which I thought was funny and I was prepared to quit at that point.

Then I read Mimpy's thing about hanging back, and I went — o h

So feeling like an idiot I tried again, quickly got past my highscore, and just kept going, slowly starting to wonder if I could then hit the 6666 for the lulz. Took a while, but yep! :D

Somehow my old 666 highscore had turned into 684 after closing the game, and now I notice the 6666 has become 6675, so all in all, 0/10 >:(

The pixel art graphics/animation are fantastic and give the game so much charm! At first I was unsure how to track my health, until I noticed the orb on the background island changing size. That was a very clever touch! I also like that the island collapses as you run low on health, but it's possible to bring it back from certain destruction by killing enemies quickly. The difficulty progression could use a bit of tweaking as it's a bit on the easy side, but other than that, you have something really great here!

This is really well done, so my feedback has to do with game design more than anything else. I just thought it was too easy. Once you get around 2000 points, the game never changes. You see the same patterns over and over and it never gets any harder. I honestly didn't care about getting hit either, since I could just kill all fo the enemies super fast to offset the health I was losing. Now, this is a great place to be in. Those are just tweaks that need to be made, but the base game is super solid. Music, shooting(though a little too uncontrollable for my taste), art, you name it. This was an impressive feat to be made in only 48 hours. You should be proud! Also, I got about 5200 points before I just let myself die. haha

I really like the unconventional approach to a bullet hell with regards to health in this. It leads to two different strategies with their own different benefits and drawbacks:

You can hang back and dodge shots to minimize taking damage, at the cost of killing enemies more slowly and losing health over time. Or, and this was my preferred playstyle, you can tank shots by getting right up in the enemy's face, kill them super quickly, and heal up the damage you took.

I think this is an interesting space to explore because bullet hells almost universally encourage only the first playstyle, but unfortunately the game's overall difficulty is pretty low, so I never felt like I was forced to swap between these styles at any time. Instead I could sorta pick and choose and do either one.

The background art is super pretty and I like the really tiny "bop" sound when you bounce off the edges. What's really missing, I think, is some dark edgy backstory explaining why these other witches are attacking your island. Jealousy, maybe?

I really like the bullet-hell take you've given to this theme, my only critisism though it was a little unclear to begin with how the health system worked and the knock-back is quite fierce when you fire - overall though, I enjoyed the game, it's a great entry :)

Loved the graphics. It wasn't apparent to me how the island's health was my health until the 2nd playthrough. Loved the Bullet Hell feel!

(I'm gonna avoid writing what I saw other people write.)

Dope stuff, super charming. Kinda easy to optimize the fun out of by ignoring horizontal movement and just making adjustments vertically. Maybe some notable slowing effect when colliding with the screen's edge would help? Besides that, early it was very engaging trying to feel out how shooting messed with movement.

It seemed like the highscore board was bugged with scores of consecutive runs stacking on top of one another so long as the game stayed open. This made immediately comparing how I was doing from one run to the next feel kinda finnicky.

The broom trail stood out to me as especially pretty paired with the scene, music and sound was nice, and I thought the menu transition into gameplay was really cool.

Pretty dope, I enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing your work~

I love the charm of this game. The artstyle and the music really nail it for me.

At first it seemed interesting how shooting thrusts you backwards however the limited space you have inside the game means you spend a lot of time bouncing. And while the game wasn't too difficult throughout I feel it still throws off the player movement enough to possibly be a bit bothersome.

Got a score of 1700. Is this touhou inspired? If so, that's epic. If not, still ultra cool. I feel like the only problem with the game was the difficulty didn't seem to get harder over time, and I eventually quit because everything felt samey. I didn't really pay attention to the projectiles coming at me though because they didn't affect me enough to worry too much about them. Visuals are top notch though, same with music.

Alright! First I wanna say it's really a charming game! it's setting is cute, and most of it is pretty lovely!

Then I kinda wanna address the gameplay itself: Kinda stopped at 2600 cause I realized the difficulty wasn't ramping up (or too slowly); thing is, because I am not punished by getting hits, I ended up only holding the fire key and all the feedback really did was making me bounce on the left of the screen (which is kinda fun though), where i'd want to be anyway. There's not really a reason to be careful with your movements, as it's way easier to just hold and sway up and down until it kills stuff. Could have gone like this forever I assume?

What i'd suggest for that is simple to make hits on you matter; not necessarily hurt you, but perhaps preventing you to fire for a short second. That way we'd feel encouraged to avoid the shots (even if they're very hard to avoid on their own)

I also kinda wished the island itself was a bit more relevant in the gameplay, as it's basically just a bar of depleting life you refuel with enemies lives, it didn't need to be an island (though that's a cool gimmick!). I think it would have been pretty cool if the island itself was part of the gameplay, like, it'd be on the field and serve as obstacle, forcing you to move around and stuff

But that's sort of a nitpick! It's finished and polished, which is pretty good for a jam game! (cant say the same for my own game) The game is pretty cool and it's really nice to see the island slowly falling as it's losing its energy, which is a rather neat concept. :D

good shot em up, good graphic.