itch.io

i've removed the link to your game, to respect your wishes! i still encourage people to go try it, and seeing a fan game pop out of this project is probably the coolest thing to happen, at least for me. thanks again! :)

gracias! :)

thanks!

just finished this. i was inspired to try it because i was watching your stream last night about 2.

this game is seriously masterful. i feel so many indie devs get caught up in making their game have that juicy indie game polish, to the point where they have polished off all the personality and raw creativity. this game is beautiful and well animated while evoking that early 2000s freeware era out of love

also, it bears mentioning that the bosses and enemy designs are really sophisticated and well animated! and each temple room is completely unique.

i really resonated with the message at the end. thanks for making this!

fun! seems totally original in the "block pushing genre" as far as i'm aware. i got thru the 25 levels. some of the puzzles felt a little loosey-goosey in the sense there seem to be many solutions, which i see as a good thing. it's just surprising, since, in my experience, these types of games tend to be very rigid in the order you're required to do things. thanks for making this!

Thanks for making it! I went back to Crossgunner D+ and cleared that, and have since made it to level 7 in Infinite. It really is a blast. Excited to learn that you are working on another game.

Got to lvl 6 with a score of 137574, mostly holding onto my EX for survival. I did level 5 in practice mode until I could do it a few times in a row.

The design of this game is so, so smart. Using the bat guys as a resource for canceling, planning a route to the repair system, doing little tap dodges to avoid the aimed shots in the cone of bullets the skull guys create, and manipulating the cross gun ships... I could go on. it's really awesome and it does so much with just a few enemies. It's so elegant I actually don't know where you would start to come up with something like this.

The bosses have a lot of character despite shooting the same pattern with different parameters (until you get to level 5 where it adds an extra shot.) The level 3 boss is particularly memorable. It allows you to stay a lot closer than the other ones. The boss sprites from Helicity are really fantastic too.

if you don't know already, kollumos is prodigiously good at making shmups in scratch and this one is no different. i believe this is the fourth shmup they have made.

i'm a big fan of their style of pixel art. it's fascinating to go back and play Locked Arcadia; you can see a clear through line with their use of high-contrast, limited color palettes and geometric designs. it reminds me of Mecha Ritz, but that comparison isn't entirely right either... kollumos' games really do look unique, and that distinctive style is refined in Shardz of Iron. i love it

the soundrack by scowsh is a bop!

the bullet patterns are colorful, pretty, and fairly dense. there's a good high score run on YouTube if you want to see how to play the game well. you are intended to make heavy use of your shield to convert bullets into gems.

it runs well with TurboWarp if you choose to play it in the browser.

follow kollumos if you don't already! they are prolific artist, and it seems like they are early in their game dev career. who knows where they'll be in a few years

it’s uncertain. the other creator stepped away from it. the majority of the game was made over five really intense months, including the game engine. it’s been longer than that since i’ve been able to do any meaningful work on it. to be honest, my mental health completely cratered; i’ve barely been able to even sit at a keyboard. on top of other bad real life stuff, i haven’t been able to get back in the saddle. i keep trying though

i was working alone on an update that adds some cool new mechanics and a new character and a bunch of polish, but i don’t know if it will ever come out unfortunately

thanks for taking interest, though! sorry if this is a letdown

yep... steam deck support not there yet. will do a native linux build so it doesn't have to go around valve's wrappers for everything

that means so much!! please do keep an eye on it; we're working on some stuff i think is pretty cool

thanks for being so honest! this is really helpful for us, and we want to address these things. we hope you stick with us and continue to give us feedback as we continue to work on it.

this isn't communicated well within the game, but the way it works is the game generates 10 random enemies every run, so sometimes you might get a TV with an eye and devil horns, and within that run, it always moves and shoots a similar way. they sort of are just "symbols" but they're distinct, so the hope is you can learn to recognize them within a single run. the style iterates on the original dead petals where the idea is that it's like a haunted shareware game... almost intentionally "cheap" and simple looking graphics meant to juxtapose the high-fidelity reflective watery surface. we want to make these more detailed and add variety!

thanks again for checking it out and we hope you give it another chance later down the line

glad you like it! funny u should mention it i did try zigcc for cross compiling! i ran into some really specific issue with regard to luajit so i abandoned it but i would really like to get it building from one platform on all platforms, so i might revisit it.

we’ll definitely have mouse aiming and thanks for mentioning the accessibility problem it solves. hadn’t thought of that

well put

thanks so much! congrats on beating the butterfly, the game is fricken brutal

thanks!

i’m glad!

:)

:pog:

thank you!

https://bandaloo.itch.io/dead-petals-bliss

For the past few months I've been working non-stop with May, the creator of satryn, to hone our twin-stick-shooter experience to make something new: DEAD PETALS BLISS. This version is free, but we hope to make a paid version someday with more features, if and when it makes sense to release something like that. If that sounds interesting, you can wishlist it here.

Meanwhile, you can enjoy the free version forever!

12348 was my first attempt after beating the third loop where the game ends

thanks!

oh my gosh thanks for playing! the definitive version will have some balance tweaks and most notably a “custom game” option that lets you play with a whole ton of parameters. i think after that, i’m gonna put all my energy towards a follow-up game that leans a little harder on upgrades/roguelike elements (such as larger suck) and lots of interesting upgrades

nice work!!

godot, even better! i can try to compile for macos if you need it. i'll DM you on twitter so you have my handle

gameplay video: 

this is the best modern take on Robotron out there. super comfortable to play without a mouse because of the 8-way shooting. cross-shaped lens flare with the additive blending is so pretty, oh my god. the sound design is so good too -- sounds like a Williams game but punchier and throatier.

(P.S. if this is gamemaker, if you want to export a mac version i may be able to help.)

edit: it gets so hectic past level 20, i love it so much

this is very good. also i relate because in real life whenever i am shooting my shotgun i also fatfinger the clone everything button, which is embarrassing

this is so good! it is very well designed around the restricted aiming. i will write more about it later. here is my final screen from my first playthrough:

this is so creative

i just played this today -- this is so much fun. it's kind of everything i'm trying to do to be honest.

the only suggestion i can make is it would be nice if the reticle pushed your camera forward so you can peek around the map. i found myself trying to do that because of enter the gungeon. edit: looks like that's already in the game. i dunno why i didn't notice at first

also, this has the art style (and violent subject matter) that if you posted it to newgrounds, it would guaranteed be front page.

i was about to totally best you with like 5 million but then it crashed! i think i lived so long it overfilled the replay buffer. (you'll just have to believe me)

i'll preface this by saying that i might be biased. when i was young and had a Nintendo DS, the only game i played as much as New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart DS was Geometry Wars: Galaxies. beyond that, i would play every freeware twin stick shooter that i could get my hands on. on top of that, i played Playstation Network titles like Super Stardust Delta and Galaga Legions DX (which is a twin-stick shooter btw! i feel like no one knows about that game.)

as tasogare66 also mentions, it's much more Robotron/Smash TV/Geometry Wars/Waves than something like an arcade shmup (STG). i don't only mean this in the sense that you can shoot in 360 degrees of motion -- you are carving out your own space by mowing down waves of low-health enemies, and paying attention to where they spawn, rather than dodging bullets. in fact, i think all lethal objects in the game you can mow down with your gun, including the projectiles fired by the boss. it shows you do not need bullet-hell danmaku-style attack patterns to make a game very challenging and rewarding! that isn't to say games that rely heavily on complex bullet patterns are bad, of course. but i think games that rely on enemy swarms are harder to design for, if only because there are fewer good examples. the conventions for the genre are less well established. which is part of why i'm so impressed by the design of this game. the way the waves spawn in, the enemy types that work together to create complex and challenging situations... it's so good.

the smash attack is awesome. you create an area-of-effect when you release right click, as well as when you ricochet off walls. it's clear that the wave patterns are designed so you can take out dozens of enemies at once if you time it right (and it feels so good when you do!) it's also a good defensive option when you feel pressured. i'm still getting better at it using it creatively

i believe the boss is always the same, but if you live long enough you can see it multiple times. unfortunately in the web version, the game crashes if you live too long due to the replay system. but if you play the downloadable version it's fine!

edit: looks like the developer has fixed the crash on the web version

edit: here's some gameplay 

my best is 90,867,100. i self destructed down to 1 life, didn't take any unintentional deaths and point-blanked as much as i could but it's possible to push the score a lot farther. i think you can get a ton more points out of the final boss (which i didn't kill. don't know if it's possible)

this is wicked fun. i don't have a score i am proud of yet though

i'm visiting family so i have to play on an aging macbook in browser, which honestly works well enough. excited to try the native windows binary with a proper keyboard

edit: as a quick note, the new title screen with random names is just for fun! the game doesn't increase in difficulty again.

haha, the logo part was a joke! just the name

thanks for taking the time to write this feedback. it's all excellent

• will definitely give the companions a health bar. probably the heart icon will shrink
• the remark about enemy variety is huge, the non-boss waves feel very samey. will start with some basic archetypes that fill the gap between "little guy" and "boss"
• > 6 enemies gets nuts! but i can ameliorate that by peppering in weaker enemies. will need to rethink the "enemy window" thing which i explain below 
• i'll probably just not drop luck items at all during the boss rush. they're also way to common in boss rush because luck is the most likely, but you can't get two of the same upgrades so it's almost always luck when only one item is dropped. that needs to be fixed.
• lastly, going to try those things for close range stuff! excited to experiment with that

"normal enemy window" is kinda weird and works like this. the game will generate 12 distinct enemies with increasing difficulty. as you progress up to the boss rush, it can pick from a moving window of 4 enemies. so level 1:

lvl 1 window:               [------------] <- randomly pick from first 4

enemies:                        0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

final level window:                                              [------------] <- randomly pick from last 4

so, if you increase the enemy count, and the window, you see a lot more variety per wave. but, it might be harder to identify enemies you've seen. which is only so helpful in practice, tbh. (during boss rush, it just picks from all 12 -- i didn't give it too much thought.)

"difficulty" is weird, and works different for each property of the generated bullet pattern. an enemy is generated with a set "difficulty", which gives the randomly chosen speed, spread, bullet size higher minimum and maximum possible values. once an enemy is generated though, they're set in stone. the issue is that an enemy has a change to basically roll 20s for all its stats. should have done something like a set amount of "skill points" to get more consistent results with how hard an enemy actually ends up being

without getting into too much detail, difficulty also increases "complexity." bullet patterns are a kind of "tree" of behavior and complexity makes it more likely that the bullet pattern tree will grow deeper. that's super vague, but simply put it makes it kind of behave more like a boss with various attack patterns. (in the settings menu, i don't think anything past 5 difficulty is very possible, lol)

the theme of the jam was procedural generation, and i think there's things that work about it and things that don't. i think folding in some more authored content while keeping some of these procedural generation systems to keep things fresh is the way to go. thanks again for spending time playing and thinking about it!

yo, nice work! thanks for the input. i'm glad someone said it because i was starting to feel that the hyper gain was kind of slow too. honestly, my exposure to bullet-hell have less been proper "shmup-shmups" and more games like gungeon and parts of isaac (i've put so much time into those i don't even want to think about it.) which is to say, i'm still learning proper genre conventions for the shmup subgenres i'm totally cribbing. because of my perpetual fascination, i get into an arcade shmup every so often, usually bullet hell, but then i don't take it that far for one reason or another. but that's been changing a lot recently

i'm bummed i missed the Gunner Parade jam but i think i would have made something kind of mid that not a lot of hardcore shmup fans would have enjoyed

in the next few weeks i'm gonna release a sort of "definitive version" with tweaks like hyper gain, and i'm thinking another True True Final Boss. (the name for the new version is not final but what do you think of this: click here (for your eyes only)

in 1.0.5 (the current itch version) once you get past [spoiler] you'll unlock a "custom game" menu. hyper gain's not on there (i'll add it) but there's a lot of cool stuff to play with. it's been helpful as i think about how to balance the base game. i only made it an unlockable thing because i'm kind of not done with it yet.

thanks again for checking it out!