The game is ok so far, but "ok" isn't a flattery in my case.
It needs more visual feedback - something to indicate that the ball has appeared, some particles when the ball bounces, maybe a trail behind the ball.
A hitbox of the right wall of the arena seems to be quite off.
What i recommend you fixing is changing the image format from JPG to PNG, and making the resolution of the sprites bigger in the first place.

Hope it helps!

The game's audiovisual design is top notch!
I really enjoyed the controls and animations.

But, i couldn't find any way to cross the needles, which preamturely ended my playthrough.

The closest your finger is to the dot, the slower you go.
People tend not to figure this out, it requires fixing.

Thank you, that's some quality feedback :)

I tried the game, the menu shader was very pleasant, and merging the menu structure with story telling is nice, even if Hotline Miami did this before. I liked how the title, matching the number of levels, creates a looming sense of mystery to be uncovered.

Sadly I can't fully review the game, as the tutorial level is broken for me. The supposed darkness was represented with few splashes of black, the rest being this red noise and occasional unreadable text floating here and there.
What i can point at is that the tutorial messages are too long, breaking the flow of the game, oversuspending the excitement and therefore worsening the player's experience.

Good luck!

I mean, surely you have to, but try breaking it down to shorter, more situational info, like:
"This is a laser. Touching it means failure."

And then, after a short time beimg stuck:
"Some lasers can be turned off by terminals. But make no mistake, or you'll be detected immediately!"

And so forth. Shorter, and more situation specific.

Nice animations, and i like the fact that the artstyle is consistent.

The name "Darklight" doesn't seem to refer anything in the game.
The music is good, and low quality bleep on item collection seems to be out of place compared to it.
There's no ingame explanation at all, which is bad, many people woudn't figure out that R is a restart.
The isometric view is great stilistically, but not showing the outlines of concealed enemies that are in the same corridor feels unfair.

The game is repetitive and bores quickly.
The main issue for me is the aiming - the character shoots somewhere else than the pointer is pointing!

The graphics and animations are good, but some sound might help.
What's the weakest point of the game is that you're sent back to menu everytime you complete a level. Also, why is there a congratulation text for first level at the beggining of the second? That may be quite confusing.

The game was incredibly fun, so bad it breaks sometimes on level completion - when there's the victory screen, LMB doesn't work, and you can just move aimlessly through the victory screen.
Overally, the game is very simple but very fun.

This game is terrible, i can't believe you're trying to charge money for that.
The hitboxes are awful, the music is bad, the tutorial is bad, the controls are unintuitive, and even finding the exe in the game's folder is a challenge.
The graphics are straight ugly. Also, the plane's propeller behaves so wrongly, i just laughed at the crap i was looking at.

I was trying to enjoy the game, but the wall of text tutorial didn't really work in it's favor. You need to build the tutorial around the game's main objective, which isn't really clear.

The audiovisuals of the game are gorgeous, they buy me alone, but still, the game manages to have some flaws.
First, the blinking mouse cursor. Try disabling it for good.
Then, there's the balancing issue - the archer mode is far superior to the swordman mode.
Both modes require more AV feedback, as the archer's attacks are unnaturally silent. This brings us to the next issue - the combat has too little feel to it - it lacks anticipation frames and the feel of weigth in moves.

Still, one of the most promising projects i've seen lately, looking forward to see it done!

The game does the adventure gaming well, but what really didn't work well is pixel art, because the size of a single pixel isn't consistent for every sprite, which is displeasing to look at. Also, the autoskipping text isn't the best idea, it may not suite most people's reading speed.

This has some potential, what i suggest adding is that the player shoots with arrows instead of space, allowing him to escape while hurting the enemy. As a counterbalance, you can make the lesser knockback.

The game is really well designed, i just hope that all this music wasn't stolen. I liked how the stages prepared the player to the respective bosses.

It would be nice if it worked at all. I get a message "Could not load plugin list".

The game could be fun if it was properly explained. The number gave me no clue about their meaning. Also, recycling the animation for every turn is a little confusing. The game would benefit greatly from higher definition textures and some bumpmaps.

Overally, the game is bad as it is, but good luck anyways.

Thanks for your opinion!
This may be not traditionally rhytmic, but still, on some stages rythm is crucial, like when you have to calm the guards by hitting space when the time is right. Maybe if it wasn't a jam game i would do this better.

It's quite a clever mechanic, but the controls are too fast to actually control the thing.

Maybe you got so good at your game, that no mortal matches you now? :D

Well, i think that the graphics are good enough for a jam game. Keep in mind, that the resolution is 320x192, it looks rather decent for something this small.

This game gave me nostalgic vibes of early 2000's anonymous freeware games, of which there was plenty. I liked how physics are your biggest enemy, navigation is extra hard in the floatiness. It's good on it's small own, only a little explanation would help, but learning without it what is what is also fine.

Thank you for the insight!
Well, the quality is somewhere about 1080p, and it's scaling from there. Should be good on most phones and tablets.
Yes, there's little time to react to the things comming from the bottom, so there are indeed indicators on the top - there are diamond shapes dancing around the bullet spawner for every bullet comming from the bottom. You may have not noticed, but they follow the angular position of their respective bullets, and then swallow them (to indicate they are connected).

You may want to include a download, so I can play and truly rate.

You shouldn't put your player right into the action, that's not how tutorials are done. The tron/snake like mechanics are interesting in a stealth game.
That's a shame that once i pass a level, the UI becomes a disaster.

For example give him some space, like a long hallway and some very far spaced walls and only the exit, without any hazard. This way the player will learn stresslessly, that crashing on walls is bad and how the movement works. Once this is done you can introduce them to the other hazards. My point is, the game starts off with way too much information to grasp.

Once i pass the level, the post level menu is drawn behind the walls and i cannot interact with the buttons.

At the first. Because of this reason i could not progress any further.

Yes, that's better and also that's quite fun! The "you can't turn back" mechanic is pretty clever, and there are only very minor things i can complain about, but there's no point to that. Great job!

Thank you for trying it!
I think there's no need of explanation of the plot, everything is contained in the behaviour - you die, and you learn from your mistake. This is my very early game, and those were specifically designed to frustrate people. I myself were a type of guy that liked frustrating games because overcoming them felt so good. Overally, mastering the teleport is key to stand a chance against this game. There was also a cheat code, but i don't remember it. I remember though, that middle mouse button takes you to the last stage, and there B takes you to the last boss.

It's surprisingly fun. As for now, the best tactic is to ignore everyone and collect, you may want to correct that.

It seems that it's your first game. Congratulations!
What it needs are of course animations, more precise hitboxes and most importantly, hi-res assets, because image compression is awful.
The walljump was funny, felt quite buggy.

That's great you've had a laugh, That's the point :)
I think the tutorial is quite good, the game is supposed to kick you in the teeth at first, and you still figured things out which shows that it's working.
Enemies may be tanky at times, but that compensates for how easy to dodge their patterns are, i think it's fair.
More power ups are an excellent idea, but i can't really think of anything outside of multishots or familiars.

Yeah, the cheatcode seems to be broken as for now :D

Thanks for trying it out!

What isn't shitty then? :D

Well, this is not what I'd call a RPG. There's no roleplay.
This game's about rising numbers, and this is ok, but those games must be not annoying to enjoy. Clicking the enemies to attack doesn't work sometimes, you'd be better off giving them circular indicators under their feet. The items don't vary this much, make little sense and are not represented graphically.
I guess you've used Brackey's RPG tutorial and wanted to make your own Diablo, but this stuff needs some work. The UI overlaps with itself, there's no way to get rid of weak items once they are not needed, the walking speed is very slow and the upgrade is not worth the points.
There are many, many little mistakes besides this, but my memory isn't that great.

Very well done, I loved it!

The concept is interesting, but I don't know if it will conquer the tedium of turn based combat, even more, I feel i doubt it.
You may still find very niche following of course :)

Also I still haven't seen the base management, maybe then the game will make more sense.

It's exported specifically for Android and PC, not every game has to be for every platform.

Why is it? Lagging too much?

I'm sorry to see that. I hope there are many good mobile games you can enjoy, I can recommend you some :)

There's an Itch link under the download button, and there's only a PC version. I guess this game would be a nightmare to play on mobile.

Thanks a lot!

Looking back, learning in this game is terrible.

This does the thing my Dubmaku does, but way better.
This game is excellent, i have only one complaint: the bullets have no trails, and when there are a lot of them, it's very hard to keep up with how they are moving, specially with your bullets getting funky quite early on.

Thanks, I've been pretty tired so I have only like three levels really standing out.
I've been going for a Hotline Miami vibe, but I guess wavy screen is not enjoyable for everybody.
Yeah, the UI was quickly put together just to be done.
I've recorded the sound effects and music in the last hour of the jam, in a closet on the laptop's microphone XD It's improvised.
I'm glad you liked it!
Oh yes, I value speed and efficiency, and GameMaker gives me just that. Everybody else was using Unity, and they've had problems after problems and their games were in the end very short and simple. I'm learning Unity and Unreal for job purposes, but my heart will be with GM forever :D

Thanks for trying it out!
Yes, the game is easy, so it can introduce newcomers to the bullet hell genre. You're quite right though, the difficulty doesn't spiral quick enough. Also, there are only four difficulties at the moment, the hardest one activating at over 30 seconds. My idea for now is that the higher the best score, the faster will the game skip through the boring parts - this way both newcomers and veterans win.

I think you may have missinterpreted an inward bullet indicator for an actual bullet, which means I've done poor job communicating what it is. If there are tilted squares near the emmiter at the top, this means there are bullets coming from underneath.

Glad to be an inspiration :D
When waiting for the interesting and intense parts of the game is the problem for the advanced players, the most obvious solution is to speed things up depending on how well the player overally deals with the game, so using high-score sounds like a go to way of doing that.
I'm writing that so you can see, that to solve a problem you basically need to understand to problem's components well enough, and then solution will become intuitive.

You may keep a secret list of previous five scores, calculate an average, and use it to do the scaling.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini with Android 4.3.

The game seems to be scaled twice vertically, making everything appear longer and making me unable to start the actual game. Hope you can figure this out :)

Done! :)

This feels like a flash game.
You should add a camera restraint so you can't see that "not area 51" ends abruptly.
The punch animation has little punch to it and doesn't reach far enough for my taste.
The game was short but rather fun.

Very fun and juicy game!
Had a hi-score of 171. Liked the game thorugh, although it's funny that the starter gun is the best. The second best is the baloon gun. I didn't like that i was forced to buy weapons when trying to jump with my high score.

Very nice game!

It has a nice flow, it's good to look at, the sounds are in their right places. I'm not sure how your level generator works - it gives nice levels, but the layouts get repetitive very quickly. I suspect there's no level generation at all.
There are render depth issues here and there, but nothing gamebreaking. What really deserves more work are animations. I see you understand anticipation, some of the attacks have even too much of an wind-up, but the impact frames are very neglected, making attacks not pop when they hit. A lack of sprite animation also makes it hard to recognize the enemy's state, but this won't be this much of a problem if you make weapon movements more expressive.

I was very interested in this project because I'm making a soulsborne roguelike myself. I was even worried, that you're making the same game but better. But after playing I see you are going for something very different than my idea. What a relief!
The game's called Nephilim Hunt, but there's nothing to look at yet.

Further thoughts:
Estus flask is too much of a rip off to slide.
I like that you can set Unity launcher's keys properly.
I like the ability to spot dodge.
Walking slowly when out of stamina makes sense, but doesn't feel good gameplay wise.
Usable item setting itself to the new acquired is rather annoying.
Enemy HP resetting when exceeding aggro zone is bullshit.
Projectiles going through walls are kinda bullshit.
The aspect ratio of the game makes that the player sees more horizontaly than vertically, even though hazards are distributed the same both ways.
Clearing out the barrels before the first mini boss is just tedious. Would be dandy if it was possible with rolling.

A nice, low effort game.
The lerping camera is nice, but when you move fast, it's left drifting behind, making it increasingly hard to see what's before the player, effectively punishing quick and skillful play. I suggest increasing the lerp rate and offsetting the camera to the right, so the player can plan what to do in advance while seeing more of what's next.
The Invisible Man skin is funny but bullshit.
The lootbox opening is super unsatisfying, I'd even animate it for you myself.
I liked how there's some room to move in the beggining to tes out controls and at the same time teach the player that right is the direction to go, BUT I hated that the first few pipes are always the same, and have a very disruptive pattern, making me wait until the game gets interesting. I'd make them randomized too once the player exceeds a hi-score of 30 or something.
Overally for a game this simple, you managed to fuck up very little, good work.

I'd play the game if it was under the link, instead I'll rant about the art and visual design a little.

The use of gradients and pillow shading is abyssmal. The characters aren't even consistent in proportions between themselves. The portrait cut feels very wrong. UI elements fighting with each other for display priority is laughable, making things kinda transparent makes this even worse.
I smell that it's made with RPG Maker - an engine created deliberatly to enable newbies to create JRPGs without programming, letting them focus on story and art. Well, I don't know about the story, but the main characters and the overal visual design is so bad, that I suspect it also hurts the storytelling - especially the distracting, tiring to look at interface and text boxes.
Also the JRPG combat is boring in general, but that's not that much of your fault, so you get a pass about that.
Hope you update the download one day so I can rip the game apart properly one day.
Sending all the love,
DyingSilence

First, I didn't make a 'x engine is bad because people make bad games' comment at all. I was just only saying that when the engine spares you going into programming unless you insist, bad aesthetics are harder to justify. Maybe your story makes up for ALL of this, but I was unable to experience it.

After some downloads on my sucky connection I've installed the RPG Maker's runtime and unRARed your game, and it only welcomed me with a blank window and an error stating that RGSS104E.dll couldn't be found. I tried to solve it, but there are only shady sites trying to shove suspicious launchers into me. I'm sorry I couldn't play the game, I wanted to give it a chance.

I don't like this piece at all, but maybe it's just my bias against this type of aesthetic. It's disproportionate and weird, especially the broken wrists and buff shoulders.

Cut the bullshit with the installer, almost nobody likes those.
You get a +100 rating for using TGF/MMF, which were my first nostalgic engines, you also get a -5 for not changing the stock icon. I am a little biased by how i love that engine, it immensely increased my enjoyment of the game.
You should add some ingame instructions on what the controls are. You should handle a fail state other than "wait until the player figures out they have to press R".
The timer at the corner stops working after the first reset.
The jumps quickly get ridiculous, but that's ok. The fourth level is just a copy paste of the first.
You should add a civilised way of aborting a level.

So, you've used a cashgrab engine to create one of hundreds of forks of the same game.
As I can tell, it combines all the optimal browser game tropes and addictive practices into one monstrosity. Disgusting.
A dash of dubstep music combined with a watermarked, weirdly cut still image is not a good trailer.
You shall not make the download section misguiding. That's actually harmful to your shady practices, as the missnamed links can offput potential players.
There isn't really much to say. You can thank me for the roast, as it gives you more probability to get featured, but this game certainly doesn't deserve that.
Also, praising your own game in a roast is suspicious, not to say pathetic. Hope you can do better than this in the future.

Well, it's not as aggresively advertised or abusive as the mafia game which is a plus :)
If you don't want the player to go somewhere, just don't let them, build a wall or kill them.
You've got functional walking and jumping, that's something. Unfortunately the sprite display order is wrong, and the character hides behind the doors. Not much to say about the game, but still I like that you took time to work with a real engine and did something yourself. Keep it up.

Very likeable little things, brings me back to 2000-2004. Had some fun and i love the aesthetics.

I'd gladly try, but there's no download.

Very nice thing, the only thing that needs improvement is that moving platforms don't transport the player.

Ah yes, the good old "it's designed this way" :D
There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not what an average player would expect, and this design may make them think it's not working properly. Some form of indicating that it won't work like expected would solve this.

Thanks for trying it out!
It's funny, because recovery works exactly how you describe it :D
Looks like you've never got a combo of 4+ perfect landings.

Thanks a lot for checking it out!

Those are good suggestions, but way beyond jam time, the game's systems were complicated enough as they were. This game has probably the worst learning experience of them all, can't argue that :D

Very good concept, but completely not my type of game :D
The UI needs some scaling up, on my 3.5" display it's unreadable.

Thanks mate!
I can't imagine how could I add powerups that wouldn't be confusing, but there's probably a great way to do this.
I've made this game in my transition period from GameMaker to Unity, that's why it's so simple.

Talk about programmer art :D

The core game is quite good, the only issues I have:
-the hitboxes are a little too unforgiving, some may think they died by touching air
-the randomness is left with too little control, which may sometimes corner the player into the instant loss. The most jarring example I've experience was when two overlaping stones ganked me at the exit of the wall, covering both ways out, forcing me to crash

I was trying to achieve a score worthy of global high scores, but I've got the "inapropiate username" strike, like, five times in a row and I just gave up.

I know, right? :D

Big thanks dude! I'm not sure if changing the graphics would really be an improvement, that's a deliberate pixel art style.

Animations and the controls? What do you mean exactly?