This is an awesome game! Good Job!

pretty different game :)

Cool consept, this is without a doubt the first time I've battled robots using dust from the ground:P Good job!:D

Super Game! I love it ;) Thanks

the movement is really cool

is it actually possible to kill the robots?
i did kite them around kicking up dust for quite a while

Thanks for the feedback, all! I did spend a lot of time getting the controls right, since I knew I wanted to try making a platformer but I had no idea what my weapon would be until the second day. It was only after wasting hours watching Mario 64 speed runs that I realized that movement should be my weapon, so I added in the dust and went back to refine the controls for the tenth time. I think the end result is that the game is more "tight" than "developed", and I really regret not having time to add more levels and enemies. I wanted to play with different room shapes, and I really wanted some robots to shoot lasers!

It is (generally) possible to kill the robots, but the game's on a bit of a reverse difficulty curve. Unfortunately, there's no indication of how much damage they've taken. You'll know when you get one, though, because they explode in a dense puff of dust that you can use to kill the remaining robots. There does seem to be a bug that occasionally makes a bot invincible, but it's rare, and I've only even seen it affect a single bot at a time. I don't think it would be in the spirit of the competition for me to fix it now, since you can still beat the game most of the time by resetting, and there's no victory screen or anything anyway. Playing with the dust without pressure is sort of a reward, though!

A few tips: The more concentrated the dust, the more effective it is (the damage function is super-linear, specifically quartic), so you may find it much more effective to skid or hop around an area for a few seconds to set up a "trap" if you can. You should only have to drag a given bot through a fairly thick cloud maybe five or six times to do it in. The bots run on simple timed, randomized state machines, and one of their states is to fly straight up, so be careful jumping over the same bot too many times in a row. (I wanted to implement Pac-Man style differences in chase behaviors but didn't have time; that may be for the best, since they still manage to ambush you often enough purely by chance, I think.) You might also find it useful to know that a ground spin lets you get through single-block-high gaps and occasionally sneak under a descending bot.

cool dust effects but that is one super hard game! also cursor key controls would have been nice :)

Cool game!

Great idea! Jumping around and kicking up dust is fun but I just can't kill the robots though, they keep killing me instead :(