I think the concept of this is interesting and mechanically it felt very good, but I had a hard time figuring out what I was supposed to do and what all the symbols meant. Menu navigation was also pretty weird. That said, I did like the graphical style a lot.
I'm not good enough to get to any of the actual dates.

Amazing , good game , 5/5!!!

I really like this idea and the anime sticker aesthetic, but the keyboard controls are so weird that I couldn't play it well. I will try again later with a controller since that like how it was intended. The music choice was not bad, but also didn't seem to fit well, but I'm really glad it wasn't totally silent.

@Forest Yeah, controller is a much better experience. As for the music, neither of us are musicians (at least not enough to pump out decent music in 3 days) and it was kind of a last-minute thing we tacked on.

Always nice to play a game for a controller ^^

Took me a time to check that the "Enemys" only shoot if you give them the wrong form of attention. I think this is a pretty clever mechanic.

But its a hard start, it would have been great if fewer enemy-types would spawn at the beginning, so that you get a link between enemy and correct attack.

@gilborn Yeah, we wanted to do something like that but we ran out of time so we couldn't make the spawning mechanics more complex.

Really interesting idea, and i would even say pretty good implementation of that idea. But god damn it! You have so much free space on left and right sides of the screen! Why didn't you put the controls and preferences of the girls there? I had to quit to the main menu several times just to remind myself about this things, and that was pretty infuriating.

@annie-owl I would've liked to do it in a pause menu as well (as the left side is for dialogue options and the right side is for a character portrait in the middle of the third level) but we simply did not have enough time. We finished only half an hour before the deadline as-is. Hopefully our experience here will allow us to make our LD42 game a bit less frustrating in that regard.

Great little entry, this. Some smart mechanics in the way the baddies' attacks are based on the player choice. Really good stuff :)

I love the art!

I got hooked with the gameplay! I really love the dessign of the game, the differents enemy behaviour give a lot of fun to the game!

It would be nice to have more feedback with where I can switch the ship, maybe?

Good job!

@ethereal-psyche-games Thanks for the feedback! The ship is upgraded once you reach a score of 250! I meant to ask the artist to add it to the help screen but forgot to mention it. I hope that if we turn this concept into a full game it will be a much more cohesive and less confusing experience.

I liked the graphics a lot (and the waifus too :P). I like the idea of different kind of ammo for different type of ennemies.

Gameplay wise I do have a few gripes, for a SHMUP the player sure has a T H I C C hitbox and the bullet are really fast which kinda makes it unfairly hard imo. Also the menu navigation and the controls are the stuff of nightmares.

Surprisingly for a jam game the sound didn't blow up my ears quite the contrary, even full volume the music was very quiet. Nice screaming SFX tho :ok_hand:. The game could do with a bit more of audio.

Neat game, I do believe that a tad bit of polish (and different controls :cold_sweat:) could easily make it an even more enjoyable experience ;).

EDIT : forgot to mention the humour was pretty good too, funniest game I played so far.

@ashtrail Thanks for the feedback! The hitbox is definitely an issue, I'm not really much of a shmup player myself and my artist didn't really complain about it either, so I figured it would be fine but I've gotten a few complaints about it now (and seeing how you do your hitbox as well I realize that would be a much better way to go about it). As for the audio, my headphones tend to be on the louder side so I forgot to compensate for that when setting the volume, and we don't have more audio since neither of us are really audio people and we barely had time to even FIND the music we used because of how close we cut it to the deadline, let alone find or make sound effects for other things as well. The screaming effect was a audio clip of the artist screaming that he mad awhile back as a joke and we decided it'd be a good touch to add some humor to the game, glad it's been so well received. We've been discussing how to streamline all the current issues with the menus and dialogue into the gameplay itself and make it a less stressful game overall, it's an idea that we really wanna consider moving forward with for a full game.

Very good game. I liked the arts and the gameplay is pretty fluid. I felt a lack of audio and maybe a particle when the shot is hit and when you take damage. But none of this compromised me to complete the game. Great job! 😁

Got overwhelmed by the cuties.


I liked this game. It's clear that the team went all-out on it. The graphics are cute and diverse, while the mechanics are tight. Shooting and dating are indeed odd things to combine, so it's glad to see that it happened.

Still, I must say, I had a hard time remembering what button fired what thing, specially since it later on became bullet hell. I ended up having better results when I just started mashing buttons.

Well, regardless, I insist, I really liked the design behind of this. Dating sims could really do with some variations like this one every now and then. [My team](twitter.com/whalesandgames) are going to love it. Kudos :whale:

Good choice of music, and overall a good way to mix the genres. Cool how the different attacks work better or worse on different enemies, and the integration with the real dating sim style prompts was nice.

Music was good, though I noticed some sounds were missing like when a projectile hits the player.

I would say graphics are the best part of this game, I see a whole lot of work that went into making all different parts of this look good from the score/wave bar to the background to the menus and such.

Good job! Cool game!

I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.

I hope you continue with the project.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape

I get a "can't open file" message on Mac. :( Would love to try it! Looks so nice on the screenshots!

@sndr As I mentioned on the itch.io page, the Mac and Linux versions are untested and may not work at all. As someone who does not own any Apple products I don't really have any way to test and fix it, sorry.

loved the game ,liked the music and the odd graphics good job

I found it difficult to get the hang of the mechanics (keyboard, and a lack of memory of what did what to whom), but this is a very clever fusion! The artwork is excellent, and I love the anime stylings. You're right in that it could use a bit of polish - perhaps a tutorial to ease you into the mechanics, and some extra sounds. But that's what happens when you have a 72-hour time limit. What's there already is very good.

The challenge is super high and I realize that its super difficult to focus on the dialogue while all those bullets are hurled at you, so it came down to memorisation of the dialogue options. In terms of the bullet choice, felt that was needless complexity and I ended up using only one key which was able to damage all enemies (teehee).
Otherwise, this was an interesting concept and I loved the artwork!

I really like the idea behind this, but I am not sure it works well in practice. It's very hard to get into and in the beginning the player just struggles to memorize what buttons shoots what. Some kind of slow introduction levels would definitelly help.
Also it was very difficult for me to keep track of the dialogue, and that's a shame, since I want to get to know the girls better.:)
But I can tell your team is very talented, so keep up with game development, I am pretty sure you come up with many awesome projects in the future!

Really dug this entry. The genre match up is excellent. I'm a huge fan of Galaga and felt like you guys nailed the basic mechanics of that. The progression felt smooth and challenging enough to keep me engaged for a few.

For some reason I couldn't scroll through menus, which was a bummer because I kept saying yes to "Should I text and drive?" Some SFX would have really set this game higher for me. I can just hear the different hit responses in my head.

Overall good entry. I would love to see a more polished version!

Like others have mentioned, I also had a hard time keeping up with the dialogue while fighting. Bot overall, this was very fun and you guys made a really pretty looking game! Well done!

A slower introduction into the game mechanics would be cool. Feels like being thrown into the deep end. Cool entry for 72 hours nonetheless.

This is a great first entry, and you're getting a lot of solid feedback here. I'm interested to see what you come out with next time after being a little battle-hardened!

This game has a cool idea and lots of good execution in the art quality and snappy movement. But wowzers it totally overwhelmed me. It asked that I memorize 20 data points before I know what they really mean, and it has 10 buttons to press. That's probably too much to expect an LD player to hold in their head going into the start of the game... a lesson I had to learn the hard way as a dev, too!

Gamefeel wise the core control was tight, which is a huge deal. But pay attention to what @Ashtrail is saying about the speed of the bullets, I think he's put his finger on a problem there. I didn't realize it while playing, but I think he's right that if the projectiles (enemy ones!) moved slower I would have been able to plot dodges more, instead of being a reaction thing.

For me, I was shooting and my eye would be in a conundrum: if I look at my ship I can't pay attention to whether I got hearts (meaning a good combo hit) or not. But if I look at the hits I lose sight of what I need to dodge. Consider conveying the information across multiple channels, like a different sound effect for the hit in each case.

So I think you have a lot of good raw ideas and raw skills here, and you put together something that's decent, and straight-up good for a first entry. But you have a little ways to go in learning about the "hump" that a stranger sitting down to play cold has to fight over, and how you can make that smoother. That comes with experience, and you'll be getting it by doing these LDs, so keep on!

Solid work here and looking forward to next time.

OK so this game is too hard and way too convoluted IMO [I just bash H, J, K & L all the time and try to survive during gameplay ^^#] BUT... that sound when you die cracks me up ^^# and the graphics are really cute! So thanks for sharing and, as you say, better luck during the next LD :-D