Quadrilateral Damage by TheMadPangolin
You can never have too many bullets. Except in Quadrilateral Damage, where you absolutely can.

This game is a top-down shooter with a twist: Bullet recycling! When the player shoots, the bullet fired bounces around the room until the player touches it or reloads their weapon. As you drain through your ammo count, bullets get bigger, faster and stronger, but picking up bullets starts to bring them back to their weaker state.
In other words, part of the challenge is dodging your own bullets.
| Windows | https://gamejolt.com/games/quadrilateral_damage/301304 |
| Download "v1 (WITH SOURCE)" | https://gamejolt.com/games/quadrilateral_damage/301304 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/quadrilateral-damage |
Ratings
| Overall | 41th | 4.015⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2th | 4.324⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 97th | 3.721⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 293th | 3.529⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 188th | 3.691⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 282th | 3.103⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 307th | 2.793⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 255th | 3.242⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
The only thing I think it's missing is music. High marks in FUN too!
+ Crosshair is amazing
+ I love the multitasking aspect
+ Graphics are amazing
- Can't resize the windows / no fullscreen support
5/5 would die again
That being said, maybe bullets should decay over time? I know part of the game involves dodging your own bullets, but you still need to have a few bullets since enemies are spawning in places your current bullets can't reach.
As an example, on the first boss I was pinned down pretty heavily trying to dodge the bullets it was shooting at me, and my bullets had long since bounced away and were now harmlessly bouncing around the wrong corner. It would be nice if after like 7 bounces a bullet "decayed" and went back to you. If you're still low on ammo, you'd still be able to fire a larger bullet, so it rewards managing your ammo well.
Also, the game appeared in a tiny window in my high-DPI screen (I run a resolution of 2736x1824 on my Surface Pro 4). I didn't see any way to easily resize it.
@jay2645 Thanks for the elaborate comment! I did at one point have a bullet decay feature as a matter of fact. Any bullet that bounced around for 10 seconds would automatically be reloaded. I removed it, however, because I thought it was a tad too easy. That being said, I was the only tester before I released it, and considering how many times I played it, I'm obviously going to find it easier than a new player. Also, you should be able to enter fullscreen mode by pressing ALT and ENTER at the same time. Sorry I didn't mention it in the controls xD
@shrapx This was an issue I was having myself, actually. I kept losing sight of the cursor (the crosshair was a last-minute addition) which was a real problem when I needed to lob a grenade at something. I couldn't really come up with a way to make the player stand out more. If I ever update this game at any point, I will probably add a coloured circle below the player to separate them from enemies a bit more.
Last thing: The idea of my game was that "the more bullets you have in your gun, the worse they are when you shoot". I know it kind of takes a backseat to the bullet-bouncing mechanic, but that's the link with the theme.
Hope you all are enjoying or have enjoyed playing :D
But thankfully, we have the right mouse botton to kill them all :D
Last thing, i loose my cursor because it is not well different from the background & we don't know when the bomb is charged (a logo on the curso could be cool :) ).
No music :/
Great game !
EDIT: Also i forgot to say that i got stuck twice and died at the level 7 because of the man who grabs you. Somtimes when he finished to drag me, i couldn't move so ennemies killed me.
Secondly, thanks for letting me know about that bug. I've never had that problem myself, but I'm going to do my best to try and trigger it myself in game so I can hopefully fix it. If I do, an updated version should be up by the end of this week at the latest.
But.. I could forgive that because it was still so much fun, lots of fun!
Easy to jump into, even if it is sometimes hard to understand why certain things happen (like how your bullets get smaller due to.. blue spheres?)
Just a quick clarification. I should really have added a tutorial screen, but... 48 hours xD
The blue balls are forcefields. From wave 6 onwards, scientist enemies will start spawning. These enemies spawn their own forcefield which bounces around the screen until the enemy that spawned them is killed. If a bullet hits a forcefield, it is forcefully reloaded into the player’s weapon. And because the more bullets your gun has, the weaker the shots are, this means that your bullets will start becoming smaller.
I’m aware that the scientist enemy is very overpowered, and I plan to continue work on this game for an improved release after Christmas, but I can’t really make such a drastic change as to nerf an enemy completely while the LD rating process is taking place :(
Thanks for playing my game, dude! Hope your overall experience was enjoyable :D
There's lots of clever things in term of Game Design. I loved the "blue circle" projectile. Sometimes (when you have to much amunition on you) it's a really bad thing that it's here, because you only shoot small projectiles as you get everything you throw back on you. And sometime it's super positive to see it because you can shoot big projectiles as you have no amunition and get back your big projectiles. Love this. This is genius and elegant. It doesnt add much to your mechanics but a lot of depth to the gameplay.
Having the possibility not to take the bonuses right away is quite a good idea as well. (died that way, didnt want to take nor the life /superpower I had because i wanted to keep them for the boss. Died at 60 000 points.)
The only bad points are the lack of epic music and some ergonomics problems: some stuff are a bit unclear on the screen, such as the enemy spawn: it looks good but you don't really know where the player is, sometime you shoot an enemy but he's not spawned yet, he's on another z-axis and it's confusing.
But it's pretty impressive that you have a mostly clear and not confusing gameplay,considering what the gameplay is.
Great job, great game. Will play again and link to my friends.
@jfraser314 STAY TUNED FOR MORE (but seriously though, thanks for the comment :D)
@Akusan Thanks! The updated release will have a tutorial of sorts. Another idea I've had is some kind of menu where the player can read about each different enemy and boss as well.
So yeah, thanks for the comments, and good luck to you all :D
I really loved it. :)
While I didn't really feel the need to keep as many bullets as possible on the screen, I totally saw the appeal. I mostly kept just circunfiring and hoping for the best, but that's probably the reason of why I only made it to wave 20-ish. With varied enemies and even boss fights, this game feels crammed with content.
If there's one thing I'd suggest, it'd be rebalancing the power up. It feels so overpowered. I mostly just kept it around to obliterate the bosses in seconds :P
A great submission with incredible production values, specially considering it's a compo game. [In behalf of my team](twitter.com/whalesandgames), we're looking forward to your next projects! Cheers! :whale: