pretty good, but i dont like how the balls seem to bounce off the walls in random directions.

That's one scary looking clown with some ominous music to match. You definitely have a nice creepy mode going on. After playing the game, my biggest suggestion is that it would be nice to know how close you came to beating a level. There's no feedback until the time runs out at which point you either win or lose. I would have loved to know if I was only a ball or two away from moving on. It would give me more motivation to try again. Good job!

Oh man that difficulty curve! Level 1: way too easy. Level 2: still too easy. Level 3: extremely hard!

Its pretty scary! I felt like i was being cursed as I played it. Great job!

i like it! very scary! good job

Good but somewhat random and hard to tell where you should be moving the paddle . Maybe if you had more balls with different values and colors other than the 1 big one it would be easier for the player to prioritize moving to certain places, or maybe I'm just bad at video games.

Thank you for uploading a web build. Scary, keep it up! :slight_smile:

Enjoyable game, it has a very good atmosphere with the graphics and mood music

I'ts a solid entry. Balls did seem to have somewhat random bounce when they were hitting the walls tho. Music was scary!

Lol this was really weird! Great use of the theme. Good job.

Pretty solid game for Ludum Dare, not very buggy, just small things like the music (too repetitive), no sound effects, the balls sometimes bounced off the walls at weird angles, graphics could be a bit better and gameplay felt too slow for a bullet hell game. But honestly, this game is pretty solid. You have a good idea, nice implementation and a fun game. The stuff I mentioned is only if you want to polish off your game in the future

Couldn't get the Linux version to work https://pastebin.com/t3vEvXQK :(

@bcvery1 yeah global.gd is my singleton file, it worked on all the other platforms, not sure about why it didnt work on linux. ill look into it.

I could never make it past level 2. I don't know how many balls I needed to keep but it was never enough (cue song from a musical).

I liked the combined genres, but only wish there was some indication of clown's health even if it grew while bullets dropped. The number of bullets didn't mean anything to me, but a bar that slowly lost fill as I was trying to keep all the balls going would have been better UI to communicate how I was doing.

If you keep working on this I also recommend adding a way to return to a previous level. I would have liked to play level 1 again, but I got trapped in level 2 until I quit the game.

I get an index out of bound with the HTML5 version.
The error : https://pastebin.com/bWJ1uqq2

The introduction really got me! I consider this to be the most innovative mix I've seen so far! The clown really sells it :P

The graphics definitely are my favorite part! Combined with the music, it sets up a very nice mood. I feel like the game has a bit too much going on, especially with the huge quantity of balls that spawn on start, but it's a good job overall! Very creative and interesting approach!

Really great idea, shows that this LD's theme can make for good games. Seemed to be easy at first, but oh boy was I wrong. :D People have said this, but I think the game would be better with an indicator of how many more balls can be lost & still beat the level.

Great entry, with a few flaws. I would like to see fewer bullets to keep track of (I think you could still have 10-20 on screen) and predictable bouncing.

Except for repeating audio, it's actually nice game, interesting genre mix. Ball physics need to be "upgraded", other than that - solid entry.

The idea is great, I've always wanted see what hundreds of balls in breakout would be like (it looks like molecules!). However, the gameplay gets monotonous as its just alternating between left and right, unless im missing something. Maybe you could add more variety in the inputs, and also think about incorporating bricks as well?

@pohead12345 yeah im playing around with post compo game now, and im looking at the aspect of brining more things to do in the game since i fixed the random ball bounce thing and its quite
repetitive without things to do.

That scary ass clown was throwing so many balls at me! I didnt understand why I lost during the second round as I kept the big ball up but didnt have enough total balls saved? My third stage had the big ball squeak through between my paddle and wall sadly but I like trying to beat it! Thanks for the game!

I wasn't such a big fan of the music, but mixing arkanoid and a bullet hell game is actually a pretty clever idea.

Interesting idea for a game. Still rough though. The thing you should fix first is collision detection with the bar, because right now it's kinda hard to understand when the ball would actually ricochet off of it.

My brother, we may not be linked by blood, but we are joined by the fever of the bullet hell!
Come play some danmaku on my page!
Yours has such great mood, i'd have loved a longer audio track for less repetition, but besides that your inversion of the bullet avoidance rule from BH's is really neat! Lots of decision making for such a simple mechanic! Well done!

Alright game.

I don't understand why you went with the dark and scary look and feel, with this concept I would expect bright and colorful fireworks and butterflies style.

Collisions not working properly was a bit annoying at times.

I got to level 4 and it seems insanely hard. Is it actually possible to complete it?

The music was not that great.

@Boltkey yeah its beatable, but you had to get the balls flying off at a certain angle at the begining, and thats partly due to my bad design in difficulty. :D
And i went with the dark and scary because its just a personal preference. I can experiment with a rainbows and ponys version with happy music and see how it works. if it does, ill put it in the post compo version :D

Thanks for being upfront about the genres you included! The wall collisions are a little funny (heh, they're clown walls, funny..get it?). The scope of the game was immediately realized within the first two seconds (which isn't a bad thing, but some variety later on would have been cool, either power-ups, move the clown's hands, etc). Maybe some of that was in there further than I got, I lost at the third level because I was short on balls. Cool entry, I dug the graphics, really liked how the balls went behind the clown hands. I don't really recall how the audio was, brb...the audio was suitable for the games atmosphere? Pretty sweet entry overall!

Very spoop. Couldn't handle all the balls. Will have clown dreams now, thank you very much for that.

It was addictive! I almost made it past the third level. Only one sec left!

Super creepy mood, I love the idea. I think this could be something really special if you took some more inspiration from bullet hells with patterns and the boss thing spawning new balls. Polish+juice could take this thing to whole new level of cool.

i like the very dark graphics and music. The concept could be promising with differents spawning geometries where player have to find the best strategy to catch them ... or not.

It's already fun to play right now and i'm looking forward for gameplay improvements including an ennemy to kill.

nice job !

An unusual spin on the classic breakout. Not sure I've ever seen it with multiple balls and missing the blocks... The music got annoying rather quickly, but better have a little music than none at all, in my opinion.

Oh no, clowns!
- I wasn't able to get very far. The sheer _impossibleness_ of keeping balls alive was a little much.
- The music was very reminiscent of the Spore Spawn from Super Metroid (my favorite game). I liked it.
- I have to give you points for theme: you truly combined two incompatible genres, and came up with a workable idea. It just needed more tweaking and polish.

Overall, good job! Ludum Dare is a difficult challenge anyway and the ideas that came out of this theme were very difficult to pull off in time.

I like the idea of the game a lot, but most of the levels seemed identical. Maybe if you expand upon the game you could add more types of balls. I love the clown though. Very creepy.

enjoyed the graphics and the audio..for me a few bricks or something to hit would be nice..wicked clown!

Cool game, and good implementation. Everything worked well. A couple suggestions: It was a little frustrating having to lose so many balls. There wasn't much to be done other than fly back and forth until you were down to about 15, when you began to be able to respond to individual balls. Also, if collisions had behaved in a more physics-appropriate way rather than always bouncing off with random velocity, the game would have been more predictable, and it would have felt more in the player's control. Also, having something to hit with all the balls would be really cool, especially if you had some control where balls went based on where your paddle was. Arkanoid did this first, I think, where you could aim your ball based on where on the paddle it hit. Anyway, good work, cool visual theme and colors, and a fun game.

Nice entry, I like these games that get a bit addictive. good job!

I had a hard time figuring this one out. I did like the creepy clown and the announcer voice. I think the concept of a pong/breakout and bullet hell is a cool idea. It just didn't seem like I was damaging the clown with the balls. It just seemed like I needed an unspecified number of balls at the end of the time limit to move on to the next stage. I made it to level 2 and couldn't get any further. However, seeing that many balls colliding at the same time did look really neat.

I did not quite understand the purpose of the game, but I still played and won a few times. I focused on not letting the big ball fall.

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