Machine Godz by Beardmage

In Machine Godz, the player has to give up a part of his abilities to progress as he completes the rooms filled with deadly traps and enemies. The more he will advance in those metallic corridors, the more the machine godz will take from him, leaving him less prepared to face the obstacles that stand before him !
After each room, the player will be given a choice about the mechanic he wants to sactifice. Each mechanic (Sword, Lasers and dash) has 3 tiers of power and will be less powerful each time.

Controls :
WASD / Left Stick : Move
Right Click / Right Stick : Fire
Left Click / Right Trigger : Melee Attack
Spacebar / Left Trigger : Dash

Team :
Antoine ITURBIDE : Programmer
Vincent PERIGOIS : Game & Level Designer
Robert FARRAND : 3D Artist & Animator
Lucas LEPLAT : Jack of all trades
Aurélien MONTERO : Sound Designer



| Windows | https://beardmage.itch.io/machine-godz |
| Windows | http://wyvup.com/?c=A2aU7Su |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/machine-godz |
Ratings
| Overall | 119th | 3.943⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 179th | 3.716⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 591th | 3.057⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 790th | 3.047⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 104th | 4.318⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 66th | 3.988⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 151th | 3.818⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 28🗳️ | 49🗨️ |
I think you can add a patch to support mouse+keyboard
As in graphic, sound or gameplay
The theme is barely approch but it's such a good game that you pass upon it !
Very Good Job !
My bad ! I thought it was an upgrade equipement at each statue
But that's why I was loosing ! ^^
The sacrifice mechanic was a bit unclear at first. I thought you were gaining bonuses and that enemies sacrificing themselves to blow you up was the mechanic. Bit of a surprise when I kept getting weaker. Maybe a visual indicator of some energy flying from you into the statue would have made it clearer, but that's just a nitpick.
Everything was incredible, one of the best games I played all jam. :metal:
Congratulations, you did a very impressive game !
Thank you very much for the very nice comment.
We are planning to add more enemy variety!
That is once we finalize fixing ergonomically unclear mechanics and input ambiguity for mouse and keyboard users ;)
@skettynmeebs,
Thank you sincerely for the comment! Yeah, no one who didn't read the game description understood that M4(H|N3 G0d_Z statues were nerfing you. Their best guess was that it was a buff. That's on us so we are trying to make up to it by making that interaction much more explicit.
@cincerteri,
Hi! Verry glad to hear that! Our graphist chose to go for a very modular art-style. This was key for myself and others in the team to build upon his art. Thanks to that we were able to add a lot of GFX for more drama and affordance.
You did play using mouse and keyboard right? You're definitely not the only one who feel the inputs ar ambiguous. I'm gonna have the mele attack follow the same orientation space as the shooting. Hopefully the feeling will be better.
@captainnic0,
I bet it was hard! So you know, Windows copies using AZERTY keyboard layout have a shortcut to swap to QWERTY layout by pressing SHIFT+ALT. This might help you with most QWERTY games. If this doesn't work for you, you might be glad to hear that most Unity3D engine based games comes, by default, with a launcher. The Unity3D launcher possesses an input menu where you can edit inputs to your liking.
I'm very glad that you played our game and thankfully liked it despite the controller issues. Than you very much.
Pretty cool game, feels anime as f*** (which i like :) )
Some hints and opinions:
- It should be clearer what can be killed and what not
- The melee ability should def. have (atleast when still fully upgraded) the ability to clear bullets in front of you (e.g. like in NieR: Automatas Bullet hell sections) otherwise it feels a bit lackluster
- I think it should be a bit clearer what i'm about to sacrefice
- The keyboard and mouse controls could need some love
But overall i think it's a very solid entry :)
We'll try to improve on that, we already tweaked the hit feedbacks with player bullets to let them know which things you can destroy, but it's not enough.
Concerning the bullet clearing, we had something like that in mind, maybe even cooler ! There are other enemies to be implemented soon-ish that will fire yellow bullets, which the player will be able to deflect with the sword !
Since the dash passes through red bullets, you will have an option for both kinds of bullets :)
We have the chance to work with a very talented Sound Designer, and it's always good when players notice.
@aj-jones Thanks for the feedback ! Other people had issues with webGL, hope it wasn't too much of a pain to get the game running.
@awix Thanks ! Your game rocks by the way :)
We do know that the game is hard though, we'll make another balance pass when the other enemies will be in the game, and tweak the difficulty curve over the several levels we have planned :)
@sargonius We really might continue working on this project in the future, so a switch version would actually be a great idea (I want to fiddle with the joy-con rumble so much) ! Thanks for the feedback ! :)
I didn't immediately understand what I was sacrificing (my abilities still worked!), and as some have said it wasn't clear what enemies could be attacked, but that's OK.
It took me a few minutes to figure out the mechanics of it all and then it was just a fun experience.
- Sounds, musics and graphics are all very good and goes well together. The game have both a very pleasant *Nier Automata* vibes with the bullets making danmaku pattern, and a *Tron* vibes, with colors and neons.
- The sacrifice mechanic is pretty self explaining, but I still think it's missing a few feedbacks, in particulary for the sacrifice of the weapon. In fact, even for the wings, I didn't actually saw the first time that one of my "feather" just disappeared.
- The game is pretty maneuverable (wasd to move, click to attack), but for some reason, it feel a bit stiff. It's maybe because I ran it on my old laptop and the fps dropped, or because it's the way it is. The ennemies seemed way faster than me (even using the space bar to dash/jump). But that wasnt really a drawback.
- The main flaw in my opinion was the difficulty : I just couldn't get past the second room. The ennemies simply nuked me before I could slay them, or explain them my point of view. I tried several approaches several time, and it always gave the same result. Well, maybe I'm just bad, or I didn't get something. But I guess in this case, the game should have explained me.
Well… It look like there are almost nothing but bad points in my review, but that still was an excellent entry compared to the others. Maybe it's why the difficulty is so frustrating : I wished I could see the other rooms !
So tl;dr : Very good sounds, music and graphics, but a tad too much of difficulty !
The game looks really amazing (the models!, especially the statues are gorgeous), the music and SFX are fitting nicely. Chaining the dashes and dodging through bullets is satisfying as is the shooting and slashing with one caveat (see below). The bullet patterns are creative and overall it's just an incredible package for a jam game.
I have some minor gripes, though. These are really just design-related things, so it's upto debate.
The main thing is the slash direction. I'd expect it to be in the aim direction, not movement. This made the sword for me almost useless as I was mostly backing away from enemies while shooting them, which meant I just dicing air.
I'm not a fan of removing/decreasing player powers. Unless it's a sidegrade or the player gets something in return (upgrade this but downgrade that), it just makes it more tedious.
The player HP is too low. Either don't so stingy with the HP pickups or make the explosions do less dmg (I'd probably go for more pickups from enemies). I got to room 5 BTW.
When a room is finished, the bullets could stop spawning to signal the player they can carry on. A few times I was actually still waiting around for enemies to appear.
Enemies (2 big bugs) in level 4 (or 5?) attack before the player gets out of the room which actually lets the player cheese them by not entering the room and just shooting them from the sacrificial room.
I hope this was at least a bit helpful and let me reiterate that the game is great and when I saw it, I actually felt pretty bad about my entry. (I mean, it's 4 devs against 1 but still :laughing: )
@myrrhe Feedbacks are on the works, we'll probably figure something out by the end of the weekend ! Concerning difficulty, we toned it down a lot between the first push and the latest update, but we'll do another full pass when all the other enemies will be implemented in the game, just so we won't do it all over again in a few days x)We'll do a blog post and update here when we'll have new stuff, so stay tuned ! :)
@secretpocketcat Concerning the slash, we're still debating about the mouse and keyboard bindings, because they are currently misleading. I do feel that the game might become too much of a kite-fest if we allow players to slash while running backwards, and lose a lot of its challenge. We'll do a complete balance rework soon-ish, with the new enemies (and traps :D).
@rkuhl Thanks ! We're still trying to figure out how to tease mechanics without a whole tutorial menu, but i'm sure we'll manage to find something :)
Anyway, thank you guys so much for all the feedback. We do want to keep working on this game for a while, looks like we fell in love with it :D See you soon !
The only negative I can think of is that I didn't feel the game got harder because of what I sacrificed (I went with sword mostly, and just used dash+laser) but simply because the bullet-hell got harder and the explosions more frequent.
There are some problems but they have already been told :
- You can slash only in your movement direction
- I thought I could destroy the turrets (readability problem)
- The statue seems to be upgrade
- Music and sounds are not well balanced (volume)
I think that if you want to continue the development you'll need to rethink a bit the game design of the sacrifice part to make it interesting to sacrifice abilities in a system where it's not just harder or more frustating.
But beside that the game is very complete with really good art, FX and feedback, music and sound !

I would just addd some feedback to the meleee and ranged attack, their red feedback made me think that wheneveer i hit them, they unleashes a small damaging wave since it's the same they are trying to hit you...
Most of the turrets ddon't have a feedback showing that they are "imortal/invulnerable" and your melee attacks didn't show some utility against anything, i would just use the ranged attack as much as possible...
the art style, the music, the gameplay!
the robot designs are also really cool, and i like how the choices between rooms are also given to you by unique-looking robots. I didn't understand what each did, but I understand that they were different choices.
very cool, i think this could be a full game
Thanks again to all of you for your valuable feedback, and have fun :)