Voidborn by Shelvid
In a world where bosses refuse to show health, AI is a little too much into hugging walls, Universe Master really loves talking and you get rush of adrenaline just because your shot destroyed a bullet that was coming for you, play as a cyborg created with a purpose to acquire The Incredible Nothing. Go through 2 worlds (Technically 3) and try to get to the goal that you were created for.
This game is a platformer shooter with insta-death and boss fights. Controls are simple but maneuverability is key.

Excuse lack of sounds, this whole entry was a disaster to make as i really overscoped hahah.
Hope you have fun!
| Youtube | http://www.mediafire.com/file/jkhtz9h82sxgwyq/Voidborn.rar/file |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/voidborn |
Ratings
| Overall | 402th | 3.597⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 553th | 3.274⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 912th | 2.694⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 694th | 3.15⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 609th | 3.452⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 244th | 3.403⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 943th | 2.783⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 26🗳️ | 40🗨️ |
@dank-nibba Thank you a lot! Best pixel art is probably a bit too much but thanks a lot hahah
I think this one-hit type of game works better when the patterns are clearly predictable, since the idea behind a game like this is that the player is meant to plan. This could also be supported by levels that fill one screen

Found it a bit hard -- I felt like the hit boxes on the projectiles were unforgiving, and was constantly doing an accidental jump after landing on a platform. I could probably get better, but that would require really dedicating myself.
@trevor-shoe Thanks a lot! Hitboxes are definitely not adjusted, they are simply fitted perfectly pixel to pixel so its basically very straight forward in collision. Jump happens probably because when holding down space, the ground checker detects ground too quickly and you end up jumping again. Thanks a lot for the comment!
@vaibho Thanks a ton! Glad you enjoyed it :)
The first one is that your gun fires really slowly and with a very short range. The rate at which it fires makes it possible to dodge maybe one bullet at a time from the normal enemies, which I think is the primary reason I couldn't get past world 2-2. The rocket guy at the beginning shoots rockets so fast and the only way I could ever get around them was to shoot the first one and then somehow maneuver around the second one. Part of this was due to the fact that sometimes the rocket would be not exactly level with my character so there was no way to shoot it at all.
And that brings up another problem: the rockets in the second world are really hard to maneuver around. In my experience I more or less could not jump over them, which meant my only option was to sort of run away, and I had to have a bit of luck to pull it off.
However both of these things are relatively forgiveable. I think they could even be left as is and the game could be fine. I think my main problem is that shooting is really unresponsive. I usually would try to shoot right as a bullet got to me and I would always die instead. (This also happened on world 2-2). On the world 2-1 boss I in fact generally would allow a few moments of lag time so that I would not die when hitting his bullets, but then of course I was always worried I would be too far away... :)
Perhaps the player bullets should be prioritized over enemy bullets somehow so that you generally don't die when trying to fire them out of the air. You could maybe even have a frame of invincibility when shooting although some testing would be necessary to see if that worked right.
I think the other thing that generally would help is creating a more predictable pattern when two enemies are on the same floor. I was unable to kill both enemies on the bottom floor of world 2-2 once I finally got down there a few times as they would usually begin firing before I was able to.
I should say though that I do, as a general rule, like a lot of what I played. I had some real fun but I just got frustrated when certain mechanics felt really unfair to me. In particular the player platforming feels pretty good for the most part although you can get trapped on the corners of enemies and that's basically a death sentence.
I do have two criticisms of the art, if you don't mind: First, I can't always tell when something is a platform or background. The first time I saw the orange bricks I thought they were lava, and when I saw the blue tiles in world 2-2 I at first thought they were solid platforms and so I died once to that mistake. I'm afraid I'm not enough of an artist to tell you how to fix this problem, just thought I should mention it.
Second, I always tell people when I see it to never mix pixel art resolutions. In my opinion it practically never will look as good as pixel art that is all drawn as the same resolution.
As far as rotating pixel art goes, I think that's kind of up to the individual. To be clear, I'm talking specifically about scaling up your pixel art, and then rotating it. If you rotate a graphic, and then it's rendered pixel-perfect with the rest of your graphics I think that looks good (I did it in my own game) but if you scale up your pixel art and then rotate it, it isn't pixel perfect and in my personal opinion pixel-perfect graphics are always better. However I think this is definitely more personal preference, I used to actually prefer it the other way around (sort of).
Anyways, hope this feedback helps and doesn't come across too harshly. You gave me some great feedback on my game and I wanted to reciprocate. :smile:
@trevor-shoe Thanks a lot for the suggestion, will definitely try to see how it works! Or for that matter how other platformers do it :)
@honey-pony Thanks a lot for the huge review! Don't worry about harshness, all of the points you stated are very much critical :) First of all the rocket issue on 2-2. As you know playtesting the game on LD is very hard as you are mostly the only one playing the game.. Now the reason why i said that is because for me that part is very doable but of course i couldn't get others to play before upload so... now that you point it out, that part is horribly designed :D Huge thanks for pointing that out, will try to get rid of that kind of design.
As for shooting i definitely don't have a pre-programmed delay, shooting is one of the highest priority in execution order in the script but i will definitely look through that as it seems to be an issue sometimes, i totally got you, thank you :)
I definitely wanted to add clouds to make it look like a window but as you see, there are no clouds :^) (time constraints/sucking at drawing fast). I love how 2-2 seems to be the most problematic level hahah, i did try to put as many combat encounters to keep it fun but yeah, with lack of platformer balancing that... definitely didn't come out as brilliant as i envisioned it hahah.
Yeah that's definitely up to a personal preference, i definitely wanted to experiment on which one would look nicer but sadly had no experience to pull that off :) But even with that i kinda prefer smooth rotation (maybe i need to play more pixel games to give a better answer to this tho so take this with a grain of salt). The scaled pixel art was mostly product of me sucking at drawing, i had really hard time trying to draw a huge version of certain things (e.g. First Boss, had to draw it in small resolution and then upscale to make it look acceptable). I definitely need to sharpen my pixel art skills, i definitely agree on the pixel resolution variety looking odd :)
Thanks a lot for the comment! I definitely can take away a lot of things from that :) Glad you still enjoyed this messy project hahah
For example, I don't know if you did this, but a lot of platformers will add "coyote-time" -- you will still be allowed to jump for a few frames after you leave a platform, as sometimes when people *feel like* they press the button "right on the edge" they are already off of the platform a little bit.