Really fun twist on a bullet hell game. Really liked it. The only feedback I have would be that some sounds would be nice.

Cool interpretation of the theme. I really liked that the server was literally on fire whenever it was over capacity :)

Interesting concept, definitely in the theme of keeping it alive. The graphics were satisfactory for this kind of game, sound/music was missing. However I felt like there were too many options D:. Great game nonetheless, congrats on finishing!

Cool game concept! Love the theme, it is a very fun twist on a management type game.

However, what i restarted. it was stuck on shooting throttles out - effective i guess, but not ideal! ;)

Over 50k in my banks! Some juicy ads, and 100 servers to support them! Had a lot of fun, thanks! Well done :smile:

@chloeofarroyo, what do you mean by "it was stuck on shooting"? Stacking is a gameplay mechanic not a bug. You should build layer-cakes of tech different types to save money and build good protection.

Sorry, i meant i didnt want to place them, as soon as the game started it spent all my money on throttles without me telling it to ;)

@chloeofarroyo. Hmm. It sounds like a bug :) May be I can reproduce it in the future.

Original concept, pretty fun to play ! :smile:

An interesting concept. I would really love to see other games created along these same lines. Took me a while to grasp how each tool works. Great job!

That's a very interesting idea! Using the services makes me feel almost like I'm playing some sort of reverse-Arkanoid. ;) Though I'm not very good at it, I think I'm slowly learning enough to survive longer each time.

There are, however, several bugs which I've found:
1. It's the same as @chloeofarroyo has already mentioned - after one game was complete and I started another run, it automatically started firing the throttling service until I was out of money (and as soon as I've earned 20$ it shot another one). After that game was done, I started another and the bug was gone.
2. I think your game remembers the game speed instead of resetting at the beginning of each round. I play for a while, I lose when the game becomes too fast for me to keep up, I click to start again and there it's super fast from the start. Refreshing the page resets the speed back to standard value.
3. I don't even know how that one happened, but one moment I was very low on cash and the game was running at a medium speed (I've played for maybe 20 seconds since the start), and suddenly the game sped up and all counters started to increase ridiculously quickly:

Bugs notwithstanding, I liked it! Seems like a cool concept to expand on!

@lcstark, thank you very much for good detailed response :)
There are some bugs in code unfortunately, as I see. But I want to fix its after COMPO in order not to break the rules. Or I'll make a second version.

Very interesting and original concept!I liked the idea and the gameplay although sadly there is not much to it after sometime .But I did enjoy playing it!Shame there are no sounds in it though.In the end Great job!

Such a great idea, I had a lot of fun playing this, thanks for making it! :D

There's probably an interesting avenue you can explore where rather than "firing" firewalls up the screen, you drag and drop them - so that you can strategically try to maintain a certain "structure". (I suppose you could explore adjacency bonuses, upgrades, and varying "attack types" down that road!) but I don't know if that fits your vision!

I don't know if I am rubbish, or have terrible luck, but I found the game had two distinct difficulty phases:
- It's super hard, I never survive long enough to buy a single server (also there may be a bug where - if you don't refresh your browser - the difficulty doesn't fully reset!)
- Or, once you've bought a single extra server, you can suddenly almost hold down space and never interact again (except to fill the screen with firewalls occasionally)

What I found was that if you try to place any defences during the first ~minute, it feels like you always end up in a war of attrition that cannot be won.
So the winning move seems to be to do nothing for ~a minute, race to buy a server, and then you're golden. It took me ages to discover this, though!

This leads to an interesting second point, which is that until you manage to survive long enough to buy a second server, you don't get an opportunity to learn that the server count goes down when overloaded, acting as a health bar. Perhaps the player should start with >1 server so they can learn this mechanic?

A minor visual improvement: I found that the money going up in increments felt really jarring, I don't know if I'm just weird, but I think if it updated more like 2-4 times per second, it'd feel more responsive?

You might want to consider making the server cost start cheaper, and become more expensive with each purchase?

Anywho, I hope all of that feels like useful feedback, please don't take it negatively - I only have this feedback for you because the idea was so compelling I _had_ to play it enough to generate these opinions! :D

Nice concept. I only miss that it is not colorblind friendly.

Scarily similar to the original concept for my game. Seems like the malicious traffic generation can be weird though sometimes. I had it spawn pretty much on the entire screen within 10 seconds of a run.

@@drevilbrain, a lot of malicious traffic in beginning of game is ok. It's has low bandwidth and almost not dangerous for player usually. The "fun" begins in a couple of minutes :)

@szieberth-adam, I didn't think about it :( Is it enough to change green color to blue?

@omaskery, thank you for such large and detailed comment!

>>It took me ages to discover this, though!

I did it special during work on game balance, but I think now it's too cruel for players. First minute is much more easy then following. You can "win" after first minute if you don't spend all money. 1-2 small buying - it's ok. Spend all - you lose. I understand, what it's bad game mechanics. But it's a compo jam :) I was short of time for better mechanics. I want fix it in the future.

>>Perhaps the player should start with >1 server so they can learn this mechanic?

It's good point. Thank you. I will definitely do that.

>>I think if it updated more like 2-4 times per second, it’d feel more responsive?

Yes, money updates by timer every 300ms :) I will think about feeling of it.

>>You might want to consider making the server cost start cheaper, and become more expensive with each purchase?

As I wrote early, I was short of time :(


Thank you for you comment again.

@alexey-akulovich I think you mean the dots. Yes, that certainly helps. I generally recommend to check palettes on this great page: https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/

@szieberth-adam Useful link for future. Thanks!

What an interesting way to depict server loads and server management! It would be neat to show a plot of server load over time, and generally add things that you would find in a server management console like DO. There were some minor bugs – the very first time I started the game the tutorial screen somehow didn't show. Also when I died the first time and restarted without reloading, the game speed was kept from the previous run. Towards the end, even when holding spacebar, I couldn't keep up with the money influx. Might be good to add options to buy 10's (or more) servers at once. I also really appreciated how the requests were generated in clusters rather than just flooding (ha) the screen uniformly, and how the various load balancers stacked on top of the screen. They got stuck at the bottom when I had a very long stack, so maybe they could drift upwards once there is nothing stopping them.


I guess you could add more variety to the types of incoming requests to increase the difficulty, since at the end I just abandoned the game, I didn't feel like I would lose.

I have to say, this is a very unique game. Really fun. Good job!

Very cool game. I like the concept a lot, very unique. Wasn't too balanced

Love the concept! There's definitely something off with the balance though. It was basically impossible to get past the first attack wave and then impossible to lose after trying a few times. Was it intentional that the game gets easier every round? Also, is there an issue with the firewall? It says it stops everything but I see most stuff passing through it

@aurel300, @aljosact, @slimbun, @frenchie thanks for you feedback :)



@aurel300, yes, I know about "reload bug" and will fix it in the feature.

>>maybe they could drift upwards once

I was in my todo list, but I did not have enough time.


@frenchie, game balance wasn't done in time. I worked a lot on it but result isn't good.
Firewall passes through all legal traffic and blocks only flood. Did you see something other?

Very nice idea but a bit buggy and unbalanced: bit hard to earn enough $ to but upgrades without dying, I got a bug where I only had red requests, without any green ones, effect of powers is not explained enough (second power only seems to disable an X amount of requests before it turns off). But keep up the good effort!

Haven't seen one quite like this, I was expecting something akin to arkanoid from the screenshots but I got something completely different, thumbs up for subverting my expectations there! I didn't run into any bugs (that I recognized as bugs anyway) and I found it a little difficult but I also didn't put too much effort into understanding the concepts either. A couple sound effects would have spiced things up a little bit but I get it, compo is hard, I know well.

Great job for compo!

Quite an interesting idea, I suppose it takes elements from shmups to idle games.

Really enjoyed this game, bit tough but an original concept :smile:

I felt like I had to hard reset the page between games though or something which ramped the difficulty was getting kept and I ran into problems quickly (Firefox 75.0, OSX)

My main critisicm is the lack of audio,it would add so much to the experience and help a player with another layer of information.

Great stuff!

Really unique idea, I love it. Took me a few goes to figure things out.
I think you could look at ways of easing players into the mechanics.
Perhaps firewalls aren't available immediately (either starting with too little money, or gating it with an upgrade first). Things like that.