I like the reverse/looking out of the monitor thing. Hmmm, perhaps you could have made the movement controls reversed to fit that theme (but maybe that would play poorly). Nice work.

Such an awesome idea! I lovee the artsyle, the gnomes are so cute, and the boxes feel very satisfying to blow up thanks to those tidy animations

That's a really clever and fun idea! I'm afraid my fellow gnomes hate me, I wasn't very good at not shooting them!

The art is very cool! I killed a lot of gnomes too...

I found the move and shoot to be a bit awkward, perhaps the mouse would be better as the fire.

I liked the different kinds of explosions of the block. Maybe put the shooting to the spacebar. moving and shooting is a little hard when i cannot really move when shooting

Now I know why my game is always loading this slow...

Really fun to play! Art, music and sound mesh together really well, and fit the theme. Got a high score of 20k. Great job guys!

The aestetic was very cool! I like this idea of the flipped perspective! Great pixel art and music as well!

We appreciate you much for your feedback, @wavertron @bosco @fromage @graphite @sansman01 @tosmaster & @parkuhrmd. Thanks! Personally I am really bad in NOT killing the friendly gnomes, too. And thanks for sharing your high score, @parkuhrmd. Mine was far less so far. :-)

Okay, I have to start off saying I love this idea! Easiest the cutest most clever take on the theme I've seen so far! The gnomes were super cute too, the whole thing was just overflowing with charm! Great job! I do feel like perhaps some powerups would help make the gameplay a bit more varied and engaging and help to keep that pesky loading bar at bay for a bit long, but overall excellent! Loved it!

@sansman01 Yeah, we realized that at some point and added the arrow keys for alternate movement. So you can use two hands to play the game, which should be a bit easier.

Having a little gnome attack my data is a very relatable feeling. Good game!

I like the added touch of the blocks having physics allowing you to chain destruction.

Cool little game! The graphics and general aesthetic especially on the main menu were great!

It was very easy to play and it was fun.
good game!
：）

15714 / That was cool ! Take my up vote !

This game is really fun and I love the idea. Great entry!

Neat! Of course it's not the most original concept in the world but with a nice art/story(ish) and plays pretty well.

A weird setup to require mouse input for menu (and restarting) while everything else is keyboard only.


At first I though that horizontal movement was absolutely pointless and you should be just fixed to right edge and always shoot that way. But yeah there are situations where you need to snake behind the gnome who is blocking your shots to a crate. The crates overwhelm you so fast that it really isn't needed cause your time is better spent on just focusing on unblocked crates.

It was somewhat annoying how after just a few seconds, there is too much stuff for you to really handle and it's just trying to mow as much as possible. Sure it fits the theme but doesn't make it feel any better really.

The biggest issue with this really to me seems to be the large height of the play area and the slow movement of the gnome. In the same time where you move from top to bottom, one newly spawned crate has already moved to the center point of the screen. Of course you do want the player to miss them too but might feel better if it wasn't that much that soon. The punishment for missing could be more and the amount missed less still resulting in the similar amount of play time. The box spawning could start with a smaller y difference from the middle and slowly increase as the game progresses.

The other gnomes were a nice design touch. They really nicely punish for mindlessly spamming your way through the game. And having them linger there for a bit even after getting shot so they soak up even more bullets if spammed was the cherry on top. Good choice!

It was quite hard for me to try to align myself properly for long shots. The screen being "backwards", the flat background and the long distance are surely the reasons for this. Did you toy around at all with an idea of a laser sight or something like that to alleviate the problem?

I guess there was some kind of bullet limit too. Sometimes shooting just made an annoying boop sound and no bullet came out. Any specific reason for this choice? It felt arbitrary and pointlessly punishing for having fun. This isn't NES and Mega Man where you can only have few sprites on the screen at once. I would also go as far as have the shoot button be able to be held down to shoot constantly. You already had a minor knockback on the player while shooting so that (and the civilian gnomes obviously too) would still make sometimes not shooting mandatory.

The sprite work did look nice but could still be improved. The thing that I'd change the most was the bullets. Could be bigger and brighter for more clear visibility/contrast. No need to try to mess with the classics, I think a decently sized white circle would be the best call here too.

A bit more oomph in the juice department wouldn't hurt either. Stuff like screen shake for explosions, muzzle flash and so on are super quick to add but make a huge difference on how the game feels. The sprites should also be ordered by their y position so that the stuff would appear to be in correct depths.

The music was ok and the sound effects weren't anything to write home about. Bfxr/sfxr bleeps and bloops work just fine (for me at least) but some variety would be needed. Most easily achieved by adding a bit of random pitch shifting when playing samples. And if you go a bit further and composite your effect from two different pitch shifted sound samples the received variety spikes up even more. The gnomes getting shot would have needed some sort of sound effect too in my opinion.

I also came up with my own genocide game mode...


Dang, looks like the character limit on posts has been decreased. To be continued...

Lots of other stuff could of course be added too to make it more lasting and interesting. Spicing up the scoring with multipliers is always an easy choice on score based games. Could maybe go up for each destroyed box but reset on missed shot. That would really reward precision and punish recklessness.

Another easy(ish) way would be to add some collectible (temporary maybe to avoid power creep and balancing issues) powerups. Could be stuff like piercing shots, spread shot (maybe dangerous too :sunglasses:), explosive shots, faster fire rate and so on.

So yeah, I guess one max length post and a bit is enough rambling from me. Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Nice game. Fits the theme realy well and main menu has some nice detail.

@antti-haavikko Thank you so much for the super detailed feedback!

The balancing is something we did not invest too much time. We wanted to have a kind of a short game and the crate spawning is not linear, but there is a clear limit of what you can handle and i agree that there is no room to last much longer, which is unsatisfying if you play multiple rounds. We had some more ideas for different weapons and skills but did not manage to include this features within two days (unfortunatly we could not use the 3rd day of the jam).

There is a bullet limit. This was the first try to avoid the player from just spamming shots all over. The friendly gnomes came along last minute ;)

This is the 2nd game we made and we will try a lot of your suggestions for future games. Cheers!!

hello Antti! @antti-haavikko

I appreciate you much for the amount of words of your feedback to us. Thank you for your what i consider a kinda in-depth-analysis/critic of our game. This is so(!) helpful. I imagine I learned a lot just by reading your feedback.

Your box spawning idea (increasing y difference to the middle) is very elegant. When coming up with balancing ideas, we didn't had anything of this kind in our minds. I appreciate you for what you write about the friendly gnomes and their impact on the bullets. And what is very valuable for me, is how you describe the surroundings of the background messing with your line sight for long shots. Actually, i noticed the same dificulty in my plays, but didn't think about how the surrounding visuals could play a role into that. I just thought it was me. So no: We didn't recognize this as a potential problem and so didn't toy with any ideas like laser sights, which would be an, again, elegant solution! I can imagine such a laser sight as a kind of upgrade.

For the annoying boop sound: This one is clearly on me and i don't like it, too. Before we speeded up the bullets, we wanted to have an "empty gun click" sound. This was a hard one to make for me and i wanted to try it by myself. But when it was implemented, we also changed the bullet speed and then it probably never really occured anymore when testing, since you nearly had permanent bullet fire then. So we missed the annoying sound. It's quite obsolete in the current state of the game, i think.

As i did all the pixel art, i am curious to know from you, how i could improve the sprites, apart from what you already suggested with the bullets. Would you tell me?

I am completely with you about the juice. With one more day we would sooo much liked to implement everything from "art of screenshake" :slight_smile: and similar presentations.

I want to end here for now and conclude with that i also appreciate you for sharing your high score! :smile: And so cool you came up with your genocide game mode. Even though i imagine i tried something similar, i cannot imagine right now how to get -1588. :)

I love the fake desktop at the beginning. The game is concise and polished, it's pretty addicting and with a little bit more substance could easily evolve into a full game. Great work!

P.S. I got the genocide high score 

Graphics are great! The gnomes are really cute. Well done!

Nice frenetic shooter with a weird and uncommon scenario.

The little gnomes inevitably remind me of the South Park gnomes who steal underpants. While I'm at it : what are gnomes doing in a computer ?

The starting interface is great. You're not the first one to have this idea, but that's still a nice idea.

I agree with @antti-haavikko about the bullet limit. It's a stupid concept that had the right to exist only with old systems which had memory limitations. If you want to limit the fire rate, add a cooldown (more or less long, as you wish), but no crappy bullet limit. This bullet limit thing just resurrected traumatistic memories I had when I was trying to beat the jelly-eyes boss in Super NES Demon's Crest... Sorry, that was unrelated.

I did not realize killing gnomes lowers your score. I learned it when reading other comments. I thought the only disadvantage of gnomes was that they block your shots while dying, so I payed attention to kill them with only one bullet, but that was stupid. Maybe you should explain the gnome mechanics in the game description.

There is too few features in the game to give me the incentive to play longer and beat a high score, but these 5 minutes of crazy data-shooting were pleasant.

hej! thanks for your feedback @boykala @ludumdaredevil and @recher!

And i appreciate you @recher for the length of your post and your criticsm especially about the bullet limit. This is something I really start to hate myself, too, now that i am trying to beat the high scores you all posted here. As pixel-fabian pointed out already, this "feature" had some history in our development of the game, so it had a purpose in the beginning. And when this purpose got obsolete, we ran out of time to play and balance and change properly. Anyway, i'm glad you had 5 minutes of pleasant time! :)

PS: I am starting to learn to avoid shooting the gnomes. It's really crucial for getting a higher score, so now i start to get way past my usual 15k in the beginning:


Cool little game. Fun to play and the graphics are nice, I also love the concept. My highscore is 22k. Good job on this one!