was a little unclear with what the ultimate goal was, but I like the vibe and I enjoyed trying to get combos

Had a lot of fun with this one. Love the screen jiggle, gave every arrow button i pressed some visual weight behind it.

interesting idea

Got a little over a hundred coins. Wish there was more feedback about the state of the timer. I can't really tell if I'm doing well.

Neat entry, game feels pretty polished on the base gameloop.
The art and music go well together.
Only problem I had was, that I hade to play it in a small window since the full screen didnt scale right on my screen, so the shop was unusable in that mode and a little small in the windowed mode

Hard game, but I really liked it! Would love to see the same concept using alphabet :D

The game is really interesting, but it is a bit hard to get enough currency to buy more time, even more to buy the other stuff. The idea is really cool but the shop lack a bit of other upgrades and/or balancing. Other than that it was really fun to play :) Well done !

@lehmy ..interesting. firefox? internet explorer?
@curtis-pelissier ..the game was first with alphabet with 500 words to type ;) changed it to the arrows combos.
@lyshaka ..yeah lost nearly a whole day with struggling unity webgl exports not working. shop could improve alot!

@truedat so all browsers do the same thing. The problem is that I use an ultrawide, which makes the aspect ratio seem off for me on full screen.

I fixed it with zooming in on the small player, but wanted to let you know to maybe set a fixed aspect ration next time? (Im not familiar with the export options of unity)

Training simulation for the Helldivers! The game is super chill. Great job on your work!

Really unique way to incorporate the theme! The game played well and had good music.
Nice entry!

The gameplay is neat and I love the presentation and effects, especiallythe sound effect when you finish one set of arrows. It might bring more fun if there are other types of arrows(maybe some arrows that required to be holding for longer time? ) to change the pacing. Anyway, it's still a great game.

I love the combination of ideas in the game! Really good.

solid entry! I wish there was some instructions because I couldn't figure out if I wanted to just survive or if the goal was to collect all the letters

Enjoyed collecting the letters, and the shop added a strategic element. The ultimate goal of the game is unclear.

Funny games that brought back memories of my childhood. Maybe we can make it even more dynamic.

This a pretty game with a nice and clean concept :clap:
Well done :wink:

That’s a really creative take on the collector theme, I loved it! The overall feel is polished, and you did a great job with the game’s scope.

I did have to adjust the browser css of the canvas width to 500px on Firefox to get the screen to display correctly, but that’s a minor issue.

Very fun mechanics and creative incorporation of the theme! Maybe the time limit could be shorter — for example, around or below one minute — and the music could be more intense to create a greater sense of tension and urgency. Overall, had a great time playing it!

Screen jiggle, sound, and the slot-machine-style thing when you finish a word all feel really nice. Difficulty progression felt very reasonable. Overall clean execution on a game with a really clear image, well done :)

Nice game, love the graphics and the concept. Good Helldivers 2 training !

@phobos youre the second one that mentions helldivers...did not play helldivers, whats with this reference? is there sometthing similar? do you mind explaining? :)

Fun game! Not sure if it was intentional but i didn't really like having to click the letters to collect them, it might be kinda cool if you could press the corresponding key to collect them instead?

This game is so simple. My speedrunner soul loves it

Okay, not gonna lie, this is weird idea at first to take arrows combos as a main mechanic, but oddly - this was pretty satysfying to play and I felt I really am playing something unique :D This is so interesting that this game got me hooked for quite a while. I could not leave until I wrapped my head on how maths for this game works. My ultimate goal is to afford buying one arrow upgrade, I got to lvl 81 max, but I have no more ideas at the moment how to this better. But I want to achieve it sometime :)

I had fun! Enough fun to play multiple times, and enough fun to reach a sort of no-win state (the first key picture is fully off-screen so I just have to guess the first input every time):


### Gameplay Talk
The shop was what really had me hooked. After playing it a little, I wondering if there was some strategy I could use to buy the "reset to 1 letter" shop option. (I even paused in the middle of writing this to try one time, which got me to that level 18 attempt). I did eventually succeed, but it was thanks to exploiting a (fun) bug - more on that later.

I realized letting the letters expire naturally makes them explode into a much larger number of coins than if you "collect" them into your bottom bar. There's a tradeoff there, since collecting a full set of letters gives a pretty hefty boost of cash (25/50/much larger number, I believe). My not-rigorous evaluation after a handful of attempts is that it's basically correct to ignore everything but the common letters, and spend coins to finish the common word if you're down to 1-2 missing letter types.

What broke the game wide open was the realization that clicking a letter in the middle of a "set completion award" duplicates the payout. Though this is definitely unintentional, it sparked a whole new kind of exploration: how could I most-effectively exploit this to reach the long-awaited "reduce arrows to 1" purchase?

I ended up adopting a strategy where I'd fill up my normal "collector" word until it was fairly close to full, then purchase some letters to leave it with 1 left. Then I'd rush as many combos as I could to stack a bunch of normal letters on the screen (usually 3 was my limit, I could get 4 on screen if the sequences were very short) purchase the last common letter, then quickly click to collect all of the on-screen letters before they expired. This would duplicate the 25 coin reward for each letter I had on-screen, netting 75 - 100 bonus coins.

It was pretty interesting, because even though I could get ridiculous amounts of money, I still had to think about how to sequence my purchases. Especially important was the timing of the "reset to 1 arrow" purchase - you wanted to get a combination to nearly complete & have as many common letters banked as possible. Basically as soon as you reset to short sequences again, you needed to try to score a 3-4 duplicate (or higher) right away to refill money reserves. Short arrow sequences make the duplicate bug much easier to exploit, but you're still at the mercy of RNG to try to get common letters (ironically the rarer letters are worse, since they don't duplicate the reward).

There's probably extra nuance about how you could optimally exploit this bug, but with my strategy I was able to effectively go infinite (I looped back to 1 arrow sequences a couple of times & passed level 30)


So, all of that is to say, I had a lot of fun playing this game!

### Feedback Notes
The rewards from the shop were very simple, but the incentives they ended up creating (with the help of a little bit of bug-exploiting :wink:) was very fun to strategize around.

It is a bit unfortunate that the rare letters didn't seem to be worth collecting for me - my strategy was so centralized on the common letters that they were mostly a downside. Maybe a mechanic where rare & legendary letters cycle through a couple different letters before disappearing would be interesting - you can leave them waiting, but you'll want to pay attention to whether they swap to a value you can actually use.

Also, bug stuff aside, I did really like how tracking which letters you already picked up was important, and how splitting your attention between collecting letters & typing sequences was key to maintaining a steady income.

The presentation of the game was nice. The music kept me in the groove & the background matched the feeling of the music well. Little bits of polish (the screenshake & visual effects of letters being entered) were great.

Thanks for making this!

@wallted kool ! right now its to expensive with 250 to buy this upgrade, but could not really test it so much before time was up. so i will fix the prices a bit and some more shop upgradees will be available after the rating phase ends.

@doctor-zeus ...absolute phenomenal review! i really appreciate that! thank you my friend. You are the first one that did realized that coins give more when you dont pick them up and that was intentional. Kool that you worked through some strategies. An hour before release i changed an upgrade in the shop where you could buy-away-One-arrow-from-next-round and made the not so good change with the now overpriced 250-all-arrows-away-buff. this did not work out so good and i will change the prices a bit when rating ends. i am glad that you had fun!!!

Fun game, gets very challenging with the longer sequences.

I like the atmosphere and the sound effects, it is very rewarding hearing the payout sound

Music, sound effects, and surprisingly the graphics were all pretty on point. Even though they're "just letters" they felt like they had some weight to them, and I liked collecting the currency.

On the LDjam site, the timer is cut off on the top of the game, but I think that's due to the resolution on LDjam more than your game itself. Still, I enjoyed this quite a lot. Reminds me of a lot of the minigames you get when fishing in Black Desert Online. Good work!

Amazing work! It’s super interesting and has a vert unique way to paraphrase the theme, good job! And welcome to give our game a try! :)