Particle Wars by NickHellquist
A rouguelite where you play as a particle. Grow or shrink depending on hp, level up to enhance your power, survive and defeat the other particles and eventually the boss!
Made in Godot 4.3 The game runs a bit janky in the browser so download the .exe if you find it unacceptable :)
I've already continued work on the game, added much more enemy variation, with mechanics like explosions, shooting, dashing etc.
Redrawn the sprites in higher resolution and fixed visibility issues.
Added alot more modifiers, tuned the difficulties and boss mechanics.
This is obviously not in this version, but if anyone is interested in play-testing or just keep up with my work, email me at nickhellquist@gmail.com, follow me on X @nickhellquist, or ask in the comments :)
If you have any suggestions for new modifiers/mechanics/enemy-types, please add then in the comments! :smile:
Thank you for playing, and giving insightful feedback to help me improve :)
Post Jam:
Due to complaints about enemy visibility I made them brighter.
Due to dash being CTRL and CTRL + W closes browser tabs I made Space a secondary dash button.
Fixed a bug where players could get unlimited over-healing.
Fixed a rare bug where XP magnet wouldn't revert the player's pick-up area to its intended size.
Ratings
| Overall | 137th | 3.596⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 66th | 3.824⭐ | 76🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 307th | 2.521⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 301th | 2.722⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 291th | 2.736⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 179th | 3.129⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 271th | 2.162⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 239th | 3.029⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 70🗳️ | 120🗨️ |
Great execution, it's a fully fledged game. I like that there's harder difficulties, although I didn't give them a try yet.
feels satisfying to play and it's a great bit of music in the background. only thing I'd say is that 10 minutes is quite a long time. By the end I felt a bit like I was just sticking it out to see the boss
really good overall though, there's a lot here I wouldn't have wanted to play for 10 minutes. this was a lot of fun
I agree with the sentiment of others, 10 min was quite a long time for what there was to differ on gameplay. Nice job overall!
- Too dark to noice red enemies (maybe cuz of my display settings)
- After ~5-6 minute, game becomes too boring, looks like enemies does not have progression.
Check out your balance because it is too important for these type of games. Well entry /|\ ^._.^ /|\
- The first five minutes of the game, I almost didn't level up at all. I think because of the higher difficulty, the enemies were grouping together and shielding the enemies I'd already damaged, so it was very rare that I actually killed one. I just circled around the map, making sure I kept enough distance from the cluster. Eventually there were so many enemies, the game was skipping every other frame (which made the movement slightly wonky).
- Around minute five, I made it to level 3 and got the explosion powerup. Then for the following minute I just started blowing up enemies in groups, and leveled up about 20 more times until the giant cluster of them was gone. It felt kind of epic.
- The last four minutes got progressively more hectic as the enemy rate increased, so there was a lot more dodging and a lot less circling the map.
- Last 15 seconds were the final boss, but he was quickly desposed of.
Didn't get hit once (though there were a few close calls).
Generally nice enough.
Generally nice enough.
BUT! The game is very cool! It just needs to be changed a little bit and it will be perfect)
Otherwise, cool little survivor game! Very neat for a compo entry!
My overall experience was fun, so thanks for that, and keep it up!
My main feedback would be to smooth out the pacing a bit and re-balance some of the drops - e.g. it takes way too much to kill enemies early on to the point of being almost boring, and the movement speed upgrade gives you a ton (too much) of safety for the rest of the game. Additionally it seems like the enemies are physics-simulated, which causes them to bounce off each-other in unpredictable ways sometimes, and I think for this type of game it's better if enemies have more predictable / adaptable behavior
Fun game! The build feels polished within its small scope. I really enjoyed the explosion perk and the extra projectile piercing—, they worked great when I was swarmed by enemies. Nice job!
@lightningst Thanks, movement is always hard to nail down :)
@aegisfate Yeah I worked my job the entire jam weekend so I had to draw the sprites on my phone during lunch to get something done :laughing: Nice to hear that the loop works good :D
@evindor Yeah, there's a bit of luck involved getting the right upgrades early :D thanks for sticking by it :) Nice to hear the movement feels good!
Thank you all for playinga and for the feedback :)
Of course, some more polish and content could have absolutely helped and make the experience even more enjoyable, but, for a jam, it is really good!
The difficulty scaling also seemed appropriate, which I was surprised by :skull: (I've never been able to properly balance out these types of games, so kudos to you!)
Overall, a very solid entry!
Once I got explosions and +15% movement speed I knew this is it! :D
I had fun playing this. I liked small animations for green orbs, it was clear for me which I picked in the range and which not. Also enemy size representing health was a really nice design choice it helped a lot with the hardest difficulty.
The hardest challenge was probably time race to keep amount of enemies to the minimum because when there were too many circles on the screen, the fps drop was too brutal.. and I had to start new run. Also I feel like "attack size" either didn't work or was giving me so little that I didn't notice it.
I was promised a simple rogue-lite, survival game, and I definitely got one.
Very nice little game that took too much of my time haha. Good entry for sure!