Stoned Scarecrow

Nice game, I played several "runs" and I enjoyed it! :)

Your pixel art skills are impressive, this game is so beautiful and well animated - did you catch some sleep during the compo? :)

Regarding the game, it's well designed, and I see the "play it several times to get xp mecanic", but I think you should be a bit more generous when giving XP to player - 1 skill point per level is very few, and it's quite long to get a new level (it took me 5 fives run to get to level 2 in XP)

Also, you should add the controls in the description, it took me some time to figure out that "Z" is used to shoot :)
(at first, I thought that it was an endless runner game, so avoid enemies only)

Thank you drludos :)
I did not sleep very much, I think some 3 hours only. The game became quite painful even, I could not really test the mechanics progressively (The bee and hand enemies I did when there was 1 hour to end the submission).

and thank you again for reminding the controls, I put them in the description :)

The controls don't feel very good. The pixel art is fantastic.

The pixel art is absolutely DELICIOUS. All those little explosion sprites... *drool* The interface is very clear and well designed and the controls are pretty good too, except-- is shooting supposed to be really unresponsive at the beginning? It was taking too long to get upgrades so I quit playing to admire the art, haha. Oh, and full points for theme too. A scarecrow on a floating log? Yeeeah, okay!

Art is amazing! I wasn't able to get very far. Is player suppose to shoot in short bursts of 3 to 4 bullets? It felt sporadic.

Hey man, it looks pretty cool!

A couple of notes:
Wish you had added some more sound and music
And animated the scarecrow a bit more
As well as a nice tooltip in game like how to shoot/move
And an indicator with the shooting

Good side:
Fun theme and good art!

Not so good:
I wish you had worked more on the gameplay

Having XP and being able to upgrade is cool and kept me playing for a while, but it just takes too much time to get an upgrade which sapped a bit of the fun out of it for me. The graphics are fantastic!

Gorgeous sprites! Also, weirdass setting, definitely good! Somehow reminded me of Trio the Punch, in a good way. Although I wish I could've fired more. The firing rate IMO makes it really hard to get XP. And the lack of music makes the whole thing feel a little empty, so I think that having music would make it way more enjoyable.

Is there only 5 enemies (mushroom, face, pipe, bee, palm)? If there are more, sorry, I didn't get that far.

I like the appearance of the game. The obscurity of characters is so fun! However, the gameplay is far from perfect. I understand the XP farming, I've seen a lot of games like this one, but your game is badly balanced.
You should've made stronger enemies give much more XP, so as you get more XP, you get XP faster, this way you spend about the same time on each level, plus you get that feeling like "Oh, I remember being killed by that enemy so many times, now I can kill a dozen of them" as a bonus.
Also, upgrading power twice makes you able to kill most of the enemies with one shot, while upgrading anything else twice (maybe except for shot speed) doesn't seem to give you a lot of opportunities.

If you want to make this game deeper, feel free to do so. I recommend adding more enemies and flocks of enemies, each one being stronger and giving more XP. For now, I can kill most types of enemies without any upgrades.

Really good pixel art! I feel it takes too long to be able to fire bullets again after 3 shots or so though.

Game's art is gorgeous! Its only drawback was that it took way too long to get that first upgrade. Levels should be easier to obtain at first.

Beautiful graphics / pixel artwork. Very impressive.

The game seemed complete but I couldn't figure out the controls (how to shoot). I tried all of the keys and mouse buttons but nothing worked!

Great idea and graphics, beautifully animated. 9/10

It's hard, but i like it. The power up system is the addictive part. Great game and awesome graphics.

nice game and unique concept. had fun playing it but i noticed that the bullets/shots goes out too long. i've pushed z and p 4 to 5 times before it gives out a pellet or something. dunno if its my keyboards problem or its meant to be that way. if it is meant to be that way, can i suggest increasing the speed of the pellets/bullets.

Nice game. Amazing level of polish and art quality for a 48h compo. Playing was fun too. However XP rate was very bad, felt like pure farming game :(

Impressive graphics

A fun idea, but it is kinda slow.

Remarkably complete and polished. Lovely art style. It's enjoyable, but certainly has some flaws. The pacing/balancing was my biggest issue.

Graphics are super good! Neat concept. Well done!

Took me a while to figure out you fire in 3s, thought the controls were being unresponsive! Nice style!

it doesnt always shoot when i press P but its really fun and the sprites are great!

Beautiful gfx, well done.

long time play sad, if you for fun - live to 3 lvl =/

Really good submission. The pixelart in particular is fantastic (it must have taken a while). I definitely feel like it's weirdness fits the theme, too.

Add some music and make the progression a bit more forgiving, and I think you're golden.

The XP exponential ramp got very steep, very quickly. Bit to steep for me.

Make this into a full game and get rich!

Taopaïpaî scarecrow ! Good visuals as usual :)

Nice game. The XP system gives a nice incentive to keep playing, but it is gained a bit slow though.

Many thanks to all who commented and rated my game. I'm creating some improvements on top of these observations and will soon bring news.

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I like the upgrades. Shot power helped a lot. Having to replay from start though felt a little repetitious.

Really nice graphics and good mechanic, I like the idea of leveling in a shoot them up. Good job!

Loved the bizarre characters, the game lookes great. Really nice upgrade system but it took a bit too long to get the experience to upgrade, apart from that I really liked it.

feel like this game's a bit of a slow burn, like designed around someone playing it for a good hour before your even powerful enough to take on the hand bastards which isn't really idea for this kind of rating.

but with that said from what I've played the gameplay's pretty competent, really needs some polish/juice as yeah that cannon feels like a pea shooter and everything's just a bit bland feel wise.

visually really good job, loved the death animations of the spinny heads and the scarecrow just throwing himself off of the log.

but yeah optimize a little more for initial enjoyment otherwise you're xp bar's never going to incentivise people into continuing playing as they've already unlocked so much instead of thinking like 'sigh 5 more minutes before I can start doing any proper damage to those flying mushrooms'

Really nice characters & animation. I like the upgrade options, but I wish the XP progression was faster.

Like most ppl, I think the graphics were awesome, but I feel like the reload time was really slow.

Source Link is Broken

Thank you JerryLeeLodbrok, I fixed the source link :)

Very slow default rate of fire; not quite Llamatron :) Excellent art and an unconventional weapon indeed :)

Not bad but seemed to run slow in my browser. The fire button worked 1 out of 4 times which was annoying. Liked the graphics and the parallax effect though.

The art is indeed nice, but the gameplay is absolutely dreadful. Shooting felt very unresponsive and the time it took to get even the first level was way too long. The gameplay felt quite slow too, since you could only shoot once every second or so.

Tried the updated version too and while it was somewhat better it still had its problems, since killing anything at the start was too hard.

I think that the base power of the player should be incereased in both versions so that you could actually get something done even without any upgrades.

I thought the upgrade was intelligent, but the starting stats were terribly underpowered. Additionally, the level-up came too slowly, making it hard to appreciate the game. Overall, I think the game needs better balancing, and give the player a sense of power more quickly.

Great take on a shmup shooter. The grindy nature of the level up system certainly needs to be reworked, because you are incredibly underpowered from the beginning.

Quiet like the art style, Well done.

CH

Awesome pixel art!

5 for gfx!

Very nice! Loved the art and simplicity of the game. The leveling mechanic was cool, it just took way too long to level up. I'll go try your new version now!

I loved the pixelart style but in terms of gameplay, I found the initial shot speed to be a bit too slow.

The artwork and animation is great! The characters are all pretty memorable. I don't know why I'm a scarecrow riding a flying log shooting mushrooms, but it's kinda fun, heh. The one problem I had was with the shooting; I would hold down the shoot key and there would be three shots...then a pause, then three more shots...and so on. It makes it so you can't shoot right when you need to. Odd, and kind of frustrating.

The pixel art is lovely, I love your palette.
There are two things in this game that I feel stand out as the most important to improve, as well as not being too difficult.
The first is the character's firing patterns. It seems silly, but as someone who started pressing space before I realised holding it worked, the whole "fire 3 shots then pause" made whether or not I was allowed to fire feel so arbitrary. More to the point, I see no reason why you couldn't just remove the break between three shots, and have it be a more continual rate.
The second is sound. I know there are probably a number of reasons (time, ability) why you didn't put it in, and that's unfortunate, but the sounds are much too repetitive. If anything, just have 3 very similar shooting sounds and choose one randomly, it makes a world of difference without much effort.

Those are my main criticisms/nitpicks, asides from that, it's a very good effort, a lot of content for a competition, great job!

Fun little game and the graphics and animation look great.

I found it a bit challenging at first due to the fly/fire speed but enjoyed it.

Very fun game. Incredible graphics. I reached level 13 but i could not kill the big mashroom!
Eu gostei do espantalho ;)

Great graphics.

Great looking game. The slow rate of fire at the first level felt a little too harsh. Long pauses between the 3 bullets you can shoot at a time. It made it annoying to play. Once the rate of fire goes up it would be more enjoyable.

Hey! I played both version (compo and post-compo) and post-compo version is pretty damn good! There's a good difficulty curve and a better progression feeling. Too bad the shot power is only useful for the end. That said, it's a very funny game. Good job!

Aww, the idea was so great and the graphics nice too, why is the scarecrow so slow to shoot T__T? More XP and some music would have been appreciated. Nice entry though!

Great graphics, the leveling system was a little too slow for my taste, especially since the character felt very nerfed to start. Lots of enemy variety, that's pretty cool to see in a ludum dare.

Great art! A lot of work for a Compo, and I see that you worked later on the postcompo version in the things you couldn´t work in. Nice music!
Good job!

Wonderful artwork (esp death animations) and it's super impressive to get gameplay with upgrades in this short amount of time.

It looks like you've probably already addressed what I'm about to say in an update but I don't want to corrupt my rating. It's a bit slow and tedious - probably due to the way the shooting works. Picking each skill point is blind and represents a lot of effort(as in you don't know exactly what it will do). I tried damage and speed. I didn't get past the hands though. SFX are a bit grating, but they still add positively to the game.

Having said that.. the hooks of rpg are working. I wanted to at least see what the leveling up did and it felt good to earn the points.

The pixelart is really good. I think that is the most notable thing about the game. Although I didn't like the game itself. You get waaay to little EXP. Basically you're giving the player a reason to replay the same part for about 5-10 times so the dynamics get slightly better and then you can finally see the next part. This feels like a chore. Why would you hide game content until a very repeating and tedious job has been done by the player? Then there is the shooting. I like the idea that the shooting pattern is a bit odd. That adds depth to it. However I noticed that you have to hold Z or P to shoot. Tapping doesn't do anyting and not holding down the button AKA not shooting has value either. Why would you even make a button for it then? I don't get it.
I like the the pattern of the first mushroom enemy and the hand. Loved that hand. The other enemies had way too much health and not a very interesting movement pattern. The animations are good for as far as they are present. You could add a lot more visual feedback and the HUD felt a bit unpolished! Might sound a bit negative but I was hoping to give some constructive feedback.
Other than that, well done! It's not easy to make something in 48h :)

Love the graphics and presentation. The pixel art is awesome. I do agree with the others that levelling is way too slow though.

Great graphics and awesome idea!

nice progression - love the idea - great animation falling off the log - nice game

Loved the art, and would have loved to have some awesome music to go with the experience. Agree with what other people have said regarding needing to be able to level up faster, and be able to fire more often.

Really quite fun, and nice leveling mechanic. However, it took way too long to get enough speed and shot speed for the game to be less tedious. Loved the artwork!