Deadline

nice game, who doesnt like a good run around and smack things and get loot and power up game nice job

Aha, I love the pencil mechanic with the writing. Very clever! Nice work!

Great work! Game idea is really unexpected and really cool.

Really funny and ingenious game. The characters are really cute, they make you want to beat them with a pencil.
I need a version of this for software development, lol.

The pen really was mightier than the sword after all.

I'm with the other posters, I liked the way you interpreted the theme. The gameplay had a good feel to it as well and you really managed to balance the difficulty quite well!

nice little game you have here!

Great game. Just loving it!

Really fun game and stellar use of the theme. The hats were also a very nice touch. My best score was 39.

Fun game and really nice take on theme. Those boosts were really cool idea there. Some editors came really fast out of nowhere.. and often I boosted my self into them. Had fun playing this.

I like how the enemies run away instead of just dying, aside from that its an addictive game with a solid game loop

That pencil swing is so satisfying! Great job!

Nice game, the first try I didn't know I had to write. Silly me.

Nice game. Funny that the enemies try to escape you!

Any chance for a Mac or HTML build? :)

Thanks for the feedbacks everyone! Looks like we passed the 20 ratings mark, wooo!

@are-sundnes Unfortunately no :(
The game was made using GMS and I only have the license for windows.

Great game, but I found that I could keep dashing with little consequence. Was that intended?

@skibisky Your pencil gets shorter every time you dash! It might not be noticeable early on, but once you're past 40-50 pages written you should start to feel it :)

Shorter pencil = shorter swing length & knockback, when you run out you are no longer able to write/dash.

@Sholf ah, just before I died I tried swiping with a 1 pixel 'long' pencil.
I didn't see any 'refills' among the powerups, is that to end the game?

@skibisky Yep, that's the catch of the pencil dash. It's powerful but it ultimately lowers the amount of pages you can write. If you never use the dash you can potentially write 100 pages (which is really hard due to the weight of the papers, my personal best is 59 haha). So you have to balance out between using the dashes and saving up your pencil so you can write more pages.

I wish I could explain more of the features in the game itself (or add more visual indicators) but I was running low on time haha.

Really cool game. I love the writing mechanic, it really adds another layer of challenge on top of the whole; whack em thing. The game was really nice to play and I had absolutely no issues with the controls (in fact it was kind of satisfying churning out paper after paper) the power-ups were an awesome addition as well and the music added some nice depth. In terms of what to improve, I'd say that a graphics upgrade is needed (the play looks very bland for example). Otherwise a very, very solid and good game that has great potential. Well Done.

@call-me-nutty Thanks for the feedback! Art is definitely my weakest department haha. I was planning to add more background variety but in the end I didn't have the time for that. Glad you enjoyed it!

_(Please put the files in a folder before you zip them.)_

I like the music!

A background with streets / building or desks would help a lot to ground the setting.
It seems kind of empty now...

It also seems kind of easy (but not _too_ easy), which is good, because I'm pretty tired tight now. :slight_smile:

https://imgur.com/a/RrVAZ
i'd play a bit more to smash your highscore, i have a thing for beating people at their own games, but i have school tomorrow so that's it from me.

probably the best game i've played so far

So... I started dashing like a madman and ended with a 1px long pencil XD

Very, very, very clever mecanism, and very well done game. The graphics could be have been a bit more polished, but it's still very fun and a bit addictive. I ended up playing longer than expected =)

I enjoyed this a bit more than I expected, it was fun frantically writing papers. The graphics we're simple but readable so I see no major fault there.

Probably the most fun of all the games I've played so far. This is really great all around. The gameplay is addictive, audio is nice, and the concept is innovative and fits the theme well. The weakest area for this game is probably the graphics, but they aren't even bad. Great work.

I didn't find any enemies in my play through...

@josh-ayres Did you write on the pages? (right-clicking)

The amount of editors (enemies) that go after you depends on how many written pages you have. They're there to collect your manuscript, so if you haven't written any they wont even bother! :)

This game is really fun!I like the gameplay,but i donw know what to after my pencil disappeared.And the music is so cool,i like it!

LOL brilliant idea, and well executed! Put a smile on my face after a playthrough, hahah. Pos'd!

Great idea and a really fun game. I like the simple graphics and the gameplay felt well balanced.

I like it, the game play has a nice flow and the mechanics work as expected. The music and sound effect go well with the visuals.

A well-made game that was fun and creative, albeit a bit slow. Maybe I was just really bad at it, but I didn't notice the whole "slowdown with more pages" thing. The music, from a compositional standpoint, was really good, but I personally can't stand the main instrument on the title screen.

@niterich Thanks for the feedback!

I definitely agree that the game feels a bit slow at start. I'll try to improve the pacing on future versions. :)

Satisfying sounds and music, nice graphics, clever concept, and hats are a nice touch. I put more far more time into this game than any other one so far. Gameplay is fun for the first couple of games.

I enjoy the triple usage of the "The more you have the worse it is" theme. 1. The more papers you have the slower you more, 2. the more written pages you have the more enemies come after you, 3. The more written pages you have/ dashes used the shorter your range is.

I have found that the best strategy is actually pretty boring. I go around the map and collect the amount of papers equal to the score I want (I first write 10-15 pages to speed up this project,) then pick up a writing power-up, then run from enemies and dash whenever they get close to me, never attacking. I managed to get 63 points doing this before running out of pencil from dashing so much https://imgur.com/a/fFtuZ

I found that in the late game I would be overrun and forced to dash instead of fighting back since attacking the horde just slowed down the people in front and it would just give me more papers which would slow me down more which would make me fight more and this cycle would repeat until I mis-timed a swing.

I recommend that you lower the rate at which enemies spawn and lower their health but instead make them faster the more paper you have so that the late game would be more of a challenge of timing rather than endurance.

@sir-mr-dr-prof-sr-jr-phd Thanks for the detailed feedback! That's an impressive score you got, definitely beat my personal best haha. I agree that late-game it's near impossible to avoid the enemies without dashing. I'll definitely rebalance the spawn rate on the post-compo version (your suggestion to increase their speed is also quite good!).

The empty paper stacking up due to the amount of enemies late game is also a problem. I thought of adding a button that lets you drop empty papers but I didn't want to overcomplicate the game. Maybe I can mess around with lowering the magnetic pull when you have more papers and see how it goes. Thanks again for spending a good amount of time on the game haha, I appreciate the feedback!

I like this game. For me @sir-mr-dr-prof-sr-jr-phd said what I thinks (and more) about your game.
Also the start is a little bit slow.
But at the End it's a really good experience.

Now here's a unique take on the theme and bonus humour points too.

I have no idea what the goal are in this game. But it looking great and the music is really good. And both the player movement and fighting is pretty well made. Overall well done.

@jk5000 Yeah the goal was not conveyed very well in the game until you get into the lose screen, which is entirely my fault. I assumed that people would understand from reading the game description here or in the itch.io page and didn't consider that some people might've missed that. Should've added some sort of a short sentence at the start of the game like "The editors are coming, write as much as you can!"

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for your comment, the link is fixed! Unfortunatly I cannot play your game because I don't have a Windows machine.

Fun little game.

Nicely done.

Fairly simple, but fun little game! The gameplay does start to get boring after a little while though; having powerups definitely helps add to the variety, but it's hard to stay interested after you've written a couple dozen pages.

Really enjoyable game, well executed too :)