Chicxulub

I wiped out 88 % of the Dinosaurs with a mass of 23235 kg. Yay!

Very cute and very well polished game! I love the retro style, you really pushed the Pico-8 engine here! Sounds and Music are very nice, too.

I love it!

yooo i wiped out 89%! lol. Audio was super nice, and the gameplay, too! The thing I could suggest is to make the asteroid sprite bigger as you get mass while spawning fewer bullets to offset the difficulty. but otherwise it was great!

@purrseus thanks a lot! Pico8 was a blast to work with, really glad we picked it.

@aljon thanks! We tried a few things with the scoring/difficulty and couldn't get anything that felt balanced. Time is always the limit in LD!

Very cute! I really liked the sprite work, and the sound design complemented it well. The high starting mass did seem to remove some jeopardy though. It felt like you could remain still for the whole game, and still probably make it to the end. Having lower initial mass and checkpoints on each wave would've been more interesting imo. Nice work!

Cool game, It kept me entertained for a while. The animations and the music were my fav things

This game was so fun! I love all the cute space dinosaurs. It was totally worth it to play till the end: I wiped out 79% of all dinosaurs. I am not sure about the balance of the game, the debris was so powerful that it was hard to care too much about avoiding bullets. Over all great job :)

@ree-rolph thanks for the feedback! I agree, balancing the game/difficulty is something we thought a lot about and I think we could have done a better job. I had hoped we found a good balance with the scoring system at the end - but perhaps that should be communicated upfront.

@aless thanks! Our artist and musician will be happy to hear :smile:

@sophiemae0 thanks for sharing your score! The feedback around balance is great too. It's always hard to find time to properly playtest and balance a LD game!

Enjoyed playing the game, I had not heard much about this pico-8 engine, but it certainly brings back the memories of 8 bit computers. I grew up with the C64 here!

Oh this was really fun. Great pixel graphics, great audio. Nicely balanced. Managed to wipe out 63% of the dinosaurs. First time I've played a PICO8 game, pretty impressed. Very well done!

This was a really fun game. The bosses were awesome, and the sound effects worked really nicely with the music. Great job!

@marrs thanks! Pico8 is a fantasy console that's designed as a reminder of those sort of games (but a little easier to work with!). We really enjoyed working with its limitations.

@digital-bacon thanks for sharing your score! Glad you enjoyed.

@forgeronstudio glad you liked the bosses! It was a bit difficult getting them to work with pico8 but I'm glad we spent so much time on them!

Curious name hahaha. Simple but pretty cool graphics, it was fun to play

This is absolutely amazing!! Fantastic job with this! I would play this for days!!!!

What an incredible game! I loved it, great job

An impressive arcade game, art is great, difficulty curve is smooth and pleasant.

This one was one of the few games I played through. Was really nice, the art, sounds and overall game mechanics makes it feel like a complete game that's enjoyable to play.

Such an awesome game, music + graphics + flow was on point - well done!

I'm a noob, only got 77% :D Super fun! You are a pixelmaster! I totally loved the idea of the dino's defending their planet with space ships... superfunny. The music... at first I was shocked by the atonality. But after a couple of minutes I started accepting it, and now I cannot get it out of my head. You are an evil genius.

One of the most funniest games I played in terms of Theme/Humor execution. Dino-laser-spaceship shenanigans vs the asteroid! The only thing you could do is change the scale of weight from Kgs to Tonnes, as Thousands of tonnes are more realistic in terms of those kind of asteroids than asteroid that weights more less 10 SUV cars :D Job well done!

Really fun little game, I'm always impressed by how much you can cram into a little Pico8 cart.

The music is amazing. And I love dinosaurs :heart: so I wiped out only 12% of them. :smile: Good job!

That was a lot more intense than I expected it to be from the screen prints. Simple mechanic done really well. Nice job!

I'm not a huge bullet hell fan, but this one is nice.

Would look good in "keep it alive" round too.

Got 86% of em on my playthrough :smile:

Really good game! I loved the enemy patterns and the lead-ins into mechanics!

Great game :) I had a lot of fun

Always dynamic and polish, it's a really nice entry.
Just the levels between the 2 bosses were a bit long with a difficulty curve that's not increase too much for me.

Your game feels "complete", a rare trait in competition entries.
Lots of enemies types and 2 boss, wow.

At first I felt it would be easy. 3 orbits later I was more on "OK I'M ON A BULLET HELLSCAPE".
Gameplays goes smooth and it's fun.

"DINOSAURS DEFENSES WEAKING" 😥 felt bad for the dinos tho.

Music is nice, fit for dinosaurs defending earth in space ships.

I only wiped out 57% of all dinosaurs, because in the beginning I thought I can destroy the dinosaurs by crashing into them (I'm an astroid after all 😅). But then I understood that I would only loose mass doing this. Loved the little dinosaur graphics and the bosses.

It seemed like thanks to Pythagoras that moving with two arrow keys pressed at the same time was faster, but I guess that's very classic thing and didn't take away from the nice feel of the game.

Good job! 🦖🦕

A good visual game with a nice gameplay !

I managed to wipe out 89% of the dinosaurs. I thought that the patterns started a bit easy, but they were reasonably hard during the final boss. The homing bullets are a little frustrating to deal with, and more variety in bullet patterns would be nice.

I also think it would be cool to crash into dinosaurs to clear the screen.

Really funny premise, and a very solid dodge 'em up that's both challenging and forgiving. Great job with the music, it really nailed the hard bass and retro feel. Managed to wipe out 88% of the dinosaurs with 23340kg meteor.

Wow, apparently I am the worst meteor! Only wiped out 70% of the dinosaurs!

Fun game!

Oh hey, I remember you guys from your LD41 entry! Good to see you again!

This is one of my favourite games I've played so far this jam. The graphics, sound effects, and general gameplay are all spot-on. I really like the fact that, despite it being a bullet hell game, you have so much health that you can't actually die, and the challenge thus becomes retaining as much health as possible. It puts a unique spin on things.

Looking through the previous reviews, it seems like I have the high-score so far:

I'm guessing that in order to wipe out 100% of the dinos, you have to collect every single piece of rubble and not get hit once? Good luck to anyone who can pull that off!

@noam-blei The name is the actual name of the asteroid! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_impactor

@avatargreggles Thanks a lot! Sadly it's only a few minutes long - we would have added more waves with more time!

@somogy Thanks!

@tricky-fat-cat I'm glad we captured that "arcade" experience. We tinkered with the difficulty curve a fair amount so it's nice to hear you thought it was smooth.

@digitalcrest thanks for playing to the end!

@slammer Thanks for the review - flow is a great feeling to find in a game!

@squidzilla 77% is a great score! Our artist appreciated being called a "pixelmaster". Our musician will accept "evil genius". :smile:

@mikoziq Thanks for sharing your score! Tonnes would definitely make more sense! We didn't think the realism through... then again, as you say, there are space dinosaurs - so maybe a tiny asteroid is the least of the immersion breaking!

@hank-ather It really did feel like cramming it in! The sprite sheet is completely filled, and we were close to running out of tokens (not that I'd been very austere in the first place though!)

@guimoliveira I hear a few people have been having an ethical dilemma about the game! Feel free to wipe out as many or as few as you want ;)

@simplepotential We hoped to get the blood pumping a bit! We often do more experimental things in LDs, so it was nice to do something a bit more grounded and polish it quite a lot.

@ic-rainbow I'm glad you found it fun! "keep it alive" - also potentially "you are the monster"!

@aimainiac We tried really hard to ensure the dinos were introduced and explained, so I'm glad you picked up on it!

@harusame thanks for sharing your score! I agree, waves 6-7 were rushed a little bit and lacked the focus/increase in difficultly of the previous waves. Thanks for the feedback!

@ltyrosine thanks for the review! a few people have mentioned their pity for the dinosaurs - maybe we drew them too friendly looking :smile:

@finntastico I think a few people thought they could destroy the dinos by crashing into them. Glad you worked out that wasn't possible! Potentially a feature we could have implemented - some kind of tradeoff between an easier wave but losing mass by crashing into them. Yes, diagonals are faster. I tried making it equal but it felt too slow when moving on diagonals, so I left it the "wrong" way. If you worked that out you can say it's a "pro gamer strat" :wink:

@linetaru thanks!

@matthewrobo The homing bullets are definitely the most controversial - we tried to tread the line between difficult and frustrating, but may have got it wrong. thanks for the feedback! We thought about crashing into dinos but worried that it might make the game a bit too easy and more about crashing and attacking than dodging.

@gamepopper Great score! Space dinosaurs was one of the first ideas we had and we knew we'd struck gold.

@nsadie 70% isn't a bad score at all! Thanks for playing :)

@f1krazy I thought I recognised your username when I reviewed your game! Glad you see you're still around :smile: I'm glad you enjoyed the game, and thanks for the positive review of the scoring system. It's something we thought about a lot - having a difficult challenge without frustration is something we really aimed for, so it's nice that you think we hit that mark! 91% is a great score - I'll be honest, 100% was set arbitrarily at 25000kg - which may or may not actually be possible :grimacing: There's some randomness with the debris, so it's hard to work out what the actual mass is. I suspect it's possible though!

LOL Cute game.. Really enjoyed it :)

Got 78%, was a lot of fun. Took me a second to get the tie in to the theme but I loved the graphics and music!

One of my favourite games of the jam :) It was far too late before I truly understood the implications of my actions :( I really enjoyed the fact it was a non punishing bullet-hell. Something really rare - its so common that getting hit will wipe you out and you need to start over. Lovely entry!

Really enjoyed this, even though I only wiped of 61% of the dinosaurs. Music, graphics and gameplay were all excellent.

Cute game with great sprites and sound effects!

Hey guys ! Congratulations for such a great job, I especially loved the huge boss sprites !
I made a little review video about it, in case you want to check it out :

"Interesting" premise :) I managed to get through it all (wiping out 57% of the dinosaurs), which is unusual for me in this sort of game!

Nice music and graphics, and overall a very compelling game.

GAME DESIGN

The game was we designed, I love the variation presented and the little challenge to collect debris. The controls were very good and the hitbox detection was on point!

FUN

I played this game 2-3 times, that much fun I had! This reminded me of the good ol arcade games, and it still blows my mind how people are using pico-8!

INNOVATION

I love how the attacks feel coordinated! and there's a pattern to everything, the orbits are like counter which reminds us how much time we have left!

THEME

A cool interpretation of the loop! The orbits mainly worked as a countdown, so a simple way of using it(game design wise)!

GRAPHICS

The artwork was fantastic, the boss fights were amazing and love the art direction!

MOOD

The music, artwork and whole premise was very cool! A totally unique interpretation of that era!

HUMOR

For me the humor was on point! I was laughing at various things in-game, and also made up a small back story to Chicxulub,how he meets a time traveling human who came to this planet where asteroids live and the human asks this dude for help to kill the dinos!

AUDIO

Love the adaptive music in the game, very few games have it in a jam and tip of hat for that!

Congratulations to the entire team for the entry and all the best for future projects!

Those pesky dinosaurs! I knew they conquered space travel right before they were wiped out! :D I got 94% at the end, which is fine, I guess. I do like myself some chicken every once in a while. Keeping the smaller ones alive has it's merits ;)

Jokes aside, this was game really really good! The premise may be simple but the execution was on point! The controls were super snappy and perfectly balanced for such a fast paced bullet hell game (though, it seemed that going diagonally made you go faster then going straight... did someone forget to normalize the speed vectors? :D)
The soundtrack and sound design in general was also perfect. Loved the game boy tunes. The soundtrack was awesome as well. Pumping and fast, keeping you on your toes at every second. But what really took the cake was the art work. Just wow! So much stuff going on. So many different enemdies end even two distinct bosses! Kudos. Aside from the obvious stuff, I also appreciated the balancing and progression in your little game. Every orbit felt a little bit harder and after the first boss you even introduced new enemies to keep the player enganged for another four orbits. I was guessing that you would just take the easy way and and recycle the first four orbits again, but you proved me wrong.

Really, this was great! The conclusion was also very nice, getting a score at the end is always a welcome surprise :) Congrats to this awesome entry!

Niiiceeee.

100% should be possible with cleaner play, though I don't think I can be bothered to try for it right now.

This was great, your design choices were great, the music was surprisingly good for pico-8 and the graphics were effective too. Really nothing to complain about.

Thanks for the detailed post-mortem writeup too! Awesome job.

I used pico-8 as well! I really liked you game, it feels very complete and well put together. The music in particular was excellent and really set the tension for the game. I think you nailed the difficulty progression, although I wasn't sure whether I was ever close to losing. The homing shots were challenging but fun, I tried to see whether I could cause them to loop back and hurt the enemies, but I couldn't tell whether that was possible or not. I would have liked some way to get back at those dinosaurs! The overall presentation was really great, nice job!

@spawncampgames thanks!

@tryston the relation to the theme is a little tenuous! but orbits are technically a loop :smile:

@honest-dan thanks so much! A "non-punishing bullet hell" seems like it should be a oxymoron but I'm glad you think it worked!

@harmadillo thanks for the positive review and for sharing your score!

@kaeveris thanks!

@satanos the video is really awesome, thanks so much for taking the time to make it and sharing it with us.

@frank-gevaerts definitely "interesting"! :smile: Ensuring everyone could complete the game was high on our priority list.

@kaafirookie thanks so much for the kind words and thorough review! We took a lot of time ensuring the hitboxes were good and fair, so thanks for picking up on that. I liked your backstory too - I never thought we'd get fan fiction written about this game :smile:

@duke 94% is one of the best scores we've seen, congratulations! Your joke about chickens is actually very apt - we designed and almost had a chicken enemy in the game! thanks for the in depth review.

@ddrkirbyisq 98% is an insane score! :open_mouth: definitely the highest I've ever seen. I'm glad you read and enjoyed the post mortem too, thanks a lot.

@reef always nice to see more pico-8 games (with very common ideas too!). Using the homing shots to hurt enemies is a really cool idea! We toyed a few times with ways you could fight back, but none of them seemed intuitive enough - maybe using the homing shots could have been it!

Wow, who knew dinosaurs flew spaceships to protect the Earth from asteroids?!? This game is incredibly educational!

Regarding the above comment: I'm just joking! The game is just so funny! I love how the wacky music goes hand-in-hand with the concept of dinos in space shooting fireballs at rocks.

@peace-of-cake-games in a world where asteroids go into orbit first before impacting, it's entirely reasonable for dinosaurs to fly spaceships :)

Great game ! Had heaps of fun ! Reminds me of Dinosaur-Laser-Fight. Amazing, art works perfectly in synergy with audio, gameplay is fair and not slippery at all. As a fan of bullet hells, I really enjoyed this ! Thank you so much for submitting this at my stream ( www.twitch.tv/drjavasaurus )

wow! only 70% of the dinosaurs were wiped out. but I had a blast playing this.

The pixel art is so great in this game. exactly how I imagined dinosaurs in space!

fun gameplay and some really good ideas on the different kind of weapons of the dinosaurs.

great job!

I managed to wipe out 88% of them!

This game is funny, but the best part to me is the music. It's sooo good to hear and set you in the right mood. I'm impressed! The sfx are also well done and integrate well with the music itself.

The visual are simple but funny, and overall is very cohesive. Being done in PICO-8 I guess you used basically the whole sprite sheet just to make the bosses ahah

As for the control, they are good enough, but I would have preferred some sort of "smoother" movement, like with a bit of friction. It seems to fit more with the asteroid thing, even though it would have been clearly harder to control.
Pacing is good, with some panel here and there to take some seconds of break, but maybe it would have been better if the game was a bit shorter. It's not that becomes boring, but near the end it was a bit repetitive and I kept playing to see the end. This is personal though, probably someone else would have preferred even more!

I liked how you handled health: instead of a bunch of lives and game over, you have this score system, and therefore it's not about reaching the end let's say but more about reaching the end as big as possible. This makes the experience engaging and also not frustrating cause I don't have to restart the game every 4-5 hits. It also let you add more chaos to the screen without caring too much if the player will be able to avoid all of them because some hits don't hurt that much.

Theme is not very clear to me, probably the orbit thing is the only thing I can relate with the theme, but being only written and not even visible makes it a weak connection.

Overall, this is a great entry, very polished, great work!

Nice health mechanics, and therefore clever twist on the ending.

I'm already a huge fanboy of PICO-8, but still, those boss sprites are :heart_eyes:, and the overall looks very polished, so :v:

Hey, I played your game on stream! It was a heap of fun, here’s the vod if you’d like to rewatch; https://www.twitch.tv/videos/781363405

Thanks for submitting your game!

We played this on stream this weekend!

I actually liked this one a lot. :slight_smile: Making a SHMUP without the shooting was a super neat idea, and the art on display was charming as hell. :smile: I appreciate how you handled the health in this game in order to ensure that players are more likely to see all of your content. Super important for a jam game!

Awesome job here!

Nice and very polished entry! You got me playing until the end ;-) Loved the retro graphics and music.