GUNSTABLE MAYHEM
MACHINE. WAKE UP.
NEW TARGET. PROCEED
In _GUNSTABLE MAYHEM_, the robot world of 2089 has been retaken by the human rebellion. You are *Machine*, the last in a long line of mechanical robots fuelled on blood. After 16 years, you are awake in a fragile, _UNSTABLE_ body. You must prevent your core from overheating it by ejecting it into the air. Get to work Machine, there are humans to eliminate.CONTROLS
- *WASD/Space* MOVEMENT- *Left Click* SHOOT
- *LShift* EJECT CORE
POWERUPS
- *Right Click* AKIMBO & TIMEWARP
Too much blood?
Turn down the blood ratio in the settings.Genres: platformer
Comments105
It kinda gave me Hotline Miami Vibes but in a good way :heart:
I don't think i completely understood the core mechanic
Really well done!
Terrific work there, well played.
The only downside i had was that it took me some time to understand the powerup system, but it was fine..
Also can we kill the boss? he's so fucking tanky lol
I might release a post jam update tomorrow to balance the boss, but my strategy is to aim for the head and run to a safe place to heal. Once you get the final powerup your core is immune to damage from the walls, so feel free to spam it inside those crate holes. :sweat_smile:
I must admit I really struggled with the wall-jumping, but otherwise really polished game!
Hilarious amounts of blood :p
The pixelated graphics are particularly nice, creating a nice ambience.
My only complain is that there isn't enough blood.
Excellent job on this entry.
@senevri There is one fairly long stretch between the autofire checkpoint and the next one, so I might add a new powerup somewhere between there in a post-jam update :D
On the other hand... well, I really, really don't like the level design. Usually that's not something that bothers me, but there were some bits in which the player has to fall down in a complete leap of faith because the camera doesn't reach that low, and some others where I got stuck or didn't know where to go. That was really frustrating.
Still, that didn't ruin the game by any stretch, but it did sour it nonetheless. It's a great game with a big flaw - and considering it's a jam, that still makes for a damn good experience.
I see the idea behind exposing the core, although it doesn't strike me as a great idea. Basically what I ended up doing was spamming shift to eject and reinsert the core inside the machine. It felt way too repetitive. If there was some mechanic boosting the player to eject the core, that would make the game epic! :slight_smile:
In the second level I fell under the level and was unable to get back. It felt very weird. :slight_frown:
Your game was very fun to play and I would love to see what this could be, should you invest more time into it. :thumbsup:
That last boss sure was tanky, I honestly thought it was invincible at first. All the other ones were basically balloons full of blood, maybe that's why they took many less shots to kill xD
Overall a really, really nice game, definitely one of my favourites so far. Bonus points for not just rotating the character's arms' sprites when aiming, nothing looks uglier than rotated pixel graphics :wink: If you ever decide to expand on this and release a full game, I'm going to buy it without hesitation!
Oh and one tiny issue, the HUD was scrambled and unreadable on my screen. Thought that it was part of the unstable theme until I saw your screenshots, I'm guessing it's because of playing on a 4K resolution?
Great submission!
A bit missed animation for jumps and wall jumps, but that's ok.
Where to begin with this?
This game leaves me so conflicted. There's so many good things going for it: the graphics, while minimal, are still pretty slick with all the glitchy effects and particles, the audio fits great, the variety of mechanics is impressive for a game jam game, and you even got a boss fight in. Overall, it comes off as very polished (which is even more impressive given this is a 1-man submission).
However (you knew there would be a "however", didn't you? :stuck_out_tongue:), this game has a bit of an identity crisis. A lot of the elements scream "intense action run-and-gun", such as the bullet ricochet, the deathswap, and the grapple. But a lot of the map design rewards stealth and strategic planning over reckless action.
Often I was punished for charging ahead as I can barely see 10 feet to the right and shooting an enemy offscreen that is clearly shooting at me can sometimes be a fatal mistake (particularly during the car chase section) when you deathswap. This is probably easiest to resolve as you could simply zoom out further (when aiming the mouse close to the edge of the screen? Or just in general).
On top of that, the wall jump is super hit-or-miss (I think some grace frames when you swap left/right arrow keys would help avoid missed inputs) resulting in the occasional failed recovery when I misjudged a jump distance (prior to unlocking grapple), thus requiring me to take things slower as failure equals immediate restart to the previous section. Not sure what the best approach at rectifying that issue is, perhaps either an _"oops you fell, here's 1hp left and we'll bounce you high enough to recover from the missed jump"_ or simply more frequent checkpoints (not sure I'm a fan of the 2nd option, that seems to be part of the appeal of the game). Ledge grab may be another solution.
And compounding on all of that is the fact that a lot of the mechanics aren't really explored to their full potential. I know this is almost certainly due to time constraint, but I feel like I should mention it for completeness sake. I wish the grapple was one of the first things introduced since it's one of the mechanics that's both super practical _and_ really fun. On the other hand the core throwing ricochet makes for cool trick shots, but really can be disregarded aside from the fact that throwing the core regens HP. It would have also been a nice touch to have the core throwing have some callback in the boss fight (ex: a fight stage that has high walls so you have to ricochet from above) since it seems to be a _core_ (pun) part of the game.
On a lesser note, but still worth mentioning, the background colors and moving patterns behind the boss made it really hard to see the bullets which caught me off guard completely the first time. Simply making them like, blue or something would help that.
With all that being said, the game was fairly technically impressive with 2D reflections and the slick screen distortion transitions. As a fellow dev who's totally into that kinda thing, congrats, here's my official seal of "I like it :thumbsup:". :stuck_out_tongue:
If this was to be a full game, I definitely see potential with some of the rough edges polished out. One of the better entries I've played so far, despite all it's shortcomings, so well done, you got me to write a short essay lol.
The idea of ejecting your core is great, feels like a solid concept for a game.
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will bLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will be loLS
I was brainstorming ideas for how to counter the occasional mishaps when the player falls into the water/road, and the idea of bouncing them up and removing 50-70ish hp feels like a good idea, however a ledge grab (if implemented well) could be good too. Of course for a full release each level will bLS
I don't know if it's a good score but in the end that's my result: