Soularis

The pixel art in this is really nice. And the sound! I truly can not get the same sound out of sfxr. I had a lot of fun collecting. But I found I could just spam the bombs to get a huge ring of souls, and then I was invincible. I could see lots of little add-ons to upgrade your character. A dodge, A bigger ring, A ring, but it's on FIRE!

@tinykidtoo thanks! yeah, there is a problem at some point that the game becomes too easy. not managed to solve it during the compo, going to fix in a post-compo edition

This looks and feels great to play. Genuinely enjoyable and had me playing for a surprising amount of time for such a simple concept. Great work.

I finally died because I wanted to turn them into friendly ghosts by touching them instead of shooting them ! :

Nice mood and very good use of the theme.

Looks great, but the difficulty increases too fast. Can't warm up.

@tweekus thanks for the feedback! yes, I've started balancing the game too late. i wanna fix it in the post-compo edition (if I will make it)

Man, it's so cool and breathtaking shmup. I'd like to see full release of this thing. One problem i've found - that is collecting souls for killing by projectile (it's making the game too easy), if you only collect souls by absorbing wizards inside circle, a dynamics will be much butter, i believe. Good luck!

Pretty cool! It's kinda hard to balance collecting souls and avoiding bullets but that's where the fun is

WOW, The sound is the best of what i've heard today.

That was super fun. I made it 256 seconds before it just became too much for my poor browser

such an original mechanic, makes for interesting gameplay, well done!

So like others have said, the game gets too easy once you realize you shouldn’t upgrade the souls and should just keep shooting. At first, I understood it differently — I thought you only got the souls by touching them and converting them directly, and that shooting just killed them without giving you the soul. I actually think that could be an easy fix — it would force the player to choose between staying safe and shooting, or risking it to get closer and capture the souls.

That said, you’d probably need to reduce the number of enemies, because when there were too many, it was impossible to get close without instantly dying.

But overall, I really enjoyed it. The pixel art looks great and the soundtrack is an absolute banger 🎶🔥 It’s amazing that you managed to pull this off for the compo — and seeing you used Ableton and Arturia plugins made me smile. Beautiful work! 👏

one of our game coders was playing this when you released it, so we all hopped on.
Really fun game, the gameplay is excellent and the vibe is great, genuinely solid game nice one!

The balance is weird. Upgraded souls seem to be somewhat lackluster, but maybe that's the whole point. It's more of a shooter than a vampire survivors game because of that.
I had ~5 fps after ~300 seconds and it made the game almost unplayable.

But the idea is quite fresh. I like this soul management. The ring-based soul collecting gets outdated too soon though. Or maybe I did something wrong.

a lot of fun! I will say that it gets really laggy pretty quick because of the sheer number of objects, and using explosions seems pretty over powered. Pretty satisfying game though!

Game got quite unplayable from ~150 seconds onwards xD

Loved the mood and graphics on this one. Are the orange ghosts the last / best? They kept shooting at everything but the enemies xD Cool entry!

Seems simple, but gets hard very fast. Thinking the merge soul mechanic acts against the game more than helping. Good job, liked the art and feel

really love the art in this. It might help with balance if you tune down the rate of spawning wizards, and maybe add a mechanic where a player can only claim a dead wizard's soul if they walk over the body of the wizard. This would force the player to make some tough decisions about where to move.

Really liked the music!