u/gold_snakeskin

I feel like I’m right there but I’ve been stuck repeating the same few actions for the past half hour.. I could use a hint!

Hi all - this is Pearl Essence, a dungeon-diving shooter that I like to call 'ecological bullet hell'. It has handcrafted rooms and enemy encounters mixed with procedural map generation and buildcrafting, and a growing roster of interesting enemies and bosses!

I've just pushed out a new update that allows for traversing a map of rooms for each stage, and basically the game has gone from being a decent foundation to finally taking shape as a coherent structure.

If you'd be interested in trying the public demo, please let me know what you think!

Hi all, this is Pearl Essence - an ecological bullet hell game. How does this look to you? It's a fair bit into a run so there's a lot going on but I wanted to show the various possible elemental interactions (of which there are many more!) Legibility and balancing the design of this game has been a fun and interesting challenge.

It's still in fairly early development but if this sounds and looks interesting to you I'd love to have you join the game's Discord server to try it and give me your feedback!

I'm working on a game called Pearl Essence - it's a 'Star of Providence meets Rift Wizard'-like, with elements of Nuclear Throne, Binding of Isaac, and Tiny Rogues.

One unique thing about this game is this tile-based elemental interaction layer underneath the real-time gameplay, where fire explodes with acid, arcane magic reacts with blood, water can freeze over or be electrocuted, and so on. Here's a clip of it in action

If you'd be interested in trying leave a comment or DM me! I would love to have your feedback as I'm working on getting a public demo live!

Been having a blast iterating from people's feedback for my game Pearl Essence, and I think with this latest pass I've finally reached a 'stable' state for my game's foundation. There are so many factors to balance - elemental tile interactions, different weapon types for both primary and secondary fire that can build into stronger versions, bombs, and so on. Many ingredients in this dish.

Here a player is using what was the best strategy in the game - putting arcane element on their primary fire to interact with the blood of enemies and cause chain reactions. Here's how I fixed it - since the player can put one of 8 elements on their primary fire, I made the bleed property a new element. This makes the blood + arcane synergy a necessary commitment between primary and secondary fire, lending more to the kind of 'sword and shield' or Bloodborne 'trick weapon and pistol' kind of dynamic I want with these systems.

If you'd be interested in trying the game, send me a DM!

Hi all - I'm working on a twinstick, bullet-hell roguelike called Pearl Essence. It's best described as 'Star of Providence meets Rift Wizard', with easy comparisons to Tiny Rogues or Binding of Isaac.

I've been lucky to get some great feedback from players, but I thought it might be fun to ask other devs how the game looks from a distance - does it look/sound fun? Does anything jump out as obvious changes?

One thing I'll say upfront is that the elemental tile-based system is currently just colored squares, but will be replaced with sprites pretty soon, making it significantly easier to distinguish between blood, fire, water etc.

I recorded a playtest a few days ago for another purpose, and I actually think this playtest would rank somewhat lowly in terms of making the game look its best due to many factors, but for that reason I think it works well for this.

And if this looks good to you - please reach out! I'd love to have you try it and get your hands-on feedback.

Thanks!

Hi, I have a workflow setup to package builds and deliver game updates to itch.io for the different games I'm working on. I began to run into issues with my storage, now that one of my games is over 100mb (x2 if I'm including the web build which I've stopped doing for this reason).

I made my build artifact storage only last 3 days but that doesn't seem to affect this usage limit. The game is still in pretty early development, so it's being updated regularly, and I need to have playtesters get access - manually uploading everytime I update main is pretty annoying. The limit just seems extremely low?

I'm on Github Pro + Copilot. I'll take any advice on how to do this better, and if the answer is just to dump $5 in every month then sure I can do that too.

Hey all - I've posted about this lore/worldbuilding tool here before, and now this tool/art thing is available on my itch for you to try yourself. The goal is to emulate the medieval scribal tradition, and it's heavily based on Kate Compton's Tracery concept.

I've been tweaking the text, footnote, and cypher generation and it's a challenge to get right. Since introducing Markov chains, I've managed to massively increase the amount of possibly generated text but of course meaning is quite hard to hold onto. I look forward to expanding this further.

I spent a few weeks creating a procedural filigree system which I think works quite well, adorning each page with glyphs and shapes as well as highlighting certain keywords.

Hey guys, wanted to share my game (working title is Pachinko but that’ll change soon!) I’ve been working on most of this year. It has bullet hell mechanics and a structure like an arcade game.

If that sounds interesting to you, please let me know and I’d be glad to send you the demo! I’m working my way to a public demo release so I could use all the feedback I can get!

I'm playing on a laptop with trackpad so pardon my shmupping :D

If this look interesting to you, please leave a comment! I would love to have some veteran shmuppers try it out and get their feedback. The game is currently finished to the level of a simple demo, about 10 mins to clear all the content if you're good, but it's not so easy!

Hey all - I've been working on this on and off for quite a while. I want to turn it into a strong worldbuilding resource that can print and save specific world states, but for now it uses replacement grammars and some lexical structures to create a fairly large (but not large enough!) set of different kinds of Medieval-esque documents - laws, poems, chronicles, genealogies, etc.

Hi all -

I posted an early version of this game at the beginning of the year, that had a different concept entirely (rotating the arena to control the falling of the ball). And while that concept still has a lot to it, I wanted to focus in on the arcade bullet hell concepts that have been of interest to me lately, stuff like bullet grazing, slow but dense patterns, precision dodging, and so on.

Next I'm working on enemy variety and elemental environment effects!

I've been having this issue recently where I can monitor and play my external synths from the OT, but when I record a sequence (rec + play) it does not play back. I want to emphasize that I've done it before for years with no problem with this exact setup and settings, but something seems to have changed and I cannot.

Here I'm demonstrating that I can in fact play the Blofeld from the OT using chromatic keys, but when I press play the channel sequence is not playing. I cycle through the track pages to show nothing really looks off far as I can tell. This phenomenon is happening for all of my external synths, not just this track. I haven't changed any global settings and like I said it used to work just a few weeks ago fine. Each instrument is separated from a MIDI splitter into its own input, so no issues with MIDI thru. The CC values on the MIDI track are not the issue as I can still monitor fine by playing.

Thanks for your help.