Whirling Blades

Very fun game, looks and plays great! Nice work

This was the one I was most looking forward to trying from your posts throughout the jam.

I love the graphics, the game looks awesome! The idea is really cool and the animation of the tiles rising is a nice effect.

The game is pretty hectic, I'm impressed how many different mechanics you implemented.
Very strong submission, nice game!

Even the download page is cool as hell.

Fast paced indeed man. I was clicking the hell out of my mouse that my wrist hurts now ahaha

I got a rad sword and survived for 2 minutes and 42 seconds…

The looks and buttons are deceiving! This game is actually pretty hard. At least for me!

Really fun. It feels nice to just run around and slash stuff with a bit 'ol blade.
Really good graphics, as always. x)
Also, pretty interesting enemy designs. I like 'em.

Absoloutely love the art work in this, and the hit feed back is really well done, awesome job!

wow, one of the best games out here!

Easy to learn and hard to master, the best kind of game! I really enjoyed playing, the controls and movement feel simple and easy to use, the graphics are colourful and nice to look at the gameplay is top notch. My only real complaint is the music, which feels slightly unfitting (that and the small window is very easy to click out of, a fullscreen mode wouldn't have gone amiss).
Also, were you using PyOpenGL? I've been meaning to learn it myself

@baconinvader It uses Pygame. :P

@DaFluffyPotato just wondering if you were using both, pygame FTW :)

I just saw this featured on the front page of itch.io. Congrats @DaFluffyPotato.

@james_deans_jeans yep. ^-^

Looks amazing, plays really well. A bit too hectic but that was kinda what you were going for so I guess it's alright. I just cant appreciate the mechanics, I dont really feel like the items I have are meaningful to me, I'm just bashing buttons and having fun and the screen flashing red cause I'm bad.

Works reaaally well, the music and the arena hack'n'slash. Nice! :)

Cool fast-paced action! The game is super challenging, I was super busy left & right clicking, at least the game doesn't need our input to use items :P

A technical nitpick is that I easily lose focus by clicking outside the game window.

Gameplay-wise after a couple games I still have no idea how items, upgrades & enemies work. It doesn't prevent me from enjoying it, but given that your scores are much higher than us mere mortals, either we don't look closely enough or the game doesn't give enough hints.

Anyway your pixel art is excellent as usual, using an isometric perspective was a cool change and worked well. The visual effects & animations are good as well, especially how the character moves around the map. I also liked the sound work, the music does get a bit repetitive after a while but I liked how it fits the energic pace of the game.

@wan the idea behind the items was to add depth without adding initial complexity. :D

I really like the simplicity of the controls in this game, and how intuitive and simple the movement and combat is. It's really fun and arcadey. On the other hand, I don't really feel like I was engaged with the items I was collecting or what some of the enemies were doing, it was just a mad whirling, dashing riot. I seemed to be replanting the grass, but I don't know why. And then after I while that stopped happening and I don't know why. There really seems to be a lot of depth there, but something needs to be done to bring it out. But even not understanding a lot of what was going on, it was still fun, and that is definitely an achievement!

The art is really good, but some of it clashes a little bit. A different ground colour would help the trees and bushes stand out a bit and add some depth, and likewise a different colour for the purple ring things, which clash with the cleared ground areas.

I like the music, very energetic.

One of my favourites I've played, for sure.

Hack and slash, automatic inventory management, a variety of enemies, an ever growing world, corruption, two button controls; quite a combination this! Individually not uncommon, but together an original mix. Fits the theme too on multiple fronts.

Hacking and slashing then feels quite good, managed 5 minutes going around the periphery squishing the corruptors. Figuring out what each ingredient does, looking at the popups, wasn't too difficult. Why does gel make the sword more powerful though?

The visuals are fine although I find the sprite work to be somewhat lacking in the shading department. Kind of teetering between 8 and 16-bit palettes, if you catch my drift. The musical instruments are more like noises, annoying at that. Sound effects fall into the similar low-fi category. Not a fan.

The major issue I have with the interactivity, apart from becoming samey after a while, is the lack of a full screen mode. I kept clicking outside the window which always costs a bit of health. Changing the cursor would help too, mine is black so it pretty much disappears once corruption gets out of hand.

Ok work.

Overall: Above average (6)
Graphics: Above average (6)
Audio: Below average (4)
Gameplay: Above average (6)
Originality: Good (7)
Theme: Good (7)

If anyone's interested, I have started a guide for the game:

Figuring out Whirling Blades

@voxel First try 24:42:2. Easy. :P

Here's a hint: I used the "saving blueberries" strategy. However, the biggest impact was from a very basic strategy that you guys seemed to have figured out, but not perfected.