To add a bit to what ThisIsAvery wrote, it might be a good idea to prototype your next game before ever adding graphics. Make sure that the basic gameplay is enjoyable before anything else.

I always reach a point where I get sick of working without graphics and have to either stop development or add some cool art/sounds/etc. but the basic mechanics are generally the very first thing I get done. There might be some tweaks later, but there's no point spending time on graphics, sound or a tutorial for a game that isn't fun to play. It might be a good idea to get people to try your games out fairly early on. Once you think you've got the mechanics down, ask a few people if they think it's fun.

I do think this game has potential, but it would need some major changes. I don't think you can turn it into a great shmup without redoing everything, but you have other options. Consider removing weapons entirely and focus on dodging and multi-path exploration. It wouldn't require as many big changes and that would set it apart from other games. Maybe the lack of weapons would naturally force players to think about the game differently. That might, in turn, cause other atypical features to be easier to comprehend. Maybe...

In regards to a lack of weapons, we have an algorithm in place to spawn them in unused rooms. We're trying to keep the players moving around the map as much as possible.

Well, it sounds like you've got the right idea. I'm not sure it works yet, though. Weapons often seemed to spawn in the middle of occupied areas rather than in empty rooms.

If an enemy or yourself is flashing it means you're hit and invulnerable for a short amount of time and cannot fire. This allows the player to get away/relocate. Other than this there should be no reason a projectile hit an enemy and not count as a hit.

There might be collision-detection problems then. I'm 90% sure that I fired at non-flashing enemies multiple times without doing any damage at all.

Sometimes I seemed to lose more than one health block from a hit as well. Do explosions do more damage?

I don't think a tutorial is necessary, but I do think things need to stand out a lot more (the ammo, for example).

I'm also not sure why you can choose the number of weapons at the start. It seemed to imply that I'd be able to carry multiple weapons at once.

Disclaimer: This is written from the point of view of someone who doesn't play bullet-hell shooters and generally avoids 2D platformers with mouse-aiming like the plague, so I'm lacking experience with this style of gameplay.


Movement

-The gravity boots work great, but I found myself really wishing that I could press Up and Down to move along walls. I think that would feel more comfortable, and you kind of have to be comfortable when dodging so many bullets.
-The wall slide is kinda cool, but maybe a bit fast to feel strategic (ie. if I slide, I'm nearly always going to go to the top of the wall rather than stopping at specific points). I also found myself often sliding up walls when I didn't want to or wasn't expecting it.
-The jetpack seems quite good, but because of a bug (mentioned later) I avoided it most of the time.

-Depending on what you pick, it seems some areas of the level are rendered useless. For example, I couldn't get up to the platform on the right using the wall-slide ability. I can get very, very close, though, which makes it a bit frustrating.


Weapons

-The shotgun felt basically useless. I felt it had too much spread and not enough speed or damage. You weren't kidding when you said it had a long reload speed. I think it's too long, though. Have you considered giving me two shots before reloading? (When I start a match, I do seem to get two shots, but not after that)
-The machine gun felt all right. It doesn't fire as rapidly as its name would suggest, though.
-The laser gun deals far too little damage to be useful. I feel like it should be stronger but run out of power after a while and have to recharge.

-The teleport gun is strange. Its incredibly long cooldown originally made me think it only worked once per match. It also doesn't always take me all the way to where I clicked. If I can't teleport to an upper platform from the ground, it's basically useless.
-The black hole gun wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be. I think the range could be increased. The first time I used it, I didn't think it was even sucking in anything. The biggest change I'd recommend, though, is that the projectile should be blocked by walls. As it is, I was never sure where the black hole would open up.
-The matter gun has a similar issue in that I never knew where the first block would appear. Other than that, though, it's all right.
-The time warp gun has the same issue, and I hate how its size is restricted by the walls/ground. I didn't see any real use for it.

-Despite the decent variety in the secondary weapons, I didn't find any of them useful in the slightest.
-The low-speed projectiles I fire make aiming at anything in the distance pretty difficult. I didn't really like that, because it kind of limited me to one of two playstyles: spray-and-pray or get-in-close-and-actually-aim. I like precision, and I expect that people who love bullet-hell games probably would to.


Other Comments

-I'm not a fan of games where Up is jump, but it works for games using the arrow keys. Using WASD, though, I kept hitting the Spacebar like I do in most WASD-controlled games.
-It would be nice to be able to start a game with only a primary weapon. I kind of wanted to try playing without any special movement skills, but I wasn't allowed to.
-It might be a good idea to make the gun change position when facing left or right, and to do it before you get too far into development.
-I feel like maybe the game should be more empowering. Let me slice through a huge number of enemies with the laser. Let me blast enemies with the shotgun and watch them go flying. You can always spawn more enemies to replace the zillions I destroy, and I'll still have to avoid bullets while doing it.
-I didn't like not being able to quit during a match. When I ran into bugs and wanted to try another configuration, I had to wait to die or close the whole program. Not ideal.
-I'd recommend making a HUD of some sort. Even just a simple, text-based on would be nice so testers can see their weapons recharging/reloading.
-Most bullet-hell games seems to use the "only the center of your ship/character matters" style of collision-detection. I wonder if that would work well here.
-The level seemed to fill up with enemies very quickly, but that may only be an issue because of the things I mentioned about the weapons.


Bugs

-I tried the gravity boots first, and then selected the jetpack for the next round. I ended up with both. Even closing the program didn't change that, but somehow I got rid of the bug later on. I'm not sure what did it.
-Sometimes secondary weapons I selected weren't given to me in the game and I was stuck using the one I used previously.


I feel like it needs direction/focus. It's a bullet-hell game without the ability to be precise in your movements and it's difficult to aim accurately at distant enemies. You've also got all these different abilities and weapons, but most don't seem to benefit the player in any way right now. I had the most luck, and the most enjoyment, just jumping around on the ground floor with the machine gun.

It's a decent start, though. The basic movement feels all right. There's some good enemy variety (although I wish more were different sizes and had different weapons). I didn't encounter any frame-rate issues at all.

The basics were easy to understand, yes, but I think it's really lacking in player feedback. I didn't have any indication of what weapon I had equipped (after the initial pickup) and didn't know how many bullets I had left without keeping track myself. Shooting didn't feel responsive. I guess there's a delay between shots that's enforced, but it just felt like in frantic, close-quarters situations I couldn't hit the enemy because it wouldn't let me shoot.

I also spent a huge amount of time without any weapon at all, it seemed. They don't have much ammo, and the pickups don't respawn particularly often. They also seem to pop up in clusters, so there are often areas of the map that have nothing.

Many times, my projectiles would hit enemies and do nothing. Sometimes I even seemed to get hurt, while the enemy didn't. I don't know if I just didn't understand the weapons or if there are collision-detection issues, but it was pretty frustrating.

I'd give it a 6/10, but that's using the "5 is average" scale. It's decent but there doesn't seem to be a lot to it and the combat isn't as fun as it could be because half the time I'm not participating (no weapon/ammo or waiting to be able to shoot again).

I played against the AI, which seemed to work quite well.

It was all right, but would have been more fun if I'd been in combat more.

It would be nice to be able to use my mouse in the menus, or at least navigate left and right with the gamepad rather than having that change my selections. I think the level design/generation could use some work, because there were a lot of rooms with only one entrance that were pretty useless.

I really like the music a lot. The graphical style is also pretty cool, although the characters aren't as defined as I'd like. In-game, they just look like balls of light as opposed to characters.

I feel like if the player enables music, then it should start right away. Not having the music start up again just makes it seem broken.

I'm not sure if the player needs to be able to continue when they die. If, like you said, it only takes about ten minutes to play through it, then that's not bad. It's kind of rogue-like-like if you have to start over when you die. What I would like, though, is to be able to continue if I have to quit for whatever reason.

As far as difficulty, do you know what mode your other testers were playing? Quick Play mode seems ten times harder than the early levels of the "campaign". Sometimes it was so hard to find a safe route that I felt like there weren't any. I didn't encounter that sort of thing in the normal mode.

I'm glad I wasn't just being stupid.

The first thing I tried, just because I was curious based on my own experiences, is turning the music off and on again. It turned off just fine, but didn't come back until I started playing. On a related note, when I later died and went back to try quick play again, the music didn't play on the character selection screen.

The second thing I tried was opening up the menu during quick play...but there didn't seem to be any way to do that, or even to quit.

Anyway, I really like the menu music. The in-game music track #1 is a bit...samey? It's just kind of a constant drone with too little variation for my taste. Whatever track was playing during the tutorial, though, I liked quite a bit.

I really like the art, even though most of it isn't on-screen very long. I don't think the game over screen fits the rest of the art at all, though. The difference in style is actually pretty jarring.

A custom cursor might be nice. The default windows cursor just looks so bland next to the nice sprite work.

In terms of gameplay, I really like it. I have to wonder if the Reveal spell is a good idea, though, considering it goes against the whole point of the game. Memory castle plays really well, and I can see it being the sort of game people will try to get better and better at. It works great, has very simple controls and is presented quite nicely. I don't really have any problems with the gameplay at all. The tutorial was also well made.

One question: Are you planning a "Continue" option, or do players have to go through the entire game in one shot?

I have a feeling I'm just missing something stupidly obvious...I went to your GameJolt page, but all I see is a download for the soundtrack, not the game.

I just tried the game again, using the shortcut rather than the EXE...and it failed to load, even though the shortcut points to that file. Weird.

You lost the ability to fire because your energy fell below 10. Your life and beam energy draw from the same source. I suppose it should display a message when the player tries to fire in this circumstance.

Yeah, or at least a flash of the energy reading to draw attention to it. That's a bit weird, though, since I never felt like the beam was drawing energy (It really wasn't noticeable). It's also a bit of an issue when doors are opened by shooting.

The game seems to do everything it can to keep the player from shooting (using energy, not giving a weapon at first, having a very slow rate of fire), but it's presented as a scrolling shooter. Maybe the tutorial needs to show that it's not a shooter (focus on taking multiple paths), or the game needs to be altered to make it feel more like one.

The one-shot-per-press is an intentional limitation of the gun. There's actually a more advanced beam hidden in a secret area that auto-fires.

I thought that might be the case. I feel like maybe there should some feedback about when the gun is ready to fire, or it should fire right away when I press the button. Half the time, I'd press it just a little too early and it wouldn't fire, but I didn't feel like I had time to wait because enemies were approaching.

I figured holding a button down to accelerate was more natural, like the gas pedal of a car. Perhaps the pacing issues are due to map design? Maybe the maps should cut down on vertical obstacles and invite the player to accelerate more often.

I think boosting by holding a key only feels good (to me, anyway) when I'm already going at a decent speed. I used the boost out of frustration that I was going so slowly. Giving me more chances to accelerate won't change the fact that I wish I didn't feel the need to.

Do you think anyone would want to play it through if I resolved the issues you mentioned?

I can't tell you whether or not to finish it. I tend to put games aside quite often and then come back to the idea later and improve upon it...only to put the new version aside. It's a good way to learn, but a terrible way to actually finish any games.

I think your game shows a lot of potential, and most of the issues I mentioned should be fairly simple to fix (if you feel like fixing them; I'm only one person with an opinion, after all). It's mostly a matter of giving the player timely, helpful feedback/info. With a few changes (like keeping the program open when I die), I'd probably play more of it.

I really like the menu music a lot, even though it's a short loop. The music in-game got a bit irritating to me, probably because I had to listen to it loop many more times. It's not bad, but I think there needs to be more to it.

I was shocked by how slow the movement is. I guess it's not a huge issue, though, when enemies are coming at you.

The tutorial felt really drawn out. I was able to move around and boost within about a second, but I had to spend minutes flying around obstacles. That seemed like far too much.

When I encountered the first enemies, the Press D thing either wasn't on-screen or wasn't noticeable so I ran into one of them. Maybe it should show up before they do, or at least earlier. Likewise, the "Press Spacebar" text shows up long before I should be pressing spacebar.

It would be nice if I didn't have to press D for every shot and could just hold it.

Then I pressed Escape to pause and it quit the entire game. That was a bit annoying. At worst, I thought it might take me back to the title screen. Completing the tutorial quit the game as well, as did dying...Why?

I don't like that my ship looks worse than anything else in the game. It's so faded and lacks and sort of detail.

The destructible wall in the tutorial has different graphics from in the actual game, so when I saw it later, I slammed into it after being surprised that shooting at it didn't work.

Some mines are in locations that seem unavoidable. I got damaged by one that was off-screen right after I picked up some super-missiles in a "secret" area.

Bug: My settings got reset when I started the game up again. What is "Partial Screen Rendering", by the way?

Bug? The stars in the background only show up in a thin, horizontal strip during the Tutorial.

Bug? I got damaged by mines and lost the ability to fire. That was at the beginning of a room, so maybe I lost it from something else but the Beam part of my HUD said "Short" and yet I couldn't fire.

Slight Issue: Boosting caused a little bit of stuttering sometimes, as if the camera couldn't properly keep up or something.


It's pretty good, from what I played. I don't particularly like the incredibly slow pace, but the multiple paths are good. I do think that the tutorial needs some work, and some of the level design could be improved a bit as well. Have you considered making the faster speed be default, and holding a key to slow down instead?

Your new turning-around setup sounds good. I've done things like that in my own games before and it seemed to work well.

I'm not sure a laser would make any difference. They security always shoots directly at the player, so there's no question of where they're going to be aiming. The issue for me was managing to jump between two locations without them hitting me while I was in the air. That could be helped greatly by increasing the time between shots just a little bit.

Another thing that might be a good idea, and would certainly help a LOT in a few rooms, would be a slight delay between a security drone's activation and the first shot (like "reflexes" but for electronics). There was one room in particular where I got killed over and over and over the instant I dropped to the ground (it was on the way back and it starts with some tall stairs you drop down).

I don't think you need to worry about lower gravity making things much easier. Players will still get shot down if they don't time jumps well.

I basically agree with TriStarch's points.

I think my main problem with the guns is that I have to jump to hit them. With one bar of health left, it was that last action that got me killed most of the time. I could reach them and shoot easily, but I'd generally get hit during my jump. I don't mind the speed of the enemy bullets, but I think they fire just a little bit too often.

I'd also suggest that you either make respawns pause briefly, or don't act on key presses until the player releases the keys and presses them again. If I die, I respawn at the door and sometimes fly out onto a spike before I've even realized I've respawned.

The game is much better now, though. I managed to get all the way from the computer to the "red spinny thing" with only one bar of health, so it's much more doable now. I did kinda like the guns they way they were before, though, when they activated as if your hacking had turned on the security system.

Yeah, I figured out that trick for the blue cars after I wrote that, but I forgot to erase it. Oops.

I like the idea of car patterns, although there's something to be said for randomness too, so maybe a combination would be good.

As far as the arrows, maybe the range could be decreased. The way it is now, I might have five arrows at the top of the screen at a given time, and I have to remember which one showed up first. Since knowing what's coming up far in the distance isn't particularly helpful, maybe arrows should just pop up right before a car appears to give the player a really brief warning. Detection range could increase with the player's speed, so that the player always has enough time to react.

Yeah, you have a point about luring in new players. I guess releasing a demo for this sort of game wouldn't work too well either. Any idea what you'd be selling for real money?

Ok, so I gave it a try.

My biggest issue with it is how long it takes to restart (PC version). I shouldn't have to take my hand off the keyboard to click a few times with my mouse. I want to get back into the game. Being able to just hit the enter key a couple of times or something would be great.

The sound at the beginning is really irritating to me, for some reason. It sounds like the car is shifting gears, but it happens three times in quick succession.

I really like how the different cars behave differently. I was hoping for that. The game also handles very well. It's enjoyable just to drive the car. I actually recovered from crashes quite often. I did feel like blue cars tracked me a little too well, though. I could rarely avoid them, but I could survive collisions with them most of the time.

I agree with jc that it's unclear what the goal of the game is. Every time I die, it tells me I got a "New Record" but doesn't say what that record was.

The car placement seems very random. I would suggest creating some rules to make it a bit more calculated. That would also help introduce more of a difficulty curve. You could have fewer green cars the farther the player gets, for example.

I felt like the arrows should change size or something, so that the player can tell which cars are closer than others. Either that, or get rid of them. I generally felt like I had enough time to avoid things, so I didn't even look at the arrows most of the time.

As far as monetization, I'd play this on mobile with ads until I got bored and then never touch it again. I'd never pay for anything in it, and wouldn't play it on PC (except for testing purposes, obviously). The base game seems to need a lot more substance, in my opinion, and then maybe you could just charge a small amount for it rather than relying on ads or micro-transactions.

Bug: Some coins up ahead of me disappeared without me (or anything else) touching them.

Bug: Sometimes pressing Enter on the New Record screen adds a space to my name...and not even at the end. Seems weird.

Bug: I died and restarted but the screeching sound went on and on. Even quitting to the menu didn't stop it.

Bug: Sometimes cars seemed to spawn too close to the edge of the road. Blue ones would jitter when trying to move toward me, but wouldn't be able to. Other cars spawned in the very center of the road sometimes. I feel like the game might feel better if it had well-defined lanes.

Edit:

Just got curious about the json scores file. It looks like it might not be saving properly. If I'm reading it right, a couple of entries have my name as "Player class:com.dreamcatcher.getaway.ScoreData,name..." which blends into the next entry (ie. the quotation marks are missing, which screws up everything that comes after).

Okay, I'm working on getting the physics to an acceptable place, as well as making spikes push you back when you hit them so you don't die in one hit from them. I've already implemented saves for every door you go through.
I've slowed down the player speed to 2/3 of current and made the jump arc take longer so far. Hopefully that will be enough.

All those changes sound great. Lookin' forward to trying the new version.

I didn't play through the entire thing, but that was only because I was in the middle of other stuff when I decided to take a break and try it.

Controls were pretty good. I'm not sure why there's a run button. Walking slowly seems almost entirely useless. The mouse control works well, but I would've liked some more feedback. Maybe a mouseover effect, in addition to the selection glow. I did get stuck briefly at the first teleporter because I was standing in front of it and that kept the connection from working.

From the short bit I played, level design seemed fine. I may play more later.

The only "big" gameplay-related issue I had with the art was the particle effect when I clicked on things. It seemed to suggest that my click was having an effect, when it really wasn't. I also feel like the enabled/disabled blocks could show their state a little more clearly (ex. become more transparent when disabled). I found the tutorials sufficient, although the slow-time one was a bit weird. Some of the animation is a bit disappointing or strange (ex. the falling animation, where the character just sticks out a foot for some reason). Deaths lacked impact. A damage flash seems to work better when you have health. For a one-hit death, I would've expected an animation.

I noticed right away that the title screen was playable. It was accidental. I just started clicking on things, wondering if there was a way to activate that object (which I didn't know was a teleporter). The title screen actually taught me much of what I needed to know, before I even got into the game.

I don't think I encountered any bugs, except maybe a moving block that went into a wall slightly before snapping to the proper position. From what I played, it seems like a pretty good game.

Ah, I see. In that case, I think the game needs to say that somewhere (that the first bird to lose all its lives is all that matters).

As for the difficulty, it may just be a matter of increasing the speed more quickly.

Having never played "Loopin' Louie" I wasn't sure what the point of it was. You said to "protect the ripoff birds" but it seemed like I was protecting them from...other ripoff birds?

In any case, it seemed incredibly easy (or it just takes far too long for the difficulty to ramp up). For a while, I wasn't even sure if it was possible to lose. At one point, I was curious how long it would take so I stopped doing anything. I gave up waiting to lose because the birds got hit so rarely that it was going to take forever.

I don't see the point of giving each bird multiple "lives". It's already very easy to last a long time without any of them getting hit. I think a total of four lives is reasonable.

Anyway, the game works fine, looks decent and I didn't mind the music (although I imagine it would get very, very repetitive if I played until I lost).

Some screenshots and/or a video would be nice.

Anyway, I downloaded it but my antivirus said it "could be" a trojan or exploit of some sort, so I didn't end up playing it. Any idea what your code does that might've caused it to be flagged?

I agree with the suggestions made by NewProject and TriStarch.

It seems very simplistic, although I didn't play through the entire thing. If there are more interesting features that come into play after the teleporter, I think maybe they should be introduced much sooner.


If you're going to have choke points, I think maybe the player "character" should be smaller. The way it is now, it's just a bit finicky fitting through one-block spaces.

It would be nice to be able to slide along a ramp by pressing against it. Sometimes it works very slowly, but other times it doesn't work at all.

The prototype is promising. I like the ideas and the overall feeling, but wish there was just more to it. There was no challenge, tension or excitement in any of the levels I played, but I get the feeling you could change that without too much trouble.

Well, I'm not a huge MegaMan fan, but I have played a few of the games. MegaMan has a short period of invulnerability after every hit, as well as a pretty long life bar. It also has very tight controls, so the challenge is often in the timing of jumps rather than the jumps themselves. Deaths in those games feel like they're from lack of skill rather than lack of control.

I really didn't find jumping and landing particularly difficult once I got used to the very strange physics, but dodging lasers while making precise jumps with overly-sensitive movement controls was a different story.

It's not about difficulty. It's about lack of control and deaths feeling incredibly cheap (losing all my health to something that touched me only briefly) or buggy (flying out of a door into the spikes unless I'm lightly tapping the directional keys, which is a weird way to play a platformer).

I wouldn't recommend changing the frame rate. That won't help much, and it might make the controls feel worse. Why not just change the variables involved?

Suggestions:

-Decrease gravity slightly.
-Set up acceleration as Xienen proposed, so that you don't instantly move so far.
-Don't have health disappear so quickly.
-You said that you plan to add checkpoints, so I'd suggest adding them as soon as possible. Otherwise you risk testers being turned off by having to replay large sections over and over again.