itch.io

As a reminder, consider all links in the comments to be scams. If I WERE making an update to this game which required a new itch.io page, I'd put it in the description, not a comment, because I have access to the page description lol

(And I AM working on another update to this, which should bring it significantly further in line with the original project)

Now that is some funny etymology

This post is in celebration of 1,000 Windows executable downloads (we're at 2.2k total downloads so I missed important milestones there)

My previous projects had gotten a couple hundred interactions at best before, this level of sustained attention is new to me lmao

"Echidna Wars DX" is still purchaseable from D-Gate's DLSite page, right here for less than $10 (although the price fluctuates with the exchange rate between USD and Japanese Yen)

"Echidna Wars Mini" is technically still accessible at this website, but you need to use an old third-party website and tell Java not to care about security in order to get it running, which is altogether too many obstacles for me to be happy with, which is why I made this project (and continue to perfect it).

If you're looking to mod Echidna Wars DX, you will want to obtain a copy legitimately first, and then visit the EverDriven discord server, where EverDriven is an overhaul mod for Echidna Wars DX, and the members there can help you mod your game.

Re: Point 2, enemies healing very quickly. I checked the code, they SHOULD (excluding unforeseen consequences) heal 1 hitpoint every 32-60 frames (depending on their eating animation lengths, a shorter animation means quicker healing), WHICH IS once to twice per second (it's the worm that heals every 32 frames, and I could probably artificially slow that animation down to take 48 frames instead...?)

Is it ACTUALLY true that enemies take half damage once they have captured a player character? It really limits your DPS- if it's not true, that'd get you double the friend-saving DPS and make Mirea plenty effective at saving characters.

1. Oh, this is helpful! I haven't been able to find anything on the level 2 attack, just 1 and 3. I'll get right on that.

2. They might be recovering every frame, instead of every animation + sound cycle, and they might be recovering way too much. What I know is that some (slime and jellyfish) are meant to spit out their capture after dropping below half health, which I don't remember whether I properly implemented. They DO take half damage from attacks while capturing, I did implement that though. I'll double check video evidence and compare notes again.

3. I originally had it exactly like this (press the button X times in Y seconds to escape) then I carefully read the user manual which said something about a gacha-type system for escape (which sounded like spend X health for a Y% chance to escape). I think both have their merits, and I could definitely add it to the list of things to include in an options menu once I know how that should look like.

4. See, I knew SOMETHING was going on with the inconsistent, infrequent item drops. I did a whole statistical analysis across multiple videos, tracking which rooms exhibited which enemies of which types dropping what at which frequencies. I believe I settled on a per-enemy sorta.... "juiciness" metric, which determines which item pool to select from. Enemies are either "regular" (25% chance to drop rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat), "ricey" (50% chance to drop rice), "meaty" (50% chance to drop meat), or "upgradey" (25% chance for rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat, ~3.9% to drop a pow-up, ~3.9% to drop a health-up [3/4 × 5/6 × 1/16). If you had more concrete stats, or could tell me otherwise why the slimes at the end of level 1-2 seemed to drop a meat when that's outside the expected range, or why the spawned slimes from le pipes ALWAYS dropped ONLY rice, that'd be awesome and amazing, stats are really tough to glean from limited video evidence.

And thank you for being so thorough with your feedback

Echidna Wars DX is a paid game, purchases of which support the original developers (which I encourage). I don't believe any ports to an HTML format exist for it? And I would highly recommend anyone wanting that, or wanting to MAKE that, to simply direct their attention to the official source of Echidna Wars DX.

If Asimofu and D-Gate go defunct and it becomes impossible to acquire legitimately from the dlsite, then I would consider it free game (pun not intended) and no longer piracy. Until then, though, please support the original creators by buying and playing their game!

Thanks for the feedback!

1. I've been desperate to figure out how Mirea's flight worked, because indefinite flying does feel broken, but I had no way to verify if any instance of a video showing the player no longer flying was due to a time limit being exceeded, or due to the player simply deciding not to fly any more. His is invaluable information.

2. That's interesting to hear! More guesswork on my part, this time due to the sprites- there's no flying + shooting sprite so I had assumed it was not an ability (while playtesting, I, too, find myself wanting to shoot while flying. This should be a really easy fix, simply removing the "&& not flying" from the prerequisites to shooting as Mirea. [Maybe also confirming it looks correct.])

3. (& 4.) This one will be tougher to properly implement, but sounds correct. Levels should keep track of which pre-generated items in each room have been collected, including Pukis.  Actually, if they always respawn (minus the Pukis) on level reload, that makes it easier, as I don't have to carry over knowledge of which items were collected indefinitely, and can naively reload the level from static data on level start (minus, of course, pukis, which are already tracked indefinitely, in your save file.)

5. Good to know. As they are now, they ONLY lose all HP, and keep their health/weapons upgrades. There is a central "kill character" code block that I can pretty simply add "also set the levels back to 0" to. This also implies, level-design-wise, the developer should be fairly benevolent with level ups.

6. Woah that's not good!! I'm not sure why that's happening (i.e. this will take a while to figure out...), I'll have to investigate this more closely.

7. I'll revisit the enemy behavior code, as capture and digestion SHOULD preoccupied the enemies, with the exception of the lamia, who moves around (and possibly attacks w/o capture ability) while digesting. Possibly my janky-ass target-priority code needs to be rewritten.

8. (& 9.) Sachiho's room is incomplete, yeah... What one might also note is level 3 ends "late", with the player jumping up to end the level instead of there being a hitbox in the final room, on that final platform, to end the level. I haven't implemented a "level-end trigger" hitbox type, they've all been screen transitions sorta hijacked for multiple purposes. The puki, delta, cat, AND flowing curtain are in-game, I just have no appropriate protocol for an animated background (or foreground) element and never picked a best way to implement such.

10. I'll be honest. It wasn't very fun to work on, was a pain to test, and a personal deadline was rapidly approaching, so I did what I could and called it good enough. I really should get on top of PROPERLY implementing ALL of the "help!" icon because it does look really nice in the videos and will look nice once implemented.

11. I am fairly sure I implemented the worm's vacuum ability after the initial release, so if you downloaded the game near its release and are relaying feedback only now, download the updated version! It has the worm suckies

12. GOD YEAH THE JELLYFISH IS WEIRD! I took a stab in the dark implementing its movement and I'm still not happy with it (it goes crazy when capturing someone because it stops bouncing up but its gravity doesn't stop pulling it down.) I should analyze video more thoroughly to figure out how it ACTUALLY behaves when moving up towards a player character, and when moving down towards a player character, with those edge cases I can safely interpolate behavior between the extremes.

Re: moving & attacking, there is a one-or-two-frame delay between first holding the jump button, and a jump actually resulting, this is when the "bending knees to jump" sprite is displayed, but it also makes jumps feel a little stilted as you have to plan ahead, not just react to enemies. The moving and jumping actions themselves are based on frame counting on blurry videos with no actual input displays, so they LOOK right to an outsider, but may not feel quite right, and might not be accurate pixel values. I suspect running might be half a pixel per frame too fast...? And jumping is equally likely not right- tuned to just about the correct height of a jump as per the video evidence, but gravity's strength is a big assumption (it might not be constant through a jump, like gravity being stronger while you're falling, or there being a terminal velocity we might reach while falling, etc) and so it may feel wrong.

(Also, sorry for springing this much text on you, I just really appreciate this game for its specifics and want to address feedback adequately.)

Yes, I believe I did look at the aryion thread about it, it at least looks familiar. I tried downgrading firefox to make it run locally, I might be stoopid but I couldn't get it to work, which spurred on the project.

I have the tools to simulate, but not to emulate, the original game. I don't know where to start with regards to building a virtual machine, it's simply outside my tool- and knowledge-set.

I'll look into the discord server, but no promises! (I am reclusive.) Fine-tuning the physics or interactions would make me quite happy, and the denizens' knowledge about the game would be quite useful for that purpose.

I would love to pick this back up, it's been a hot second since I last touched it, and I've had a couple ideas for unofficial expansions that I really need to get to.

As a general PSA, don't click links in comments. I am not sure why (and it's not just on my page), there appears to be a plague of bot posts advertising a large number of free adult games on the other side of a link. Undoubtedly this is a scam of one kind or another. Practice safe internet browsing, everyone!

Yes, the original game was only 3 stages. There are a bunch of totally-unused assets too, which points to the likelihood that it was unfinished when Echidna Wars DX came out, and it [Echidna Wars Mini] was shelved. I cannot replicate what wasn't there :P

This was made in Dragonruby! So, written in ruby!

Ahh, I should fix those. I can guess what's going on with the healing thing, and the names being the same SHOULD just be some functionality being commented out for testing purposes.

I plan on updating it eventually, to increase its parity with the original demo, but it won't get any "new content" updates until after reaching perfect parity.

As well, such "new content" updates would be quite slow. It's a lot easier to piece together pre-existing assets to conform with pre-existing specification, than it is to make entirely new assets and entirely new levels.

I'm surprised! There's nothing about the way I handle projectiles that should be even a little unstable.

This game engine struggles with HTML builds for reasons outside the developer's control (even an empty project, doing nothing, can't reach a stable 60fps...) so I highly recommend- if you like the gameplay, but feel like it's too slow, download it and run locally! It'll be so much better running at a smooth 60fps.

(and I'll take a look to see if I can replicate the crash)

Echidna Wars DX is available from D-Gate here

"Echidna Wars Mini" or "Echidna Wars DX"? I believe the original DLSite page is still up if you want to buy the full version.

She seems like an innocent angel to me. Unquestionably best girl.

17.8s... that's a toughie...

Very cheeky use of Mars, the Bringer of War, by Gustav Holst

I think you left a debug tool in the jam build :P

If you press X while the camera is open, it'll show a bunch of multicolored dots on a black background, those dots just so happen to line up with the positioning of the animatronics. But you didn't hear this from me!

Also, I'm not sure if the blindspot lights actually work to show you that an animatronic is at your door about to get you? I watched Bonnie come up (very quickly I might add :P) but he didn't show up at the door, he just jumped me. There may be a little bit of finalizing mechanics left to do here!

You, sir, left a MINUSCULE GAP amongst the saws! I threaded this imperceptible needle to avoid the saw obstacle course >:3

Don't worry, I've got a better one >:3

Huzzah! (it might not come through, 28.02s)

As I said on the game page, adorable game and clever design! I'll note, though, that the main menu "select an option" noise is fairly loud for being a quiet title screen.

Awwe, so cute! And such a clever design. As tsuneko said, so many systems being interconnected through the "vitality" number is really interesting, and makes you consider things in weird and interesting ways. Wings sure can be worth the 10 steps it costs to get them. Is the map going to save you the 4(or 5?) missteps it costs to buy? Will the sword actually take out 10 damage on all the enemies you'll face? (and will the other enemies you could avoid drop enough vitality on death to be worth moving out of your way to fight them?)

Truly fascinating in its simplicity. Oh yeah and the art is fantastic too.

What the heck!? I haven't played Omori or Yume Nikki but I recognize the inspirations. To add another game to the pile of "inspirations that coincidentally I've never touched with a 30ft pole", I'd point to Earthbound. The battles, themes and sound effects, felt incredibly Earthbound and I've never even played it!!!

I've found this weird back-alley dimensional series of rooms (there's at least two of these rooms, they (almost) all have three doors at the top, sometimes the floor pattern is different, they lead to different areas in the map if you're lucky) trying to decipher this area was super tough (can't imagine why) and I'm not sure I explored even a small fraction of the duplicate rooms. I can see this becoming really difficult to finish, as the only OTHER avenue of continued exploration I could find was a weird haunted house themed area (floorboards and slimes with very tough enemies), and if that doesn't lead to new avenues of exploration, I'd be pretty much out of ideas for finding the ending.

I died enough times to see you CHEATING with the NUMBER OF GRAVES in the area between dying and reaching the bar, so I'd say I've played enough to give it all-around 5 stars for phenomenal gameplay and sound and looks.

The game looks nice, and sounds very nice, but the controls are very hard to intuit, which is important when there are tightly-timed sections... The grapple-jump, especially, feels unnecessarily difficult to pull off, requiring the player to be on the ground (so with a free jump) to grapple and then press space afterwards but not before, but also within a very tight (but occasionally, weirdly, very loose?) window of time. Rather, I think executing jumping and grappling "simultaneously", jumping either before or after grappling within a certain accessible timeframe, would make the grapple-jump ability feel better. (Also needing an un-used jump in order to do it makes it difficult to chain with other movement capabilities)

What I'm trying to say is the game looks nice, but the controls were uniquely frustrating to me in particular.

This is adorable. You might say it's lacking in gameplay elements, but a chill collectathon is just fine by me.

A very cute, very fun game! No frills, just directing plane traffic. I think not being able to readjust plane routes once they've been set (or at least, I didn't experiment enough to find such a feature) and also not being able to directly see HOW faster/slower each plane color is, relative to one another, makes it a bit of a guessing game until you've thoroughly internalized the speeds.

I could take a guess, though, that PICO-8's limited input suite (^v<>xc) and internal code memory banks (there's a "token" limit, as I recall) would make it tough to just add all the little bells and whistles you wanted. It helps keep scope from growing out of control, but also can get in the way of an "intuitive to the player" (as opposed to a "concise implementation") solution to XYZ problem.

Whatever. Bravo, I say!

This is a calm and peaceful game, with a simple optimization problem before you- sort these blocks using the limited space given to you. It doesn't try to be some grand adventure, it knows what it is, and it does what it does quite well. I feel like the gameplay is perhaps a little too free- you can stack any blocks on any other blocks, the only limit is four per tower.

(I suppose what I'm saying is that the typical form of this puzzle is the Towers of Hanoi, in which the blocks aren't colored but they are sized, and you can only place a block onto a tower if the tower is empty (base case) or the block(s) already there are larger than the block you are trying to place, (and your task is to move a stack of X blocks from tower 1 to tower 3, with the help of tower 2), or a, like, potion-mixing puzzle where you move groups of blocks from beaker to beaker, and you cannot separate a group once they have been mixed, and you still can't overfill any beakers so the puzzle is pretty strongly one-way and so a reset button is important to offer.)

But, for the puzzle that it is, it works well.

Okay, but there is one bug! If you use the up/down keys to move up/down a row and your cursor is empty, that works, but the height of the cursor isn't correctly adjusted! So if the tower you moved to doesn't have the same number of blocks as the tower you moved from, you can't actually access that tower. This shouldn't be hard to fix,  since left and right correctly assign the cursor's height, and even in-game I fix this by also tapping left and then right whenever I tap up or down, so I'll do "up-left-right" or "down-left-right" and it has the same effect but also corrects the cursor's position.

Cute game! chill vibes! I did not end up going for collecting 1000 coins. The shark's on-target reward versus off-target punishment is absolutely ruthless, I easily caught everything smaller than it but it immediately peeled itself off all three times I found it (I did find it with heron bait, and I "won" when it ran off with the special bait, which I am assuming IS intentional, given it's dynamite)

It's just a really big jump in reward versus punishment, you need to have an on versus off target ratio significantly higher than any other fish demands, to theoretically catch the Great White.

(Also, the text is not quite pixel-perfect. It's nearly there, but the blocks of text are slightly offset from the pixel grid, and there is a slight sub-pixel-sized gap between each row of text...)

I think the time limits (25s total, and ingredients are falling from the sky, giving you not just a set order of them, but also only a few seconds to choose if each one is in or out) significantly reduces the tactical potential of this game. I can imagine instead you're given a tray of, say, 12 ingredients, and you can take your time arranging them into 4 potions however you see fit. To increase tactical potential, you could also show a tooltip while hovering over an ingredient, telling exactly what it'll do when put in a potion.

I've noticed that some effects are like "15% magical resistance", versus like "GAIN 10% attack", which would imply that some potions are setting values, versus adding to them. This could be a huge tactical opportunity- arrange ingredients so that you get one really high-value XYZ stat, and then the other potions want to use GAIN stats instead of SET stats, or you'll effectively nullify all previous potions!!

As in, so like, get this. You have potion A, which says "20% magical resistance, heal 10%, gain 5% attack speed", and potion B, which says "gain 5% magical resistance, gain 10% defense, take 20 damage"

If you use potion A then potion B, then (assuming boss still has 600 total health) you end up with 26% more magical resistance (105% of 120% is 126%, not just 125%). If you use potion B then potion A, then you get 20% more magical resistance instead, losing out on the 5% bonus because it was overwritten by 20%

With six different stats, both seeing gains and sets, it becomes a real optimization problem the player has to wrestle with in order to maximize the usefulness of their potion ingredients before each wave of heroes.

All in all, I enjoyed it, but it was indeed lacking in tactical choices because things simply move too fast to allow for super slow, careful, conscious thought.

This is fun! Once I got all the mechanics down, it was a finely-tuned classic boss-battle experience, with good music and fun sound effects. I beat the slime in 69.55s

god, that's right, the friggin hiding spots, they aren't explaaaaaaained

that'd be tough to no-text communicate, other than actually drawing the dang sprites I was supposed to

I like the look of this, I think I'll stick around to see how it pans out

Good stuff! Creative confounding features and a gentle difficulty curve!

Hi! I'm Ceph, I'm a stubborn indie game dev who works fast with novel and unique game mechanics and has minimal motivation to get things into a completed state.

Hopefully I slow down enough to get 3-4 small minigames packaged into one competitive-like game bundle.

I keep seeing games that remind me strongly of Baba Is You, and then I check... HEMPULI...

Some day I'll get past day 5 or so. Every time I try, I get a little bit further, but the balancing is fairly out of wack past day two :P

2000 units to craft an upgrade is a lot to ask of the player! On top of limited stamina, increasingly rare ore spawns, pricey quota items, and zombies that might prevent you getting home that run! But the gameplay loop is too compelling, I just keep playing...

Also, if you want your inputs to be very reliably recorded by the current version of the game, do that half-beat counting yourself- "1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &", and change inputs the & BEFORE the beat that takes the input, that will give you the most leeway, and is what let me become reliable enough to clear level 5 (which was super satisfying by the way)

And the final step would be juice, juice, juice! Music outside of the rhythmic setup part, and then sound effects and VFX for the things that happen. You mentioned sprucing up the walls, which indeed would help the atmosphere immensely, but don't neglect adding in little worldly details like chairs and tables, piles of books, stuff like that. And definitely, little faux-lore blurbs perhaps explaining why we're using a wind-up toy to steal gems instead of grabbing them ourselves, or just banter between the phantom thieves who might be here with us.