Killer/Healer

This is a very captivating game.

Surprisingly, it was more challenging and interesting to play than to watch it being played.

And, even after the win, you just can't help but want to play more.

To be honest, I didn't like the visuals though. It's bright and cartoonish, but somewhat neither realistic nor cartoonish enough? The characters look a bit gross (and I assume that was the point), and I guess they are meant to be knitted dolls, but it wasn't clear to me. The sewing-machine-not-a-hairdryer looked very plastic and shiny, with a weird choice of colors. I feel like having a few better materials for these objects would've make the overall look much better.

Music is awesome, but probably a little bit too distractive for the gameplay? Can't tell what's the problem, but you don't get distracted by DOOM soundtrack, even though it is aggressive and fast. For a jam game, this isn't much of an issue.

The gameplay side is good. It's very fast, and losing doesn't feel too punishing, so you jump right into the next try.

I did run out of ammo more times than I'd like to, and I guess a better indication of this should be implemented. This could be done on multiple levels, with some "precausion" signals for the player (so they can predict that they will run out of ammo soon, and act in advance) and better signals for a situation when they don't have ammo anymore. For example, some indicator could be added next to the crosshair, some "low ammo" and/or "no ammo" message/icon added to the UI, maybe some sound too. The weapon could also play some sound, a specific one for "we fired the last bullet" and some click for "no bullets to fire".

For some reason, I think the first waves are harder than the final ones. Like, a large amount of zombies spawn in the beginning, but after you deal with all of them, only a small groups spawn over a cooldown. Because of that, if you have ammo, you quickly finish them off when they spawn, and can spend time collecting more ammo while waiting for the next one.

If multiple zombies reach the patient, they could take out patient's health very quickly, which was a problem if I was running out of ammo and not noticing, resulting in an instant game over. Maybe a melee attack would've been some help, so the player could at least try to mitigate the game over by punching the zombies off the patient to win time to find some ammo. Maybe some ammo could've dropped off the dead zombies instead of respawning in the same places on the arena, so player could be handling much larger hoards of zombies being in the middle of non-stop action instead of running away to restock from time to time.

I think the game meets the theme we had, but the kill/heal idea is a little bit "on the surface". The setting is kinda curious though.