cyberfrank 2020-04-21 06:43
Nice work! The radar was a nice touch.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Space Drone Guy
By technonugget
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 322 | 3.91 | 42 | |
| Fun | 156 | 3.98 | 42 | |
| Innovation | 1078 | 3.35 | 41 | |
| Theme | 766 | 3.86 | 42 | |
| Graphics | 699 | 3.97 | 42 | |
| Audio | 953 | 3.29 | 41 | |
| Humor | 1707 | 2.39 | 34 | |
| Mood | 1035 | 3.48 | 39 |
Nice work! The radar was a nice touch.
Nice Game, I thought changing directions was just a little too slow, but maybe thats what one has to expect in space. It reminded me a lot of asteroids.
I really like these graphics, your pixel art style was very well excuted unlike other games which just sue it as an excuse. Also its just flat out a polished game. Thank you.
This has to be my favourite game so far. Very polished experience, love the controls and the physics of the bullets affecting both you and the meteorites. My only criticism would be the extended periods of downtime, probably need a stressless mechanic thrown in so the player isn't doing nothing (something like preparing a shield, upgrading the drone, etc)
Excellent work
I love the core gameplay. The controls are simple to understand but actually quite challenging to master even though there are many others in the genre. I think it may have just a bit more space drift than other games which adds to this feeling of skill-ceiling. I thought the enemies were pretty charming actually haha. I loved how you'd get close and they'd kinda scurry away like a slow bug. One thing that is rough about balancing this type of game is wanting to stay close to the hive at higher levels. I found it safest to hang by the hive and right click from afar since that could still kill things, so I found myself looking at the minimap more than the game itself. I think that's fine because once I was more confident, I'd go out more and more often to hunt things down.
This is absolutely the most polished game I've seen from you. I actually thought a team made this at first and then I saw it was just you. All the small effects and particles on things really added up, along with the consistent artwork!
great art style, cute sound effects, the radar is a good touch. the game felt a bit too "slippery", making it a bit hard.
@peachtreeoath Hey Calvin!! I didn't know you were going to be doing LD this time around. Thanks for playing though, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Its funny that you say you end up using the radar to snipe because I often found myself doing that also! I think the main reason for this is because the game runs at such a low resolution, I considered upscaling to a higher standard, but I was doing all my work on a 720p monitor, so I couldn't really upscale too much without changing the aspect ratio
test
Yea there was a last minute call to arms with some of the other CO folks so you can check out their work in my game :)
Haha that makes sense about the resolution. How does the AI work in terms of moving towards the player, if at all? I couldn't quite tell if that was in there, but certainly when they sit back it makes sniping a solid strat.
Finally asteroids game has a purpose! Minimap is very helpful, but the game was quite hard for me to control. I lost signal many times, but I guess that's part of the challenge: deciding whether to shoot or not
It's an alright game. I love the pixel art, nice atmosphere. The first minutes of the game should keep the player invested to see what's next. Then give them bigger excitement. As a game jam, it has potential with your type of graphics. Keep doing what your doing and get better.
@peachtreeoath yeah the ai kinda just wanders around until they come within a certain range of the player or hiveship. most of the time they just drift out of screen and despawn before that happens. But yes, AI was definitely one of the more difficult aspects of this game, getting them to work with the physics was quite finnicky.
Great job with the art, if you were to carry on the game post compo, I'd suggest dialing back the inertia on the drone, as though it's 'realisic' for a drone in space, it'd be nicer for it to be more responsive, and perhaps, given you're using the mouse, have a cursor/reticule to pick out enemeies.
When the wave of asteroids came along, I gave up as it became super difficult to aim.
Really fun to play! Very reminiscent of oldschool arcade and atari games, and I love the use of momentum. The only gripe I have is that having the cursor locked so close to the player makes aiming somewhat irritating. Regardless, really great entry, I would love to play a full version of this some day.
Really liked the graphics and the gameplay felt smooth as well! I think the aiming mechanic was interesting, but would have preferred being able to move the cursor wherever I want on the screen. Neat entry!
I also had the same issues with keyboard input/canvas focus in my entry. This fixed it for me, maybe it'll help you too: https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/388#issuecomment-371971451
@lectvs hey thanks a bunch man, I hadn't even bothered trying to fix it yet because I'm still recuperating from the weekend, but this actually worked for me and now the itch.io webpage has no input bugs :)
Great submission! Thanks for bringing it by the stream!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=01h22m51s) (approximate timestamp)
I really enjoyed this one! Shooting down enemies off-screen was very satisfying. I did mention this during the stream – the aiming was a little bit weird with the mouse. Maybe having a normal cursor would make the game too easy, but who knows. Right now the aiming seems like it's emulating an analog stick on a game pad. Also the RNG! :angry: The meteor showers were a nice touch, I would love to see many other kinds of encounters.
Really cool game! I enjoyed playing it and had a lot of fun! Cool graphics and the game overall had a good mood and aesthetic. It felt good to play and the momentum idea for the drone was executed really well! The enemies moved and fought well, and your combat system against them was good. Recommendations: less time spent on the meteor shower at the start, and more time fighting enemies, also, bigger bullets would't hurt), and a better title/name. Overall: Geat game, and well done!
This is real cool, i love the visual style and particles! Also the radar was a great touch. I found myself using the radar to try clear enemies with rightclick before they got too close so it was good that it pushed the player ship back otherwise it would be too OP. It was a bit hard to aim with the mouse since the green aim dot was so close to the player. It would be cool if there was a cursor that followed the mouse that the ship turret looked at? Not sure if that would make it too easy tho. I have a real soft spot for twin stick shooters haha. Would be cool to see this with more story and world building stuff cos i like the aesthetic
Nice game! I like the audio and pixel style graphics. But i find myself hard to control the drone. Maybe adding some drag force to it will make it easier. Unless, hardness is part of the game design. :D Also, make mouse displayed on screen make it easier to know where the drone is currently shooting. All in all, it is a nice game. Well done!
Wow, I like this game alot! The radar reminds me of old Amiga game Transplant, which was my favourite shootemup as a kid :slight_smile: Graphic style is nice and the crackling debris from enemy ships is satisfying. Could maybe have used some more sounds or music. I liked how the control scheme seemed to imitate space physics.
Would like to play advanced edition if such emerges.
Very engaging game! Newtonian physics makes it hard and unforgiving. Just like good old Asteroids, only here you have wider area to fly and enemies are smarter than dumb asteroids. Nice pixel-art and the overall polish. A very solid entry. And could be a foundation of a bigger game, since you can build a lot of features around those core mechanics.
It worked fine for me in embedded and fullscreen modes on itch. And I have only one complain about the fullscreen mode. The screen is pinned to the top and it would be much better to have it placed in the middle or maybe scale with preserved aspect rate/borders.
Great game, the movement seemed a bit janky and it was very difficult but overall great! The radar was great too. More weapons would be great though.
Proper space physics are always interesting to see. The WASD for directional thrust was a good idea, but I kept getting confused with a regular 2d space game where it's A & D to rotate and W to thrust (my problem rather than the game's). My only criticism is about the mouse pointer; I found the green dot being restricted to the immediate area around the drone to be a bit confusing and hard to see; might be good to give an option for a reticle mouse pointer that has frre reign of the entire screen (or limited to the whole visible circle).
This felt very polished - the graphics were nice (especially the little touches like the radar and the debris left behind by ships, or the smooth integration of the game into the page), the enemy AI felt nice to play against, and the sound effects were really fitting. I immediately died since I didn't initially realize that the controls were purely acceleration, but the controls felt nice after I figured that out - the mouse felt a bit awkward (maybe showing a whole line of aim would help instead of a little dot?), but not terribly so. I found out on my second run that ramming other ships was a fun (if not terribly effective) strategy. I could see this expanding in lots of directions too - for instance, adding power-ups or a rogue-like item system could work really well (especially since I can see lots of interesting possibilities for weapons given the commitment to physics - why not smash your enemies together or blow them and their bullets around - perhaps causing difficult forces on yourself) or even a more retro class system where you unlock new kinds of ships by playing. Of course, more enemy types could help as well - perhaps some that necessitate larger scale planning (e.g. a carrier comes along and parks far away, spawning ships, or a ship that can't take any damage but just straight accelerates at your host). The core of this game just feels so nice to play, even with limited content - would love to see it expanded in pretty much any way. Well done.
Really nice entry. I like games that tend to simulate physics space. The graphics are nice and I really liked pixel perfect rotation of the sprites. The game could benefit from some music, but we all know music doesn't fit on our jam schedules. :smile: All in all, great job. :clap:
That's a really fun game! ;) The graphics look great, the sounds work fine for this type of game. I wish there was some background music to supplement it, but I get how hard it is to fit everything in such a short time. I loved that you used proper classical mechanics, though I guess it could use some sort of "brake" button, which would use thrusters to stop you in your place.
I adored the way you implemented proper space psychics into the drone movement, it made the whole experience so much more strategic and challenging, and getting the hang of those thrusters ended up being half the fun. Very impressive. The html version wouldn't let me right click, and didn't have sounds for some reason, but that might be a Safari thing. Overall I thought the whole game was really well put together, and had a lot of potential. Good work!
Great old-fashioned shooter! Overall a nicely polished and balanced game. One of the best I've played. The enemies behave interesting. I only have a comple of minor gripes. One is that I think the small play area feels a bit myopic, I would prefer it a little more zoomed out. The other is that the aiming is kind of hard with the slow gun. Having an easy aiming system would allow the player to concentrate more on the action.
Nice! Literally the only thing I can suggest is maybe making the aiming dot a little further from the ship - it would make it a little easier knowing where I'm aiming.
But other than that, everything was well done! I loved the mechanics of the game, with the strategy of moving around. The decision of using the weaker but faster gun and using the powerful gun with knockback is neat, especially since you're already trying to steady your movement. And the out of signal thing is cool too, making it rather imperative that I control my movement - along with the fact that running into anything destroys my drone.
The obstacles were cool too - I especially liked how the enemy's AI worked, retreating when I start attacking it but soon returning to attack the ship. The asteroids were a need obstacle too.
Again, well done!
Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/615937007?t=8h02m31s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin