Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Chuck Yeager's Jet Janitor
By shawn-moore
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 144 | 3.86 | 27 | |
| Fun | 63 | 4.01 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 125 | 3.88 | 27 | |
| Theme | 496 | 3.50 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 354 | 3.58 | 27 | |
| Audio | 184 | 3.64 | 27 | |
| Humor | 72 | 3.73 | 25 | |
| Mood | 356 | 3.40 | 22 |
I think the game plays way too fast if playing on a 144hz or 280hz monitor; haha. But for what I was able to play before it got too challenging, it is incredibly charming. The music bops, and the game is actually designed pretty well. Good concept. I like how I take control of many different planes and they are either dumped or meet their demise, haha.
@cammin Oh no! I don't have a fast refresh monitor to test with. (it was much easier to test at ~20fps which worked well enough that I assumed I had frame-rate independence). Sorry about that!
Thank you for the kind words and the fair shake despite the issues!
I liked the audio! Good art, it felt personal. The screen shake was pretty aggressive though! Good work :) I also used phaser!
@valid I'm afraid I just can't help myself with the screenshake 😆 I look forward to trying your Phaser game too!
Thank you very much for your entry - I hope you had great fun making it :smile:
Very nice entry :thumbsup_tone1: kind of reminded me of an old game :thinking: Turbo Raketti :smile:
I hope you'll drop by mine and give it a spin :wink:
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
Uh and the numbers.... pure nerd pedigree (in a positive sense) :thumbsup_tone1:
Fun stuff! It was pretty satisfying to watch the planes go into cold storage and see your score go up. Love the metrics.
The art was nice and charming, and the concept + backstory was great. I liked how the theme tied into your story as well. The ship was a little hard to control, but overall a great game. Nice work!
Hey @shawn-moore, really had fun playing your game :grin: nice work! As said a "Level indicator" would be nice to have to know that you got to the next level. Other than that great idea and great execution!
Cool game! I was absolutely terrible at it though.
Took me a while to "get" it and then man it was satisfying diving into the blue stuff. The abject chaos was pretty fun. It's nice to play a game like this, the world needs more.
My favorite bit was the helicopter having booster jets. Game is really fun as well. Love the attention to detail with the cutscenes.
The effects really help sell this game. Makes things really satisfying. Also like how you explicitly put the theme in the intro so nobody can miss it lol.
Make sure to use delta time for your velocities! The jets fly 4 times as fast and as loose because I have a 240hz monitor. Just a heads up... But maybe keep a copy of the original, because it's still super fun to spaz about uncontrollably with the jets. Also this is a REALLY cool idea! Good job!
@phobos001 yeah :/ I think the engine I’m using might have issues with >60hz displays since the display framerate is faster than the physics timestep. Hard for me to test unfortunately. Though it does seem to be fine when I intentionally slow down the game. Sorry about that but I’m glad you still had fun. Can’t even imagine playing at 4x speed though haha, I feel like even 1x was probably a little too fast!
Thanks all for the kind words! <3
@shawn-moore Yeah, it's pretty wild! I recorded a video for you here: https://youtu.be/mctFu1KMbN8
oh my god XD
Firefox had the UP key held down all the time for some reason, but switching to Chrome resolved the issue.
I really enjoyed the damage to the ships being taken out of your paycheck. It was also pretty funny that destroying a ship was a perfectly acceptable way to "solve" the level.
Loved the Millennium Falcon appearance, of course.
I found that the gravity was a bit too quick to really make use of the weapons fully, and I was pretty bad a steering with the afterburners on, so it was easier for me to just dodge everything and drop the ships into the goal. It was helpful to clear out the mines though.
One thing that I would have loved to see would have been different speed, weights, turning, and thrust on the different ships, or perhaps an incentive to strategize depositing certain ships before others. So the only real criticism I have is that it felt like I was playing the same level over and over depending on how many ships there were. Seeing as how you mentioned accidentally wasting time on different weapons or AI for dogfighting, I assume you probably had that stuff in mind too.
Really good work!
@andrewkennedy Thank you so much for your thoughtful and thorough feedback! Not sure what went wrong with Firefox ("it works on my machine" 😂) - I wonder if you were using a gamepad or something that I didn't catch in my testing. (The only browser-specific issue I encountered was Safari specifically has a lot of trouble playing sounds)
Tweaking the control parameters per ship would definitely be a really nice addition! But sadly yeah I had to deprioritize it due to jam constraints: dev time, but also playability. Players will spend only a few minutes with the game, so I thought it was important to give them as much time as possible to build a mental model of exactly one set of controls, since it's difficult enough to get the hang of even just that. In a longer game though, with progression and whatnot, we would have the luxury to not let the player get too comfortable, and maybe give them the opportunity to choose their upgrades and deal with the consequences (which is what my primary inspiration for this game, Luftrausers, does). In any case, I definitely hear you that it causes levels to feel pretty samey, especially for that last level where all seven ships are at play. I suppose slightly more complicated/larger levels, and putting ships in more different areas of the levels, probably would have been a good enough solution for the jam ... next time! 😄
The game is addicting. I really like the idea (and if only someday we can actually stash them away)! How cool would it be to have a job parking all the fighter jets haha. Your burndown charts are also really cool!!
Fantastic game! Could perhaps be a little bit more forgiving with the collisions and maybe make the planes handle a bit better. I loved the new game+ concept and your time management graph. Very cool, excited to see what you'll crank out next!
Thanks for bringing your game by my stream to check out Monday night! If you'd like to watch my reactions/discussion again you can find the highlight at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1005053851
You sure do love graphs and stats! haha. Idea is cool, but game really had to explain what you're meant to do. It really was the theme of event that came up to my mind and got me an idea that i need to put the plains DEEPER in the water
@Ariorick that’s certainly fair, but I wanted to try trusting players to figure it out. You did! 😄 I haven’t heard yet of anyone completely bouncing off the game without figuring out the win condition. Yet, anyway! There could be a silent majority I suppose. You’re right though, something for me to improve on for next time!
man hats off to you for doing this in javascript, and the millennium falcon? lol great job interesting concept
@gorethumb thanks! I enjoyed catching your stream of it :D
Hello! Your game was played on stream ( https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos ) on 5/03 (Day 2 of LDJAM streams).
You can find the timestamp of when your game was played here: https://tinyurl.com/LDJAM48-ursa
This was fun! I enjoyed the music and the mood. The game just felt nice to play.
Graphics were simple but I think they were perfectly serviceable. Everything was easy to recognize and played nicely.
I wasn't sure about the hitboxes though. They seemed to be large and I swear I was getting hit with missiles before they actually made impact.
I also found that I was better off just ignoring the enemies altogether and just flying for the water. The level with the mines around the water was nice because it forced me to use an ability that I was otherwise ignoring.
Well done!
Congrats on finishing! I found the gameplay a little inconsistent. The turning speed was REALLY fast in my version, I wonder if the speed was bound to framerate? It was almost unplayable unless I just barely tapped on the arrows. Beyond that, I managed to figure out a winning strategy of leaning the planes ever so slightly and just tapping the thruster to nudge my way to victory. I could see a lot of ideas here to mix up gameplay, but the controls were really the biggest challenge. I appreciated the graphics and music, though they seemed to clash a little bit. Over-all, I had fun (the camera shake when you leave the plane grounded was INTENSE), and wish you all the best for future versions. Thanks for the game!