Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → The Last Patrol
By willoxs
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 926 | 3.34 | 38 | |
| Fun | 1065 | 3.01 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 1104 | 2.81 | 38 | |
| Theme | 1165 | 3.14 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 724 | 3.61 | 38 | |
| Audio | 548 | 3.41 | 37 | |
| Mood | 747 | 3.42 | 37 |
The game looks incredible! I really like how it makes you feel the void and darkness of space. The controls feel great, though sometimes you feel faster than the enemies and you end up passing over them, and having to turn back to shoot them. The game lacks a feedback when a shot hits an enemy, like a screen rumble or an sfx. I would really like to buy and play a full version of this game.
Great work!
This is great fun, I love how you control another ship when you die. The voice lines are also great!
the game feeling is great. zoom effect when the thrusters are working, enemies falling down when they are shot etc, shows your ambition. i think only thing lacking is the feeling of accomplishment. maybe you could use a small title when waves are beaten and new waves coming.
@rodrigo-montenegro Yeah your completely right - a bit of screenshake on hit would have been so easy to do. Why didnt i think of it in time xD
@tendencydriven Im a big fan of "you die but take over something else" and i appreciate the voice line love
@mindexpositions Yeah i guess a little notification aside from the narration would have helped
thanks for being my first commenters this LD! Ill make sure to check your games when i have time
Nice visuals, I like the scale of the planet when you reach it and the vastness of space. If you expand this game I'd love to see bigger ships and bigger battles.
Game's good in general. But I really felt like the gameplay core loop lacks alot. I did not see my health, tho it looked like I get mostly one shot by enemies, the bigger ships seemed more important but do not shoot.
I am constantly faster then my enemies so it's rather annoying circling around to even hit them just because I always catch up to them. There is to me a bit too much time in the traveling.
Time in traveling would be fine BUT! The space is just empty, the color background is very cool and the particles I love it. But sadly it felt very empty and I would like some bigger planets in the background that very slowly move away. Maybe like 3.
The voice over is very nice! If that is your voiceover sir, then very good. The graphics and sound felt polished
Liked how you change to one of the other ships when you die. Feel like it needs some background music. All in all it was a good game
Nice game, visuals are good and controls are neat. You really feel the speed and the destruction of enemies spaceships. In my mind, it misses feedback when you hit a shot. But good job anyway
Space dog fighting? Aw yisss. Visually, the game was fantastic! It wasn't until my first ship got destroyed that I realized I would play as the other ships.
It's hard to offer any critique as I read about your challenges in the "dev log". The game ran fine for me! Beyond the things you talked about, I think two things would have been nice: 1. I think the ability to switch at will would have been a lot of fun! 2. Maybe the controls would have felt a little smoother on a game controller
Thanks for the game!
Thanks for all the quality feedback
@trev3lyan nah the code is such a mess - im not touching that again xD
@taaada the bigger ships are supposed to be the bombers send to destroy the moonbase and the smaller ones are their fighter escortes. Good point about the emptynes - i felt the same and tried randomly generated asteroids that you have to avoid. But that was too ambitious as it required altering the AI to avoid them as well...
@jesse-martin thanks! No music was an "artistic choice" actually.
@raiponz yeah the feedback was brought up before - thats a good point. I think next time i need a few playtesters.
@hawkin controller support and custom keybindings were the first things to be thrown out to save time. The ability to switch at will would have been really cool! Again - i should get playtesters to tell me such things xD
Cool game, I liked it. The visual part and the control is good
I really, really like this! The space combat had a really good feel to it. It gave me big Battlestar Galactica vibes. And the narrative was really well integrated and paced. Clever use of graphics, from vast gaseous emptiness to massive planets, made the game world feel expansive. And the sound and background particle movement made the ships feel really fast. Subtle but very effective game juice.
You did a great job with the friendly and enemy AI, too.
Great work!
Good game. I like how your extra lives were handled. The controls were fine, but I found it tricky to actually aim due to things moving too fast. Also I has an interesting border at the top of the screen when the camera zoomed out when accelerating. (1920x1200 resolution)
I like your game! The graphics are great, and the acceleration is very nicely done! When my ship blew up I thought it was over, but to my surprise I could play as a diffrent one, nice touch! The voiceover is nice and clear, great stuff :-)
I would have liked to see the planet go kaboom :grin: , but the way you handled it was pretty humorous :D
hey cool game, I enjoyed the dog fighting although found it hard to aim with the keyboard at such high speeds I probably would have preferred to use the mouse for direction / targeting. Game started full screen on my ultrawide monitor and I couldn't find a way to window it so there were quite a few visual glitches as a result.
The backgrouds are great and the feel of the ship is good. I think mouse aim would have been cool, as well as some sort of effect when hitting enemy ships. Very good job!
This game is very nice overall, the controls are well thought and the principle is really nice. The movements we're a bit hard to get at first, but the way it's done it feels really fast pace. Maybe missing a little music to set the mood?
Not a bad start for a space combat game. Physics felt great. Just FYI on my monitor it has issues: Screenshot.png
Interesting entry! Controls were a bit hard but I sort of got it after a bit. It's always hard to nail down ship fighting to feel good and you did a pretty good job with it. I wish the ships would have had health bars or some indicator of health as well as a cooldown indicator for weapons. I also like the idea of having each of the different ships in your squad be your "life counter" and it was neat that they all had different firing patterns. perhaps a neat idea would be the ability to switch between fighters to fight different types of enemies? Otherwise good entry!
@david-york @copito @someone Oh no! I completely forgot to account for different screen sizes... Will definitely do that again next time.
@human-writes-code Thanks for playing - and mentioning the juice xD
@wouter52 Also thanks for actually finishing the game! I have no idea how hard the difficulty actually is and yours is the first comment to reference the ending. Thats not to say everyone else didnt get it but the number is now definitely higher than zero.
@rhoka Yes switching at will would have been a great feature...
Very nice entry, I liked that you flew a small squadron rather than just a single ship, that was a cool idea. The background changing hue as you flew around was a neat touch.
* I had the same issue as David York, albeit not quite as extreme.
* It would have been nice to have some feedback on ship damage, it could be hard to tell if I'd actually hit the enemy at times. Some kind of sprite effect, hit markers, damage counter etc... just something to show I'd connected.
* Mouse movement would be great also, the WASD controls felt a little clunky.
* Could the enemy damage the planet? I had assumed so, but it wasn't obvious and they didn't seem to do anything to it.
Cool game :) Great work!
Nice game! I like the idea of 4 ships as 4 lives. Also camera movement and snake is very nice too! I hope you add upgrade and repair systems in the future. And it would be useful if there was a sound of hitting enemy ships. Also I have artefacts on the edge of my 2k screen, there are screenshots of the same bug in other comments.
Keep up the good work!
This was really fun to play. :smiley: I'm not entirely sure how the physics worked, since the ships seemed to turn like they had air resistance, but seemed to maintain forward momentum as if they didn't.
Once I got used to the controls, though, it was a cool little experience. I was a fan of how the game didn't end when I died, but switched me over to the next ship in the squadron. Really sold the "last desperate effort" and "losses are expected" kind of mood.
The sound design was really good too. The engines felt powerful and the ships weighty simply because of how they sounded.
Great job!
@martink @gamescodedogs Yeah - having just one hd monitor and no further testing comes to bite me here. Really bad not to think of larger screensetups ahead of time. But thanks for playing anyway - and calling out the glitches.
Its really just that the background is not scaled. That means if your screen is bigger than the (pretty big) background there is no surface left to cover those parts of the screen and thus it will still render the sprites but wont clear the stuff drawn before... i should probably put up a post jam version that is windowed so it works on larger screens as so many seem to have problems with it.
@skruffye thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate that you liked the sound design - im really proud of that.
@martink and psst dont tell anybody - but i did not have the time to implement the planet destruction. So even if the goal is to prevent the bombers from reaching the base - that ending never gets triggered.
I just hoped nobody will notice that the big ships are essentially just target practice.
Great game ! The feel of the ships is nice and the graphics are really cool.
Good job :slight_smile:
Just to get it out of the way, the (fixed version) didn't work for me - couldn't get the main menu to respond at all. So I downloaded the other one and played that - didn't notice any obvious bugs!
I love shooty-shooty space fights, so this was right up my alley. Totally didn't expect the voice over, so that was a cool surprise and gave the whole experience a real feeling of being launched into the middle of a story in progress, which I loved for something that's meant to be a short experience (just got to the good stuff quick!).
As a person who mainly focuses on the audio aspects of projects, I completely understand how hard it can be. If I didn't have a team to work with while doing jams it probably wouldn't happen at all. So, despite the lack of discernable music, you still did great work on the stuff you did get implemented, so nice job on that!
The ships control well, and I love that it switches the player between them - very cool idea.
Overall, cool game that ticks all the necessary boxes in my book, and in some cases, does so excellently!
Wow that was awesome! The 2d dogfighting felt really good, and moving from one objective to the next was actually fun because the sound effects and graphics did a really good job of conveying the feeling of moving at high speed. The voice acting was also superb, very dry and serious, made the situation feel dire.
The only issue was that weird border effect which I assume was a glitch. Not sure how to describe it but I think you know what I'm talking about. It was just ugly and weird and kind of broke the immersion and feeling of being in space.
@bitculture thanks for the lengthy comment and glad you liked it. I actually had placeholder music at times during the jam but i felt that it was way better with just background noise so scrapped it.
And yeah also thx for telling me that the version i put up for all the people that would otherwise have terrible glitches (see above (and below) comments) was completely broken xD
@skleembof im really happy (and a bit surprised) that so many here seem to like the voice-acting xD thank you
@gamescodedogs @martink @david-york @someone i now have a version that forces a windowed mode for big screens and should prevent the visual glitches. A bit late but i though i at least tell you.
You did a great job, the audio is amazing, the visuals are great it felt good to fly I thought for a long time I did no damage and my squad did everything, but maybe I hit some of them it's hard to know without feedback (at first I thought it was one hit to kill). Btw the AI is well developped The combat is not easy, it's a little bit hard to be precise on the direction I shoot
This was till now one of the most fun games for me :). Great work. I like the game design idea, that you become one of your npc mates on dying. This is a clever trick to justify multiple lives and also introduce a negative feedback loop. The graphics feel awesome. I can only imagine how great some music would feel with this game. Maybe some more noise on the audio would also fit well in there.
Top-Down Space/Air combat games are in need of a comeback ... got quite the vibes, from a x-wing and tiefighter game back then I was a child