rodrigo-montenegro 2022-04-05 14:12
Pretty cool concept! The controls are very fun to play with, and the graphics look great.
Great work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Neon Meltdown
By milan8890, Solus and Prütty
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1032 | 3.25 | 52 | |
| Fun | 807 | 3.27 | 52 | |
| Innovation | 1333 | 2.42 | 52 | |
| Theme | 1083 | 3.27 | 52 | |
| Graphics | 837 | 3.47 | 52 | |
| Audio | 880 | 2.66 | 47 | |
| Humor | 1092 | 2.08 | 44 | |
| Mood | 1172 | 2.96 | 46 |
Pretty cool concept! The controls are very fun to play with, and the graphics look great.
Great work!
I don't know if the game is meant to be silent but it was for me. Some sound effects would have been good. I also had trouble keeping track of my health. Maybe there could be a visual effect when taking damage? The ships look very nice, though, and the gameplay is otherwise fun enough.
The game does a great job with it's VR/cyber aesthetic - the ships, bullets, UI all look very cohesive and the soundtrack really fits in as well. Feels fun to move and shoot, very satisfying when you manage to narrowly dodge an enemy. Like the upgrades too!
@joni-jarvinen Thanks for the feedback!
There is music in the game but you have to up the volume by starting and pressing ESC (i don't know why it's set to 0 by default).
And there should be a red flash on top of the screen when you get hit.
I really liked it :D Didnt get as far with few attempts, its quite hard to keep up, if that was the goal, then it works, but the movement of enemies is sometimes hard to predict, they seem to not be consistent, they are getting sometimes faster the closer they are, I think it looks like LookAt function? Cause it would explain, why the ships dont slow down at all while trying to rotate and aim into you (they move with a bit different psychics than player - they dont slide, which makes them a bit too hard to predict). Other than that its really fun to manuveur with sliding ship, if enemies did the same it would be interesting. Graphics are simple, but enjoyable. I would try to tweak a bit difficulty in early stage, if that is 'very easy', then I fear of what is in the end of the game :D Really enjoyable game overall though, great work!
instead of all the UI at start I would prefer smoother movement. More missile types.
Game also feels like a snowball, when there are too many enemies I never am able to get back so maybe add some temporary powor ups which help you clean the level temporarily and swing things back.
Fun to play, reminded me of the old asteroid games but with a neon twist. The flight was a bit floaty with the controls, and the bullets I think could use a slightly bigger hitbox, but otherwise a good entry. Good job!
I appreciated that the upgrades weren't just increasing a single value and the 2nd tier took that into consideration as well. 👍
Nice shooter for me personally I like the controls to be more responsive and snappy.
@janku
You are correct! It is the LookAt function! We tried to make the enemies slide but in our opinion it made the enemy movement very wierd.
On the difficulty: yes i agree it is hard (we once accidentaly made enemies spawn every frame)
nice game, it was quite fun to play and I liked how the spaceship movement felt, also the music getting more fast/intense was a nice touch but I would recommend for you to use maybe a bit more sound effects (SFXR is a great tool for making simple sound effects quickly). The graphics look quite nice especially the ships and particles but I would also recommend to work a bit more on the menus like adding a quit button with Application.Quit() in unity. the gameplay was nice and quite smooth and quite interesting with a nice difficulty curve, also one thing that I would recommend is giving the bullet's rigidbody2D interpolation to make look a bit smoother when you pause the game/pick an upgrade. anyways great game, I found it quite fun and played for a while.
@epu Thanks for the feedback and thank you for the SFX i'll check it out!
Very addicting game. I had fun playing it until I got absolutely destroyed late-game. Visually it looks pretty, but it's lacking some stuff like subtle background or better menus. It loses a lot on lack of audio - even the simplest sound effects would make it more interesting (unless something broke and there was supposed to be an audio?). In any case, game's fun and fits the theme, nice job!
@krzyhau
Thanks for playing!
There is music but somehow it's volume is set to 0 by default so just start a new game and press ESC you should see a volume slider.
I feel like the movement was just a little bit too slow, otherwise great game
I was gonna mention the music but then I see that you explain how to fix that above.
The movement was confusing for me. I figured out how it worked, but instinctually I just expect the engines to push the thing so I was often going up when I meant to go down.
the music was pretty great and i really like the art style. late game was intense!!
I had a lot of fun playing this. I enjoyed the visuals and the ship upgrading system. Well done!
Shooting in time to the music is cool, and you could have leaned into this with the enemies as well. My issues were the enemies are a bit too fast, and too narrow to hit (maybe this part is me sucking dunno).
On each beat of the track, enemy could: pulse toward the player change shape; maybe get fatter for a brief period so they are easier to hit, but only for that short window.
To me, this would enhance the number of "near misses" the player can have, by using the timing to avoid touching enemies when they are smallest and not moving, creating a sort of dance with death.
Anyway that's just my random thoughts, I think there's something really great in hiding in this jam entry!
Started out slow and generic but turned into action packed shooter. I especially liked the changing of music and the visuals of the ships. Controls were also nice, and random upgrades are a good addition.
Maybe its me but, I think fire rate buff doesn't work? I have acquired over 5 of them, but my fire rate never did feel faster. It actually felt slower. Other than this, maybe UI could use a touch. It was hard to notice earning new upgrades and keeping track of health.
overall, great job!
I quite liked it. Nice neon colors, great variety of enemies, dynamic gameplay.
The lighting effects are really cool. I like the difficulty level, which is challenging from the start.
@mpk90 Yeah, we tried to balance everything to feel like you are being overwhelmed, but we didn!t have much time for doing it.
I had fun playing this. I like the high contrast 'neon' art style. Per comments I got the audio working in settings which is good as it is a very nice fit for the game. Satisfying gameplay with upgrades and a build in intensity corresponding with theme. Possibly collision zones could be a little larger? Well done.
Cool looking game. Playing is fun, the controls are a bit floaty at the start. Great job!
Hey! Thanks for playing our game!
I like the concept of yours. I have to say, that a total absence of SFX is a dealbreaker for me. I found the music volume slider because you mentioned it in the comments, but I do not enjoy listening to the music you picked out for the game. I love how the ship controls and the additional movement upgrades really flow well into the upgrade system.
I do not enjoy the Hard -> Easy --> Hard type of level progression though (of which I cannot even see a progression bar of)
Thanks for your entry! My Highscore is 229
Looks like a bad shmup at first sight, the main culprit is the inertia. It's quite hard to start. But after some time I learned which power-ups make the game playable and this becomes fun. Then there are new enemies and the right power-ups are not the same, and I have to balance them so I can survive now but I also have what I need to survive later. You did a great balancing job! But some power-ups still look mostly useless: accuracy, ghost ship, faster shots, fire rate is not what I expect but there is something else that does what I expect fire rate to do.
I did not get past the purple rectangles. I like how the music evolves.
The bloom could look nicer. I think you could use dithering to avoid banding. Even after getting better movements and movements speed power-ups, I still think inertia is a bad idea. It usually bad in shmups, with few exceptions like Asteroids.
High score: 313.
A nice game, enjoyed playing it for a good 10 minutes :)
Definitely a challenge but normal for gamejam standards (no time to develop casual starting levelshaha, I'm one to talk ^^)
Just that "very easy bar" in the top left was mocking me, I thought I did pretty good in the end and it STILL said very easy - grrr :P
Graphics were simple and nice, good to read!
While playing it's important to remember to upgrade - piercing 2 enemies is bae btw - I assume that feature fell victim to the deadline, but getting some sort of notification about an available deadline would be a nice addition :) Like a sound, maybe
The feedback for shooting enemies is nice! Makes you wanna return and play more :)
And jepppp - in the beginning I was definitely hogging the edge too much and dying all the time xD you just gotta step up your shooting game ^^ (that felt really nice btw!)
Good job, guys :)
Thank you everyone for checking out our game!
@manio We had a few SFXs but after playtestinga little especially at the later stages of the game the fireing and deathsounds were playing too often and started to get annoying and drown out the music
@sentmoraap This was my first time using post-processing, i'll check into it more later. Yea some of the upgardes were pretty useless. We were running out of time and some were just thrown into the mix.
@angiemon Thanks for the kind words! :) Yea we pretty much made about half of the upgardes on the last day or balancing them still around midnight. (pierce, damage, firerate) Would have loved to improve the balance a little bit more especially the ghost ships.
Beautiful graphics and good controls. Fun to play.
I got to 259 on one play and that is the limit of what I can do. On an earlier playthrough I had a bug where I asked for faster pew pew and it set my amount of bullets, and speed, back to the default setting.. which got me pretty much instakilled, I had about 2 seconds of "what?". Also - are the edges intended to be instadeath?
Despite this not being my genre *at all* I really enjoyed the game. The movement felt fluid beyond belief and the music made everything feel incredibly inevitable - well done!
My main gripe (aside from what I assume is a bug, which happens in jams) is that I would have liked just a tiny bit of, wobble? Some give, on the movement, so that the fluidity could be felt more. Just so that I can use the whole area of the base screen without feeling like I am certainly getting myself killed. Just another "inch" of space, so that when you sway to the edges you can see the load in area of the mobs, could be super super super nice and make the whole flow feel beyond perfect.
But, this is a game jam game, and it's inevitable, so locked in stuck is exactly on theme.
Well done. :D
Fun game! Although it isn't technically "inevitable", I like the concept. That said, I think it has a major flaw: the small bullets, janky movement and slow rotation speed are all antithetical to the very slow fire rate. It feels very frustrating to miss a shot and have to wait an entire second for the next one to be fired. With a bit more polish, I think it can be a really enjoyable space shooter! Good job :D
Pretty and solid game. I like the graphics and progression. Feels a bit difficult but that might be ok in the end. I'm not sure but feels like the fire rate increase upgrade felt like it actually slowed the fire rate. Nice variety of upgrades.
Well done, very fun game.
Haha. I like the "known bugs" section. Now that's a real man's game. Just slam yourself in the opposite direction and the velocity will balance out! It's up to us to straighten it out. Cool game!
@otterfaelure I will look into the fire rate thingy i might have messed something up in the code, nad the edges aren't supposed to be instakill, you might have just got unlucky and got a purple spawn very close.
@arihan10 It is inevitable. At a certain point you can't survive. Yeah at the begining everything is a bit slow but that's what upgardes are for :p . And i dodn't understand the slow rotation speed?
@mortalfosca @sentmoraap @otterfaelure We looked into the fire rate issues as you told us, and we figured it out. We had a variable that one of us expected that if we increase it, it will increase the rate of fire, but actually it was the other way around. If everything is right we will fix it and upload the fix.
Pretty solid entry ! I especially liked the music and gameplay, the difficulty curve is also nice, and the controls feel better and better the more you unlock upgrades.
Very nice music, love the art style going with neon colors, really emphasizes what you should be focusing on, that's good game design right there.
Tetszik a kurzor pulzálása.
Neon Meltdown definitely went up in my books the more I played it. Beginning with the awkward conrols, muted-by-default music and high difficulty, I had thought it was a classic case of "game jam game that's been tuned way too difficult" - a common jam trap I've fallen in many many times :laughing: but once I started getting some of those upgrades together, it was a rewarding experience getting the ship and gunplay to just *feel* better. I don't think I've played many games where the controls are deliberately awkward to use with the intent of making them more responsive, and that combined with the smooth ramping of difficulty means it doesn't just make the game easier. Whilst it did make it crushingly annoying to then die and go back to the jank, it did make it extra tense to stay alive. Of course, the visuals are also very pleasing, and that pretty explosion did make dying more tolerable!
I think my only main complaint besides the lack of sound effects (that'd really add to the game feel!) is that I think the timer-as-health system is unneeded and I feel like it'd just feel better if you stuck to a standard health system. :)
Well done!