elzeu 2022-10-05 08:19
My ship disappeared from sight and never came back :) The camera following the player can improve the gameplay. The player also moves very slowly, making it difficult to dodge enemy attacks.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Sisyphean Flash
By mikolak
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1209 | 2.54 | 24 | |
| Fun | 1168 | 2.52 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 1213 | 2.18 | 24 | |
| Theme | 1079 | 2.93 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 1100 | 2.13 | 24 | |
| Mood | 1166 | 2.36 | 24 |
My ship disappeared from sight and never came back :) The camera following the player can improve the gameplay. The player also moves very slowly, making it difficult to dodge enemy attacks.
The control is a bit weird... The ship slide out of the screen and when I try to get it back it gets somewhere else. Also the bullet is too slow. I don't know if it's intentional but the game is too hard to play.
The game crashes after few minutes of playing. Tried 3 times and every time it was the crash that got me - not the enemies :laughing:
I like the inertia on the movement, and the concept of switching between the safe and unsafe zones is interesting. At the moment, the game is quite basic and buggy. Could use some SFX, some nice background to tell the player he's in space (to match the movement inertia), some more interesting graphics, some area limiter (so you can't just disappear into a vacuum of space), some visual feedback on damage and on choosing the upgrades - but I bet you know all this :wink:
Congrats on having a playable game in jam time! That's already a big thing - especially alone.
Out of screen crash :D Good idea!
Thanks to all that rated so far, especially fabula_rasa for the detailed review!
Yeah, all the remarks so far list things that I expected, and had planned to implement/change. So, at least the good news is I was on the right track ;).
The player ship moves way too sluggishly. Even buying nothing but ship speed bonuses doesn't help because it seems to mostly just affect top speed, not acceleration. With 5+ speed bonuses it was still impossible to dodge enemy fire unless I was already moving at the start of the enemy phase. I can't help but wonder if this is bugged in some way, because it makes the game practically unplayable which makes it seem unintended.
The game is mindlessly fun for a short time. The buy phase UI is difficult to navigate; - UI should be sorted according to the key from 1-5 - No bought feedback
For the gameplay part, I guess other people have reviewed most of the issue that I've found. Nice job anyway, but don't forget to create a player boundary to not go off the screen too far.
Ship movement is way too slow for me and the game crashes after some time.
I liked the take on the theme, with short, digestible waves that get progressively harder - perfect for a quick jam game! To add to some of the critiques, perhaps the wave ending after you've defeated the last enemy would speed things up, as well as an option to skip the upgrade selection so that I'm not sitting around watching the countdown timer after spending my scrap.
Good game
I'm curious how you even managed that file size for such a minimal game. Somehow my mothership got stuck continually moving to the right after the third wave which made the rest quite easy as the enemies were nowhere near me. until it eventually crashed `Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid contact spec!` (linux version) Got this crash on my second attempt too. The upgrades not being in order was odd.
Thanks to all that reviewed, especially for the critiques!
@alex-de-la-cour : regarding your suggestion, originally there was a plan to have a salvage collection element - this would fill up the remaining time in the fight phase and would force prioritizing actions in later waves.
@someone : one of the many, many things that didn't make it due to me being unable to put in sufficient prep time was minimizing the distribution. 90% of the game archives' contents is actually the full Java Runtime. Minimizing both that and the archive of the game itself (`game.jar`) would reduce the size to something like 30 MB.
Interesting that you got that exception. I suspect it's because one of the objects got destroyed between the collision itself and its handling code. Thanks for reporting that!
Interesting game, interesting artwork. Innovative, fun to play, good job 👏🏻