That was pretty fun! Like other people I died a few times at first from the overheat damage before I figured out what's going on. Neat mechanics though!
Great concept! The UI probably should have been more obvious, because it was pretty hard to see my health and heat levels at just a glance. And maybe some other indicator of your heat levels? Maybe your ship starts tinting red, or your bullets start sounding different or something. The overheating sound is really loud, which kind of works because you immediately are like "what is that and how do I stop it", but it's like twice as loud as everything else. The way things go into slow motion when you die is really neat. Good job!
@peculiarcarrot, Thanks for the UI feedback.. from playing over and over, I didn't even look at the bars. I ended up relying completely on sound for the heat tracking and didn't realize people might be trying to glance at the bar.
I try to avoid tinting to give status - I am red/green colorblind and run into many cases where UI expects you to have better color differentiation then I do. But some sort of glow/halo(s) around the ship could be really good feedback as to the status of your ship.
Very well done, it plays smoothly. It's a bit frustrating a space shooter where you can't just shoot like crazy, but it's an interesting way to use the theme.
I liked the usage of the overheat mechanic, and liked that is was fast paced. And the slow-motion death was an awesome contrast to the fast paced nature game. Nice touch.
I would suggest making the background different, as it moved to fast for me (maybe I am just too old) and the audio could get overwhelming at times. And the bar visibility could be improved.
Doesn't scale to fit in windowed mode on my macbook, and I couldn't get past the title screen either. Unfortunately can't rate without being able to actually play it.
@evandowning, Screenshot/OS/Any details that I can use to ID why you had a problem?
@rsim & @colossal-gnome, I don't have a mac to test on, but have been able to export MAC builds successfully before.. Do you have a screen shot of what the title screen looks like? There should be a play button in the middle that starts the game.
Challenging game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) [I fixed this video to have proper audio!]
@rsim, @colossal-gnome, @azlen - I adjusted the UI scaling and re-exported/uploaded. I couldn't reproduce your exact issue, but was able to do something similar when the resolution was set really low. The UI Scaling fixed the issue on my computer.
Spatium Calorem! This sounds like a Harry Potter spell. No matter, it's a good take on the theme. * Oh man, so much noise from the action. If you can't tell, the background is the problem, visibility is hard with bright dotted lights going blazing fast. Then again, that's just me but the background needs to be darker but still noticeable. * The heat is my bane! Good work on notifying with a sound when you're over half. It does get annoying when you're shooting too often but I think that's a neccessary evil. I found myself getting slower with my pacing of attack to manage this. I feel I regret having 3 bullets at a time now because of it. I was shooting 1 set per second. Don't worry, that's not a complaint. * Wish the heat bar is bigger or at least either at the side or bottom of the screen, different from health. Then again you need to track both of those. You should try changing the player ship when it's in low health or have some indicator along with the ship, like a ring bar, so you can concentrate on it more since it's a top-down shooter game. I don't have time to look at the bars. The heat warning sounds is already helping and I'm starting to ignore the health altogether. * Slow motion death, that's just cool. Could be better if you use delta timing than FPS as a factor. * I'm a keen eye and I do notice there's a really small lag when you destroy a ship. Something tells me it's the particles.
@fiaKaiera, good eye. That is an intentional slow down to make the moment last (see vlambeer's art of screen shake) perhaps I made it slightly to long.
I'll have to check the 'slow-motion' frame rate thing. All I did was set the time scale low for a few seconds, it should still render the same number of frames.
@jason-kennedy Ah. I see. Then no complaints here. I feel you could do something better about it, however.
Just to point out: I'm not sure if you did rate my game yet cause the only things I saw that the links were unavailable, which is weird because I did placed my links first before making my page. Sorry to ask. x/
Nice use of the theme. The overheat sound is kinda obnoxious, but i get that you don't want to hear that sound at all. Besides that it's pretty good side scroller.
Some of these things have already been said by the looks of it, but they are worth repeating: - The background scrolling is too fast. Very distracting. - Health pickups move very slowly and you cannot pick them up before they move past the invisible border. - There is an invisible border! - The heat alarm sound is too loud and too long! It overlaps making it even worse! - The alarm also starts at around 50% heat. Why so soon? Heat drops really fast after all. - Enemy patters are quite predictable. Had fun dodging projectiles, but such dare devil tactics are not really needed. Stick to the bottom of the screen and pick them off one by one. - Occasionally it seemed that the ship collided with its own bullet! Lost health when starting to shoot. Weird.
For 12 hours, not bad. That doesn't remove the faults though.
Overall: *Below average (2.5)* Fun: *Average (3.0)* Innovation: *Below average (2.5)* Theme: *Above average (3.5)* Graphics: *Bad (2.0)* Audio: *Annoying! (1.5)* Mood: *Bad (2.0)*
Simple but enjoyable! Usually this type of game is frustratingly hard to play, but this one seems to have a better difficulty curve for slower players like me :)
The visuals are kind of ugly (except for the cool explosion effects), but this is actually a lot of fun to play. There's a nice use of brief pauses to act impact to the shots. Getting upgrades is cool but also has the interesting side effect of making you play more carefully. The sound effects work well and I like the addition of a sound when your heat starts getting high.
Man that was much more fun than I expected. I'm not sure about the heating mechanic. Maybe rethink it somehow. The sound was annoying and frustrating. The rest of the game was really cool. Liked the enemy movement patterns and upgrades. This has all the ingredients for a decent SHMUP.
I am really impressed (done during 12 hours?)! This is one of my favorite games in LD40. I have hard time to stop playing. Really! It seems to be well balanced and sounds are amazing. It reminds me of old arcade games (I recently visited arcade games museum and played such pieces as Space Invaders). You game is fun to play! I will share my score here later today... ;-) Constructive criticism: Those stars are maybe moving too fast... Maybe...
Comments39
I try to avoid tinting to give status - I am red/green colorblind and run into many cases where UI expects you to have better color differentiation then I do. But some sort of glow/halo(s) around the ship could be really good feedback as to the status of your ship.
Thanks!
I would suggest making the background different, as it moved to fast for me (maybe I am just too old) and the audio could get overwhelming at times. And the bar visibility could be improved.
However, good work on finishing a game!
However, it really could use some music.
Screenshot/OS/Any details that I can use to ID why you had a problem?
@rsim & @colossal-gnome,
I don't have a mac to test on, but have been able to export MAC builds successfully before.. Do you have a screen shot of what the title screen looks like? There should be a play button in the middle that starts the game.
* Oh man, so much noise from the action. If you can't tell, the background is the problem, visibility is hard with bright dotted lights going blazing fast. Then again, that's just me but the background needs to be darker but still noticeable.
* The heat is my bane! Good work on notifying with a sound when you're over half. It does get annoying when you're shooting too often but I think that's a neccessary evil. I found myself getting slower with my pacing of attack to manage this. I feel I regret having 3 bullets at a time now because of it. I was shooting 1 set per second. Don't worry, that's not a complaint.
* Wish the heat bar is bigger or at least either at the side or bottom of the screen, different from health. Then again you need to track both of those. You should try changing the player ship when it's in low health or have some indicator along with the ship, like a ring bar, so you can concentrate on it more since it's a top-down shooter game. I don't have time to look at the bars. The heat warning sounds is already helping and I'm starting to ignore the health altogether.
* Slow motion death, that's just cool. Could be better if you use delta timing than FPS as a factor.
* I'm a keen eye and I do notice there's a really small lag when you destroy a ship. Something tells me it's the particles.
Nice and simple, a good entry. Good work.
I'll have to check the 'slow-motion' frame rate thing. All I did was set the time scale low for a few seconds, it should still render the same number of frames.
Just to point out: I'm not sure if you did rate my game yet cause the only things I saw that the links were unavailable, which is weird because I did placed my links first before making my page. Sorry to ask. x/
Some of these things have already been said by the looks of it, but they are worth repeating:
- The background scrolling is too fast. Very distracting.
- Health pickups move very slowly and you cannot pick them up before they move past the invisible border.
- There is an invisible border!
- The heat alarm sound is too loud and too long! It overlaps making it even worse!
- The alarm also starts at around 50% heat. Why so soon? Heat drops really fast after all.
- Enemy patters are quite predictable. Had fun dodging projectiles, but such dare devil tactics are not really needed. Stick to the bottom of the screen and pick them off one by one.
- Occasionally it seemed that the ship collided with its own bullet! Lost health when starting to shoot. Weird.
For 12 hours, not bad. That doesn't remove the faults though.
Overall: *Below average (2.5)*
Fun: *Average (3.0)*
Innovation: *Below average (2.5)*
Theme: *Above average (3.5)*
Graphics: *Bad (2.0)*
Audio: *Annoying! (1.5)*
Mood: *Bad (2.0)*
Check out my game if you like!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected
Usually this type of game is frustratingly hard to play, but this one seems to have a better difficulty curve for slower players like me :)