Ludum Dare #44compo

Space Struggle

by meursault

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.60

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.19

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.28

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.35

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.88

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.17

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.84

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.37

Space Struggle is a space management game.
You are the captain of a rebel ship that fights the Dog Catcher Association (DCA) to protect the dog population of your solar system.

Today you attacked a DCA outpost and freed seven cute puppies. Several DCA ships are hunting you as a result. They hacked your bank account and you are not able to access your money. You must reach your Home planet. They can defend you from the DCA.

Your fuel is limited and you will have to trade parts of your ship for fuel to reach Home. Selling parts will make you slower and weaker. Selling too much of the wrong parts can mean death. Your ship has four types of parts: Scanning, Speed, Damage, and Defense parts.
Check the ingame help screen for more explanations.

Let's hope you can make it Home.
FOR THE DOGGOS!

The game was developed with Monogame, Pyxel Edit, Bfxr, and Bosca Ceoil.

You can send me feedback on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yellow_what

Thanks for playing :-)

Tags: #management, #pixel art, #space

Genres: simulation, survival

Tools: Bfxr, Bosca Ceoil, MonoGame, Pyxel Edit

Comments24

FanManPro29 Apr 2019, 06:27

Nice one! Reminds me of "The Ur-Quan Masters" and I'd play that any day.

superpokeunicorn29 Apr 2019, 06:47

I thought the premise of the game was really neat. I like the idea of a game where you are not getting upgrades, but rather strategically choosing how you will downgrade. Sort of like a reverse FTL. I enjoyed the strategy involved in picking which planets to go to in order to optimize your path, trying to balance distance with value. However, I do feel that a bit too much of the game relied on luck, with a few to many random no-win scenarios. You could definitely optimize your play and I did beat it eventually, but each run really felt like a roll of the dice. That said, this was a really neat game that I had a lot of fun playing. Nice work!

Memel0629 Apr 2019, 07:34

Like others said, maybe the gameplay structure is too reliant on luck and RNG
But the theme is well fitting and the game is fun and clean

Polish is in the average level for a compo entry

Balancement is the weak point, but it's ok and it doesn't harm too much to the overall experience

Thanks for your work and don't forget to have your hands on a post-jam version with tuning and improvements :)

saladon29 Apr 2019, 08:27

This could be a fun game, but there isn't really any skill required. Good job though!

Martynas29 Apr 2019, 10:16

Great color scheme and UI. Needs a little bit of tuning to increase the importance of skill, but overall it's a really nice game.

p0nce29 Apr 2019, 15:25

Nice game, with lots of content.
Maybe I had luck? Once I understood where home was, all I had to do was fight-only, collect fuel and do one trip towards home.

Skalex29 Apr 2019, 16:57

Really nice graphics and audio! Gameplay is a bit repetitive but is still really enjoyable!

daria-toni29 Apr 2019, 18:41

Like it! Especially your choice of style, pretty :)

Eldemarkki29 Apr 2019, 19:46

Really interesting game! I liked the color scheme and visual style a lot!

mrtnldm30 Apr 2019, 00:06

Great game! I really like strategy (especially turn based) so this was really down my alley. Like the art and the music, makes for a great theme. The actions and descriptions at locations were well written. Kept my interest! Well done!

WubbaDuck30 Apr 2019, 01:28

I like the art style and the travel and fuel mechanic. Definitely has a FTL vibe. I found myself getting a stuck quite often, and it seemed like one mistake early on could screw up the whole run. But still enjoyable.

RumSquawks30 Apr 2019, 05:15

I can see this being really really engaging with some tweaks. Often I felt like I never would have had enough fuel to make it to the green planet despite my choices, and on one occasion, there was a massive gap between the left side of the map and the right that I'm pretty sure was impassible under all circumstances. Still, really interesting and very nice to look at. I hope you continue to work on it post-jam. Do it for the doggos!

hadesfury30 Apr 2019, 11:08

Great entry kind of hard to get through but the graphism are really pretty

randomhuman30 Apr 2019, 12:42

Wow, so much going on in this game! I love the sense of humour and the art. In the gameplay, I'm not sure there's enough incentive to explore around, I pretty much just stuck to the shops where possible, but the concept is really cool.

joemanaco30 Apr 2019, 19:24

Awesome game and concept. Felt quite some FTL vibes :thumbsup_tone1:

lagrume-masque30 Apr 2019, 22:45

First I saw "space management" and I was not happy. Then I saw that you have to save puppies and I HAD TO GO SAVE THEM
The core mechanic is real clever and the game achieves to stay clear and simple, well done! I loved to explore and to read about the random events. Graphics are neat. I would have loved to hear sound but the entry is still really good! Nice!

Adam Elaoud30 Apr 2019, 23:25

This was super fun! It took me a total of three tries to beat the game (although I think I got a pretty lucky seed on my 3rd run). The graphics and UI were excellent. Overall, a job well done!

Sebastien Bourgeois1 May 2019, 18:58

Cool! I can feel the FTL inspiration, obviously but paying for downgrades instead of upgrades is a nice idea and definitely fit the theme! Maybe too easy, I was able to finish the game on first try, and I suck at FTL. Great work!

Seb Jones1 May 2019, 19:02

A nice little take on the FTL style game. Nice graphics, fun gameplay, good music - it's hard to think of any constructive criticism for this one. Good work!

Ashtrail1 May 2019, 19:33

Impressive amount of work for a compo, good job !

The mechanics are pretty well explained (which isn't always the case with entries) and that's cool.
The pixel art is nice.

Going the management road for the theme was a good idea. Other games that took the "sacrifice gameplay to progress" take on the theme removed controls which isn't very fun, here it just lowers stats.

The sound design isn't the best, the music gets quickly repetitive (albeit you can disable it), and the movement sound effect doesn't feel quite right.

The balancing could be improved, depending on the random layout you can win easily by just zapping from shop to shop.

On a side note : I was playing fullscreen and sometimes clicking on the map would minimize the game window for some reason.

Overall it's a nice game that feels pretty polished. Well done for finishing this game and managing to put so much content inside by yourself !

Nick Rafalski2 May 2019, 02:57

I really really liked this. Just about everything was awesome: graphics, audio, theme. I love the random events and the simple but effective battle system. I feel like scanning was kinda the red-headed step child of the stats so I sold that at every opportunity, but maybe I didn't appreciate its value. I managed to beat the game on my 3rd play through which I think is just about right for a LD game. Bravo!

commanderstitch3 May 2019, 00:41

I'm just impressed that so much was done. Felt like a complete game! Music was a tad loud and i won this game. I was so glad to make it home.

DrVernichter3 May 2019, 10:57

rly nice game!

Vesk4 May 2019, 13:25

I love this game, great job! The idea is absolutely great and instantly understandable, and the execution with that art style is also great. Really the type of game I enjoy. Only thing I would change is the music, which understandably for a game jam isn't very good.

Other games by @meursault

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