Save the Space Whales!

by aik
Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.68
Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.45
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.21
Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.74
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.55
Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.18
Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.79
Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.83
Alien poachers are hunting space whales! Stop them by crashing through their harpoon lines until the whale can escape into hyperspace.

Controls:
Right/D to accelerate.
Up/W and Down/S to change angle.

Avoid hitting the whale or going too far away from it. Breaking the harpoon line will cause the alien ship to fly away (another will spawn after a little while). If the health hits zero, the level will reset. If the timer reaches zero, the whale will start flying off and you can go to the next level.

Genres: action
Tools: HaxeFlixel

Comments13

Furfel20 Apr 2020, 09:45
It was very difficult to control (W swapped with D). A very challenging game but you might zoom the camera out a bit. Also regarding Flixel, you could have compiled it for HTML5 instead of Flash to be more modern ;)
Tornoz20 Apr 2020, 09:51
The control confused the hell out of me but I like the concept! The gam was quite laggy on flash.
ubershmekel
ubershmekel21 Apr 2020, 04:43
The concept of defending a whale was cool! I don't know why you chose this control scheme instead of "up" as thrust. I also made a lunar-lander like game, but you can see the alternate control scheme there. Also - it felt like I was moving so slowly in this game, and if I held the thrust for too long, I would be too fast and fly off the map. It just felt hard to control. I also didn't know if I made any progress after every level, are there levels? Does something change after I win? Anyway, a really cool concept! Thank you for the cool whale.
Aikauthor22 Apr 2020, 02:46
@Furfel The HTML5 export for Haxeflixel isn't great, unfortunately. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it was unplayably laggy.

@ubershmekel Using up/down to tilt made more sense to me, I guess because I started the rocket out on its side. There are levels - it just changes how fast the aliens retract their harpoons, health of the whale, and how much time you have.
The world needs more lunar lander games :)
Vivoubos
Vivoubos22 Apr 2020, 08:36
Arg! The controls aren't instincitve! So hard ^^

The music is great :) At the level 4 it to hard, the whale die in 10sec ^^

Good job on this game!
Oxalotte23 Apr 2020, 09:00
Controls are a bit weird but space movements are nice. Musics and art are simple but efficient, well done ! Anyways, good work ! [^^]
mikouaji
mikouaji24 Apr 2020, 15:09
man that ship is hard to control and those pesky aliens fly so fast :D
fun idea, cool music, really works well, only the controls are a pain
Rudenko
Rudenko25 Apr 2020, 13:03
Nice idea! Little bit laggy on level starts, ship is hard to control but i love theme. Maybe also rockets will be as temporary bonus weapon. But anyway good work, keep it going!
mypalmike
mypalmike3 May 2020, 02:09
The controls are really tough. Left-right for steering would improve this a lot. Nice music and sound.
DeepKaiju
DeepKaiju3 May 2020, 02:15
A bit difficult to control. But solid enough concept.
jk5000
jk50004 May 2020, 07:20
The idea is good, but the controls makes the game really difficult.
Flying Dog Fish
Flying Dog Fish5 May 2020, 16:23
Interesting idea. Controls take some getting used to, but the real problem is that the ship has too little thrust so it takes forever for it to move and even longer to stop and go back the other way.
meelo5 May 2020, 19:32
This is a neat concept, though I had some trouble with its implementation; as others have mentioned, the controls were difficult to understand - I ended up using both hands with my left hand on w/s and my right on d (and I still often got confused about directions). I also didn't feel like the thrust was sufficient to do much - if I was moving fast enough to traverse the whale in a reasonable length of time, I was also going fast enough that it would take a long time to reverse. Making it easier to control would definitely be an improvement. It might also be cool to have a minimap or different kinds of aliens. I managed to get rather far - it's enjoyable enough as it is. I especially like the music and sound effects. There's some nice polish too, like the links of the chain falling off when you plow through them.
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