Captain Starforce

very crispy and well polished, great job!

Love the aesthetic and the music adds the proper amount of urgency. Great work!

Really captured the essence of good space arcade game and the music is awesome! Well done!

Excellent work! Music, art, gameplay, all great.

Cool retro gameplay. Great job! :thumbsup:

Was a really good experience, Took me a minute to understand how to play (partly because I probably skipped the part you tell us). Really liked the graphics style too, keep it up!

Great graphics and music/sfx! I couldn't figure out what to do once your cargo was full though. Any pointers?

Great job! Very nice retro feeling. I would have liked a waypoint back to the station, unless I missed that somehow.

Fun and interesting take on a classic that's already great. Few comments:

1. would love to have some indication of where the base is on the map, i got filled up with crew and got frustrated trying to find my way back home
2. initially the graphics are pretty tough, hard to tell an asteroid compared to the background
3. music is awesome
4. I'm not sure what the top bar was supposed to be :( maybe i didn't get that far?

Solid little PICO-8 game! The music is excellent and you did a great job visualizing a LOT of detail with very few pixels.

Yay a Pico-8 game! I loved this. So good! The graphics were perfect, you really nailed it. The weapon is much better than the typical "Asteroids" gun. I would have appreciated knowing where the home base was so I didn't have to re-find it. Overall an excellent effort.

Was alot of fun! I loved the music and the controls, although with the colors it was a little hard to see. I love PICO-8 too so that was a huge plus :smile:

Great atmosphere. I'm amazed by the fact that this game had an opening scroll and so much plot!

Awesome art and background music. The games fun to play as well! Really like the space theme :)

@andy-beers @sharploaded @lantto @adamjn I knew I'd forgotten something! Yeah, there was supposed to be a 'return to the station' warning when you're full, that's the first thing to put in the post-jam version :smile:

Thanks for all the comments, everyone!

So many comments all at once, was someone streaming the game?

Really nice game and I love the music! Also, got Pico-8, yay!

@extar not sure, maybe. but i found it from it being rated highly on the ludum dare site, just going there to review games that are on the top :)

@david-york Got to rep Pico-8. It's the law :) I think a lot of people don't realise how well-suited Pico-8 is for jams, the limitations keep things focused and it's really easy to make something that looks and sounds good in it. Yeah the plan was for there to be a 'return to base' indicator, but it got lost in the mix as deadline approached :)

@denatus got to love Pico-8. :)

Awesome retro aesthetic ＼(^-^)／

Time to bail out before the asteroid hits!

Pros:
- Great gameplay loop
- Clear objectives
- Love the aesthetics department here
- Clean color palette. I'm always a sucker for minimalistic and pixel-art games
- Good model designs (crew is actually crew and not just random debris)
- Multiple levels is a plus
- Music makes me go back to retro-times

Cons:
- Hard to point out one, as the game feels complete
- Ah yes, base icon to give you an idea of space would be cool!
- Encountered a 'god mode' bug. Essentially, I could not be killed, no matter how big the asteroid I smashed into :)

Very solid entry. Excellent job!

This was really fun and polished. Nice job.

Awesome entry you have here. Personally I thought everything was detailed enough for me to know what was around me ( the different sizes of asteroids, astronauts, ships etc. ). The colour pallete was well utilised and the sprite work was great. Gameplay here was nice, although I wish the ship's max speed was a little lesser. The only complaints I have with the game have been raised by others before, especially just some sort of indicator for the location of the base. Great job overall on this entry

Was finding the station *supposed* to be this difficult?

@blubberquark It's always in the top left of the game area. I meant to put a pointer in to show the way back but you can still find your way by going along the edges of the screen.

Cool game! I like the controls, art and atmosphere.
I wasn't not sure what to do after my cargo is full of astronauts.

@brusi you need to drop the astronauts off at the station so you can go and rescue more :)

Great one! Adding my voice to the chorus for a station indicator once full, also, maybe upgrades and more enemies? As is I got to a point where I didn't feel I was in any danger

Fun game I really liked the music at the start for 48 hours its really good!

@fromage I've already started on the post-jam version (over on Newgrounds) and a 'direction to space station' indicator was the first thing I put in :) I didn't have much time to balance the game, at the moment it's very swingy, there can be loads of asteroids in the field but not anywhere near the player, another post-jam feature is going to be asteroids aimed at the player to make the experience a bit more even. Thanks for playing!

Thanks for bringing your game by my stream for feedback! If you’d like to revisit the play and commentary you can view the highlight at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1448039277

Fun game. As discussed, shield regen is maybe a little too fast, but better too easy than too hard, and it would be great if there were a direction to space station indicator. Visuals read very cleanly; I could immediately tell what the direction to crew indicator meant.

Heh, never wrong to go classical, is it?

Nice game, and I've been glad to play it.

Very nice. Graphics and music/sfx are great. Controls feel good and there's nice feedback on everything like destroying asteroids and collecting crew. A few minor things that could improve the game would be to move the camera ahead of the ship when it's moving, because it's very hard to see upcoming asteroids and I tended to plow through them (since health regens so fast). Also, some indicator for where the drop-off point is would help.

Fun game! Very nice retro graphics and music. Sometimes when a lot of sounds were happening at once some of the sounds got clipped, probably a limitation of the pico8, so not your fault at all :). When I first started I got a bit lost in the first region, but after wandering around for some time I figured out that the station is in the top left corner of the map and had no issues finding it again afterwards. Using the laser to chop up asteroids was very satisfying.

Overall a fun nice arcade game :)!

Here's my score :) :

Wow the presentation! And on Pico8! Even the itch-io website has a nice design. And the game itself plays well, too! Color me impressed, well done, Captain!

@bernhard Many thanks! Pico-8 is actually really well suited to making jam games like this, the harsh limitations stop you from biting off more than you can chew. Glad you appreciated the little touched like the Itch page ;)

Extremely well polished. Lovely visual design, I love the neon green minimal palette. The music is rocking, it fits well. The Asteroids style shooting is clean and responsive, and the additional power of the laser cutter weapon is quite satisfying. My only critique of the art would be the low resolution of Pico8 makes the detailed sprites a bit large for scale, and the action can be a bit harder to parse in this style. The game physics feel great, the explosions are juicy, and the text entry updates in the bottom left add to the frenetic pace of scouring the screen for your crewmates. Really great job.

Great aesthetic, well polished, fun and nice music! Too bad the theme is integrated only via the increasing difficulty, but not matter, great job!