Loss Of Signal

Nice Entry! I got some old school asteroids vibes, but really loved the twist, harder levels were harder to stay close without dying with all the twists and turns. Congrats!

neat! the filament looked really cool. There was a weird gray thing that kept showing up on the web version on half the screen

@nikolaj I was having terrible trouble with the parallax backgrounds, which is what this sounds like! Thanks for letting me know!

I got score of 172 on Pleiades! Really cool little arcade game. Kinda weird take on like, a lot things, but it generally works out to be really cool. Trying to keep by the filament was its own challenge, and adding in the black holes and whatnot turned out really really cool. Great job! I did notice when the filament was primarily right-to-left, it was hard to see what was coming up. Hard to dodge black holes!

This feels very good and has a nice difficulty to it. The idea with the filament felt quite innovative and gives this space game an unique touch.

fun, especially the last levels with the moving station feel like a racing game where you are racing the finish line, except, in space you can simply cut corners and wait for the finish line to arrive ;)

@nardandas thanks so much for the feedback, and that's a good score! Initially I had planned to make it mobile-friendly, hence the screen ratio, but biffed it with the UI and knew trying to fix it would have broken everything, so I just rolled with it!

@stefan-b I'm almost certain the "optimum" path for some of the levels is to just ignore the filament and gun for the exit :joy:

You made a right call about the art direction.
It was probably quick to make, but it looks stylish.
And style is almost always more important than the amount of details.
The filament looks extra cool (thanks to the flow animation).

It's admirable that you managed to make the mobile controls working during the compo.

The amount of different levels and extra mechanics, not to mention the different difficulties says a lot about your productivity. I think the most common thing to have is like 2 or 3 levels in the jam/compo game. You managed to create much more. I haven't played all of them, but I tried one level from each difficulty. They do feel different enough.

Now some of the less positive thoughts about the game and its implementation (I'm keeping in mind that this is a compo).

Some simple music would make the game a little bit more lively in my opinion. Some simple tools allow you to create a track in 10-20 minutes. It won't be a good music, but it's something. People can turn it off if they hate it, but for a 10-15 minutes session (most of the jam games don't get more than that I believe) it would make the experience much more gamey-like.

The docking feels awkward, but that is to be expected I guess. I got used to it after a couple of runs.
It does change the pace from going at full speed to a turtle speed though. Not sure if this can be addressed in any way.

The friction/proximity interface/terminology is overly complicated in my opinion. :sweat_smile:
As far as I understand, the proximity means the countdown until you get destroyed.
There could be a more intuitive way to represent it, like calling it DANGER or something.
Friction is probably related to the extra speed boost, but again, I'm not sure it adds anything to the speed counter. Players don't need to be explained about what "danger" would do - if it's full, something bad will happen. A full "proximity" doesn't convey a clear message to me.

It wasn't convenient to play the game in the browser from my desktop as full-screen mode is not supported (?) and some vertical part of the screen gets out of bounds. I was only able to see 80% of the screen due to that. It's not a biggest issue, but it would make some of the interface invisible to me, depending on which half of the screen I'm going to focus on. Making 2 layouts would be too much for a compo game, but I have a feeling that most people here would rather try to run your game in the desktop browser if there is such opportunity. I don't have any statistics that would support this theory, so I might be wrong here. :D

In my opinion:
browser game > mobile browser game > desktop build > mobile build

Running a browser game is basically ~zero efforts. Running a game on a phone might require an extra step, because while you're playing games on LD, you usually don't expect them to be a mobile game. Therefore, there is a higher chance of a player sitting in front of their PC/laptop. Desktop builds are a pain to download and run (anti-virus may go crazy and for a good reason). Mobile builds are like desktop builds, but also could be more dangerous and they still require a device switch.

I hope this is helpful at least in some way. :D

Ah. The danger meter could probably go near the vessel, so it's easier to notice for the player.
But since you have a nice sound cue for it, maybe the visual representation is not that important.

Really liked the aesthetics. Sound effects were nice but as said earlier some basic background music would have elevated it to much higher level. The filament thing felt little too punishing since the control is hard enough to navigate well but i really like the idea with playing with danger to get speed. Same with blackholes, it could be fun to try get gravity assist boost with them but i always failed.

@quasilyte Wow, that's some great feedback! You're absolutely right across the board. I had thought about making some music, but I've never done it before, and if I'm honest I just bottled it when I was sat with LMMS open in front of me - next jam for sure! The whole weird aspect ratio is that my intent was to be "mobile first" but I realised too late that I'd properly messed up the way I'd implemented the UI, so just had to roll with a fixed aspect!

I'd say the overcomplicated UI was part of my intended aesthetic, but it could do with better explanations if I'm going that route. I'd initially thought about implementing a small tutorial but opted for going for content on this one!

@ttkayttis I definitely think there is some fun to be had with fine tuning the numbers under the hood to make it tighter/more satisfying, but I'm happy with where it landed!

very nice, simple, chill game, i like the graphics a lot!

Very nice! Great controls, good sound. Interesting with the filament. I would have liked to see a bit further, now you have to have to memorize the level if you want to move really fast. Great game overall!

(Cool to hear your thoughts about Godot. I also did my first game in Godot and I feel the same)

Aww yeah, got through them all! I don't think my scores ended up being that impressive, as I greatly feared the filament and its Ding-Ding-Ding-DING-KAPOW scenario, but I used it enough to never run out of fuel either and I can be proud of that.

I absolutely adore the vector art style, this reminds me a lot of some great-looking vectrex games, and it's wonderful playing this in a dark room and having the bright lines accentuated, it's just awesome. I hinted at it before, but the sound design was wonderful as well. The danger indicator, you immediately understand how it works with the sound cues, and it's perfect to not need to look at the bar every second and keep concentrating on the filament. Same with the thrust, you really feel the difference between firing the thrusters and drifting through space.
Gameplay was fun, I went from apprentice to journeyman to master. The master levels were the greatest, I loved the variations in the gimmicks. The chase one was my favorite, that one was very hype, trying to keep up. Beautiful game, great job!

Hey very cool entry :smiley: Great minimalist concept.

Very interesting variation with the last levels. I would found interesting to have something less smooth between empty space and "filament flow" to hehance the feedback. But it's a compo, well done and hudge respect :clap:

Interesting game, I liked the concept of the filament flow and it was nice to add the black holes for difficulty and have lvl variations. The game play is nice and visuels / sound effects are coherent and create a nice feel.

Where we're going, we will ABSOLUTELY need roads.
Loved this. As a kid that grew up on Asteroids on windows, this hits for me in a big way. would love to write music for this. nice work!!

Nice little game. The ship feels too slow for my taste. The filament looks fantastic! Good job with the different levels.

Awesome game! The combination of mechanics and visuals has potential to become a crowd favorite (if developed further). Mini Metro, Osmos and similar games come to mind.