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A jam submission

Return to TyrienView game page

Sequel to shmups like Tyrian where you are on the side of the enemies
Submitted by z0rly — 1 day, 23 hours before the deadline
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Return to Tyrien's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Community Choice#492.5382.538

Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

  • It always seems a bit unfair when ya play a shooter and ya have to kill endless numbers of enemies, while being super limited in ships yourself.  Why can't the good guys ever use their resources to construct some sort of assembly line for Good Guy Ships, and fight fire with fire?  Z0rly's Return to Tyrian examines this clever notion, evening up the battlefield by giving the player a near endless horde of ships.

    Return to Tyrian's music tracks are quite good, they have a neat ethereal quality and set the space shooter mood nicely.  The synths match up well to the original's instrumentation, nice work with 'em!  The visuals are solid, very evocative of the original Tyrian's aesthetic, which as a shooter that was primarily on early PCs has a fairly unique style.  The stage backgrounds are interesting and well-done, but unfortunately don't seem to have much impact on gameplay and can add a lot of visual confusion when there's already so many ships and projectiles filling the screen.  And all these overlapping sprites lead to the core issue I have with this entry:

    It's hard to know what the heck is going on!  The moment you start your first level, there's an immediate difficulty in understanding how to play, let alone play well.  A little bit of tutorialization at the start of gameplay, at the very least showing the controls again, would go a long way.

    Sadly the controls are not ideal, feeling fairly cumbersome given the strategies that seem to work best.  The player is generally reliant on holding units in place and setting up shields to keep them alive, and the auto spam of bullets will let the player ships win out.  But if enemy forces get a good start / build up in mass, there's often no possible way to recover.  Having some form of screen reset, such as a limited bomb ability, would be a nice way to allow players to salvage bad scenarios.

    Return to Tyrien is rough and fairly difficult to play, which is a bummer because the visuals and music going into it are quite strong.  But I do think it's a good start towards a concept that has a lot of promise!  It'd be neat to explore the player calling different types of unit waves, or maybe allowing them to switch between flying patterns, so understanding which ones do best against enemy types and attack formations becomes a key strategic choice.  I'd definitely like to see continued work on this, since I think ya've made a good effort in a direction that has a lot of possibilities and intrinsic conceptual appeal.

Elevator pitch
Your forces have been devastated by one nimble, powerful shmup ship. Rally your popcorn for revenge!

Describe how your game adheres to the theme
This is riffing off Tyrian specifically, and generally it's an unnecessary sequel to all shmups where you take revenge on the small powerful ships that have devestated your forces. A reverse shmup, if you will.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)
Pros:
  • Cool idea
  • Nice visual style
Cons:
  • Mouse sensitivity is very low
  • Strategy suffers as a result of the mouse controls
Here & There:

This is a neat concept but the execution is unfortunately pretty rough. The mouse sensitivity is low enough that for me it nullified the use of the mouse. I died on the first mission before realizing that there was no limit to the number of shields, and so I relied on placing as many shields as I could. Also because of that, aiming shots is near impossible to do effectively and so I couldn't make use of it. The last enemy on level 3 just flew into my ships quickly and nearly caused me to lose despite having only having 10-20 deaths up until that point. That could use some tweaking in terms of its power. On the final level I made an effort to aim at the dodging baddies and so was throwing the mouse around my desk in order to move it enough to actually hit them which has caused me to misuse my mouse for the last several minutes while writing this which is pretty funny I have to say. Overall the balancing is just too punishing. I liked that the enemy pattern thing showed where the enemies would be, but I couldn't tell if it always showed up or not before the wave came in. It's a nice looking game with a cool idea but doesn't give the player much opportunity to enjoy it. Seeing your progress through the jam was cool and with some more polish I'm eager to see what you can come up with.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and giving such detailed feedback!

" The mouse sensitivity is low enough that for me it nullified the use of the mouse." - Nice catch, I seem to have completely missed that, even as I always set the mouse sensitivity in other games I play really low, should have put two and two together. Darn!

"The last enemy on level 3 just flew into my ships quickly and nearly caused me to lose despite having only having 10-20 deaths up until that point. That could use some tweaking in terms of its power." -  Yeah, upon further reflection it just becomes a surprise "hope you budgeted enough deaths for this part" kind of thing. I'll definitely rework the dodging ship AI so it's more predictable and fighting that ship is less of a matter of attrition, and to emphasize fighting dodging ships more overall.

"Overall the balancing is just too punishing. I liked that the enemy pattern thing showed where the enemies would be, but I couldn't tell if it always showed up or not before the wave came in. It's a nice looking game with a cool idea but doesn't give the player much opportunity to enjoy it. Seeing your progress through the jam was cool and with some more polish I'm eager to see what you can come up with." - Thanks, that's encouraging and I plan to continue improving it.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

This is a really nifty idea that's unfortunately very confusing to play. Combined with how difficult the first stage seems to be unfortunately renders the game pretty annoying to play.

I don't really feel like I have adequate control over my ships to counter the sometimes overwhelming enemy fire.

I did enjoy the chaos on screen, however and the sound was pretty decent

Developer

Thanks for playing! Yeah it's still a pretty early stage mechanics wise. I will refine the mechanics more as we go along.

Part of the challenge is having less direct control over ships, but having more firepower overall. It's clear that there's more work needed to hit a sweet spot, but I'm not sure of that point myself yet.  Though I'm definitely making the LMB drag + hold patterns with "D" more powerful, and putting in a warning system for enemy waves, messing with shield cooldowns, etc.

Submitted(+1)

I like the idea of playing the common enemies instead of the hero, but I ended up pretty confused at how to actually play well.  Through the first level I though "oh, this is easy, so long as I keep making shields", and that got me by.  Had enough backup shields on the screen by the end that nothing could touch me.  But the second level started off crazy, and I wasn't able to get any leeway; there were so many ships that I couldn't spawn anything without it being instantly destroyed.

When I gave up, the screen looked like this:  

I don't know... maybe I just didn't get it, but it's hard to feel like I'm the popcorn ships at this point.

Developer

Thanks for playing! Yeah that part could use more balance tuning, you pretty much need to have enough shields beforehand there not to get in a death spiral of getting spammed and not having enough firepower to take them all down. I guess this means in the future version, there should be fewer but smarter enemies.

Developer (2 edits)

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I agree, there are issues with just getting what the heck is the way to beat the ships; I'm not sure I've really nailed that down for myself either. As others suggested, it would be cool to make enemy attack patterns more gradually introduced and having more cues for your own ships. This is a game I want to continue to work on after the jam so there might be a version with that sometime in the future :)

tho for this version you might be able to get away with spamming shields (RMB, 5s cd) all over the screen and making sure it's all covered, that strategy is hilariously in favor of the player

Submitted(+1)

I like the concept, and the art and music work really well, but I have a hard time telling what is happening most of the time. I lost a bunch and didn't understand why. I think it has potential, so hopefully you can make it better with presenting some basic strategies to the player and ramping the difficulty more slowly.

Submitted(+1)

This is a very cool concept, and the art/music fit well with the game. My main issue with it is the lack of feedback to the player. There isn't much difference in how player and enemy ships are presented, and there isn't much impact when the player ships die, so it's hard to know if you're doing well.

Submitted(+1)

This game is based on an interesting idea. Everything looks and sounds pretty good. Personally I had a hard time getting into it. Maybe if I understood the strategies to play better I would have enjoyed it more. Overall a good effort.