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Scrapship Demo (Alpha)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Favorite game | #4 | 2.858 | 3.500 |
Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Nice game! Qbasic is where I got my programming start, so this really intrigued me! I mostly made Kingdom of Kroz and ZZT wannabes, and only dabbled any sprite-based graphics. I eventually defected to art over programming, but my background in Basic helped a lot with using programs like DarkBasic Professional, and even engines like Construct (my current fav).
Anyhow, it was a fun space shooter! I found the enemies were super-tough, and it was quite hard overall. There seemed to be a random element to how soon the "boss" arrived. Sometimes I'd see the larger ships first, others times not at all. It seemed really hard to avoid the boss's attack. However, I did manage to beat it after 5-6 tries! I kept coming back, definitely enjoyable.
One other thing I'd like to see improved if you're continuing this project would be more feedback/satisfaction for destroying enemies. They just sort of disappear right now (i think?), it didn't feel as good as it probably should.
Really good overall though, and one of my favorites in the jam. I know it's a small jam, but really I did enjoy this one! Keep it up!
Ah cool! Glad to see that someone else has heard of Qbasic! :)
The game has some explosion animations, but you're right, the enemies basically just disappear from the screen when shot down. Animations are still on my "to-do" list.
Difficulty seems to be a recurring criticism so future versions will have a difficulty adjustment. It's hard because on the one hand, you have really casual top-down shooter players and on the other you have the hardcore shmuppers that love bullet hell, high scores and 1CCs.
Thanks for playing and mentioning Construct! I've been wondering what would be a good game engine coming from a Qbasic background.
Well, Construct is waaaaay easier than actual programming. For me that's a plus, but not sure if that's your cup of tea. It's an event-based system. I discovered Construct 2 when I was finding tools for a game-dev class that I taught for a few of years. What I love about it is though it's very easy to use and learn, you quickly run into all the same problems that you would in programming. It's really good for teaching students (high schoolers in this case) the core concepts of programming, without getting lost in syntax.
I ultimately found it was perfect for me too! I prefer art, game design, etc over raw coding. This scratches my coding itch JUST enough without frustrating me.
That said, I use Construct 2 currently, which is going off the market very soon. They've had Construct 3 for awhile, and are switching full focus to that. Unfortunately, it's software-as-a-service vs the one payment for C2. C3 looks really great, but for now I'm holding out. (That may change eventually, I just am not a fan of rental software... urgh.)
Yeah, the "rental software" model that some of these game engines use is ridiculous. I think that's why a lot of people are moving over to open source stuff like Godot.
Fun game. Liked the ship powerups and the different enemies but did find it getting hard really quickly. Might be nice if it eased the player in a little more and also the instructions at the start went past a little quick. The narrator voice works really well in setting the mood for the game which was a really nice touch.
Thanks for the feedback Franklin's Ghost!
I agree, the difficulty can be challenging so I'll be adding a difficulty adjustment in future iterations of the game.
The instruction screen duration is dependent on how long it takes the graphics to load in the background. As I add more graphics to the game the load time will be a little longer, giving the player more time to read. Even so, the controls are very standard for top-down shooters, but to make it easier, I plan on having a "casual" mode where the player won't even have to press space bar to fire.
Glad to hear you liked the voice narration! Thanks again for playing!