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A jam submission

Solar GuardView game page

A homebrew Game Boy Advance game made for GBA Jam 2021.
Submitted by Deft Spade — 6 hours, 1 minute before the deadline
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Solar Guard's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#93.5003.500
Technical#93.3753.375
Polish#93.3753.375
Graphics#103.6253.625
Originality#133.5003.500
Audio#143.1253.125

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • Ambitious space shooter with very believable presentation! (the UI really sells the experience - maybe too much so, as the number of stats is a little overwhelming). Controlling the ships is pretty hard, but there's plenty to try - finding the ideal one for each mission is a fun challenge in itself. Good luck taking this further!
  • Great thrust physics, very playable, with nice soundtrack.
  • Super hard to control! But I guess that's part of the fun. I only managed to finish a couple of missions, but it's really well done. A bit more variety of music would help.

Repository URL
https://github.com/Deft-Spade/Solar-Guard

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Comments

Submitted

Wow, the game ist very interesting! Great Job!

Developer

Thanks!

Submitted

Nice game, good presentation. I haven't got the hang of controlling the ship yet! Am not a very good escort 🚀☄️

Developer(+1)

Thanks! Glad to hear the game presents itself well. Controlling the ship is quite tricky; the physics can take getting used to. I’m not a good escort either, mission 2 honestly needs more level design work to balance its difficulty. 😅 That was something that I ran out of time to do before the jam ended.

Submitted

Nice looking UI, fits so well for the space themed game. Although I’m so bad at controlling my ship, and drift away a lot XD

I’ve encountered this divide by zero error on mission 2 when I touched the asteroids, while attacking at it. I was also low on HP, but I can’t recall how much was it.

Developer

Controlling the ship can be tricky thanks to the physics used in the game. I’ve crashed into the asteroids on mission 2 a lot!

In fact, mission 2 is too hard in my opinion now that I’ve played it a few times after the jam; it needs more difficulty balancing but would have ran out of time in the jam to do so anyway.

I haven’t looked in the code yet (that’s something I’ll do if I get around to doing any post-jam work on the game) but I’d guess from the info you’ve provided that the error has probably occurred in the code responsible for updating the HUD’s displayed values (since division was used there to get the proportion of a value against it’s maximum to know how much to fill the value’s meter on the HUD).

Thanks for the reporting the bug, I’ve added a line to the game’s description on itch.io advising that since Solar Guard is still in development, there’s a fair chance that issues/bugs will be encountered.

Submitted

Only had a quick round on this, but neat little shooter. It felt a little weird hitting the "edge" of the map, it might have worked better wrapping.

Definitely one to replay with more time

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, I agree that it’s a bit odd to suddenly stop when hitting the edge but wrapping wouldn’t work for this game since it’d break the intended design of certain missions. For example, mission 5 requires you to fly from the bottom-right corner of the map to the top-left corner and back several times fast enough to rescue the escape pods. Wrapping would cut down the amount of travelling distance required since the player could take a short-cut by flying towards the corner to wrap-around to the other corner rather than having to fly across the map, defeating the intended design of the mission. I’ve just had the idea that maybe bouncing the player off the edge gently might be better than just stopping completely, I might implement that in future development if I get around to doing further work on Solar Guard after the jam.

Submitted(+1)

I didn't get that far in my play, but a good reason not to wrap. I agree the bounce might be less jarring than a dead stop though