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StarPack: Swarm Survivor's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artistic | #24 | 3.852 | 3.852 |
| Overall | #34 | 3.074 | 3.074 |
| Technical | #36 | 3.111 | 3.111 |
| Design | #40 | 3.037 | 3.037 |
| Gameplay | #45 | 2.852 | 2.852 |
| Theme | #56 | 2.519 | 2.519 |
Ranked from 27 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Beautiful artwork! The progression is a tad on the slow side, but I guess that's up to taste. I had some trouble with the keys, even after I read the description, since I didn't felt like I was moving, so I thought I missed something. Otherwise great experience :D Would love to play that on my old gameboy!
Really nice game, though enemies spawn a bit too fast to kill them in reasonable time.
really nice pixelart and music, gameplay was fun in the beginning but then it was too hard to kill the enemies, I think an AI a bit smarter would make it really fun to play
This retro style graphics are good! That greenish and black colours you get on a gameboy screen is very faithful here, the music also gives a good followup. When the enemies accumulate on the screen gets a little hard to to get the exp points, but the upgrade system is nice, it is simple and every single upgrade is useful. Job well done!
final boss was hard but I manage to beat him somehow, now my head hurt.
Thank you for your dedication!
The difficulty is very unbalanced here, I didn't have enough time to iron out the spikes, but it seems beatable, and there is also the 'soft' game over if you want to proceed anyway :)
Well that song's gonna be stuck in my head a while. Great stuff, this one's super addicting! Very fun submission, nice job :D
Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it.
I can tell there was a great deal of care put into the style of this game; it looks like it could be lifted straight out of the Game Boy era. That's incredibly well done!
The gameplay somewhat devolved into running in circles to pile up a bunch of mobs and let the gun handle it, so a little variety in the enemies (ones that keep distance and shoot at you, for example) would have gone a long way.
Otherwise, this was great!
Thank you for the feedback!
Gameboy had a nice place in terms of cart space vs screen specs, so dev could've gone all in for screens and animations. I wanted to capture a bit of this approach and was surprised that 4 colors was quite powerful.
I definitely need to think of some other enemy types as a lot of people point this out.
Very nice! That's one slippery ship. The graphics are sublime! Music and effects are great. The feedback of the shield/dmg is awesome. The graphics of the enemy and the pickups could be a little less similar to each other. Felt really stupid when I kept "collecting" the enemy. But I'm sure that's just me :) What a fun game! Thanks
Thank you for the feedback!
For the shield I used the old school trick of showing and hiding the sprite at ~60hz which gives the fuzzy transparency effect. It's not really necessary with alpha setting available, but it's more authentic.
The initial idea is that you collect the gem which is part of the enemy, like gems from metalheads in Jak II? That's why the center is similar, I wanted to add more particles or animation maybe to give more visual focus for exp but didn't had time.
omg the gameboy aesthetics are so on point. i especially love the character portray
Thanks for the feedback! I am glad you like it. I am pretty happy with how the portrait turned out. I think I got some more facial animations, for story maybe... if it develops
Nice to see a fellow game boy enthusiast! Overall a very solid game, feels like it might as well have been a full release on the game boy back in the days. nice gameplay stylish graphics and a solid banging soundtrack to boot. What's not to love?
Thanks for the feedback and kind words! I never had an original gameboy but I had a color one. I was trying to reproduce the nostalgia feeling, although it would be very challenging with original hardware.
Cool little space shooter !
I like that you went for full smooth rotation aven with the game boy inspired aesthetic, it looks really good, especially the pilot's portrait that even reacts when you take damage, the music is also really nice.
Gameplay wise, i like the floaty asteroids style controls but it does make it a bit hard at times to dodge upcoming enemies, this also made it so that when dodging enemies tended to pile up a bit in a huge cluster.
I didn't imediately understand at first that you don't control the ships turret yourself but that it rather shoots by itself, but once i got it i feel it's a nice idea and it kinda sells more the idea of you're lost in space and defending yourself to survive.
I also like the upgrade system with the 3 (i suppose randomised) choices every time.
Had a real good time playing this.
Well done :)
Thank you for such a detailed feedback!
I am glad you like the authentic as I was afraid not to pull it off with the limited palette. But that seemed quite interesting of what's possible to do with just 4 colors. I never had the original game boy but had the Color one, I was always amazed by how smooth animations were on those, and the crystal grid made pixels clearer than anything CRT rendered at that time. So I went for this feel of grid rendering, and now it's really easy as all is handled by the engine.
The game was difficult to understand at first but after a bit of messing around I understood, it is a bit hard to understand the where you at at the world because of the camera angle but over I really like the progression really nice art style and music Great work!
Thank you for the feedback!
Yes, in this game it doesn't really matter where you are in the world as enemies spawn around the player. The only one that matter is the Boss, so I've added a guiding arrow for that.
I love the style! The difficulty flew really quick, and the rate of enemies seemed a bit much. It would be interesting to see the enemies not clump up too much as it made avoiding them pretty simple. But I really enjoyed the progression and abilities!
Thanks for the feedback! Right, there is a spike there, but I had to stop at some point of balancing since it takes a while... For this one I wanted to rely mostly on engine physics with some adjustments but I would think of something else for the future
The gameplay was very fun! I didnt expect the difficulty to ramp up like it did.
Thank you for the feedback! Glad you liked it. Yes, there is definitely a difficulty spike, but it takes a lot of playtest to iron those out... So the 'soft' game over is there to make it less challenging.