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First Hope's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Gameplay | #1 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
Art Style | #1 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
People's Choice | #2 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
Staff's Pick | #3 | n/a | n/a |
Representation of Theme | #3 | 3.100 | 3.100 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- A well polished shoot-em-up. I would've liked to see the theme directly represented in the game itself, but the story logs were a clever way to incorporate the theme.
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Enjoy the game!
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Comments
I hope to see this game getting even better
This may be the first time you played this game but it sure won't be the last!
The game resolution has been updated to be smaller, everyone should be able to see the entire game screen now!
Outer space is badass, and so is this game. There are a lot of things I like about this game. You gave me a lot to comment on, so rather than give you a bunch of paragraphs, let me list them out a bit more cleanly:
Here are my critiques, with some suggestions for how I would improve on them:
All these criticisms have pretty simple solutions imo, so don't be intimidated by the fact that I wrote so much. Great work on this.
Wow! Thank you so much for the compliments and critique. I spent ALOT of time looking for good music and I'm glad that so many people like it as much as I did. Also, believe it or not but I would actually sometimes keep the game running in the background while I was writing code since I enjoyed the music so much.
I also think the game is quite slow. I played the game so many times while developing it that I convinced myself that I had gotten quite good at it and didn't see the need to make it harder since I thought it was easy just for me lol. I'll definitely go in and make the enemies and blasts faster. Also, yes the enemies spawn in greater quantities as the level increases.
I will admit, the powerup art was something I had to do quickly since I was running out of time for the game jam. Before submitting, they were simple 5x5 rectangles that had a different color based on what they did. I think I will stick with the idea that they are powerups sent by the player's allies but maybe I'll make them look like storage capsules or something.
The space logs are implemented and are definitely my favorite part of the game. The way to unlock space logs is to destroy enemy ships and they reveal a bit about the history of the player's world each time they're unlocked. Each space log requires you to destroy a different number of enemy ships and all of them are unlocked once you destroy a total of 750. I guess I should have written somewhere that "collecting data" is the same as destroying enemy ships. Also, if you look at the bottom right of the space logs page you'll see the total count of enemies you've killed so far.
The reason you can't see the entirety of all the screens is since the resolution of the game is hard coded. I forgot to take this into account when developing the game since my monitor has quite a large resolution and so the entirety of the game screen was always visible for me. I will likely go in and either change the resolution or make the window resizable.
Thanks for all the feedback, this is the first game I've ever made and I was scared that it would be terrible but your feedback gave me hope so I'm very grateful!
By the way, your game, Your Buddy, was really fun to play. The art, game mechanics, and overall vibe of the game was super cool and I definitely want to make a game as good as Your Buddy in the future. Thank you again for the feedback!
I can relate to being scared when releasing it - it was also my first game, so I was overthinking and redesigning everything during the testing process, too. You did a really great job though.
Knowing about how the log unlocks work, I'll have to go back and try it so I can check them out. I love to unlock extra lore stuff like that. The other things I mentioned are really just minor things I noticed, things that tend to slip by you when you're developing and constantly testing a game over a two week period. lol
Your comment about my game made me really, really happy to read. I totally blew out my scope when conceptualizing this game - in future game jams, I'll definitely focus more on making a game with fewer features that are more polished, rather than a game like YB with several features with mediocre polish. I'm also glad that you liked the assets, because I was worried that scraping them together from the free section on Itch would leave the game lacking some visual cohesion (which it definitely does, but I'm glad that it's not so bad, haha)
Anyway, thanks again for your really nice comment, and congrats on your first game. :)
The music is cool !