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Flux Pursuit's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #2 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #5 | 3.953 | 3.953 |
| Visuals | #9 | 4.063 | 4.063 |
| Game Design | #10 | 3.875 | 3.875 |
| Execution | #12 | 3.875 | 3.875 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Excellent music, sfx, visuals, and animation that all mesh really well. Strategy is straightforward and satisfying, though I wish I had some more "deck-shaping" options to avoid getting stuck. Lots of really nice polish that lend a lot to gamefeel (the rising tone of SFX when building a chain, the movement of the ship).
This is pretty much flawless execution, gameplay, audio, visuals, everything working together to create a very satisfying game.
Great work! Looks nice and sounds good. Satisfying “feel” with the UI and SFX.
The mechanic was simple once I under stood it but given the available cards I didn’t feel like I had a whole lot of choice in what I could play?
I did encounter an issue in one of play throughs, maybe round 3 or 4. I didn’t draw any starter cards for the first 5 or 6 rounds, despite clearing out all the cards in my hand each turn. I ended up getting a missiles starter and playing it eventually but by then I was already dead. I wonder if increasing weighting of starters earlier in the round might help?
The way it’s currently coded, your chances of being offered your first starter pack increase by 20% every level until 100% on the 6th level. It sounds like that’s not a strong enough guarantee when considering that some players will low-roll. I’ll definitely make sure to tune that for the post-jam update!
I wonder how other roguelikes are playtested though; it seems like it’s hard to test low / high-rolls without playing through a ton of runs.
Yeah I feel like anything with random outcomes is always going to roll a bunch of 1s at some point! I assume a lot of games use some sort of pseudo-random thingo like Dota does https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Random_Distribution. Which I guess is kind of what you’ve done there with the 20%, so I just got quite unlucky! Potentially you need to bump up the % faster in later levels or something like that? In this case if you get to turn 6 before you get a starter you’re basically dead without a chance to play anything?
No idea about testing, but that would be a fun problem to play around with.
Nice game !
graphics are nice, as is audio. I 'd like some way and reason to rearrange the modules, and of course more of these ! maybe a bit of rng cheating to have a chance at starter when none is in the reactor or selection yet.
This was really fun, great concept. It took me a few goes to understand how to get chain reactions, but a great use of the theme.
Brilliant game, not much else to say.
One thing that I wasn’t sure about is if dodging the projectiles by moving the ship is intentional. I was able to do it a few times, but it doesn’t seem necessary anyway.
Thanks!
The missile dodging isn’t intentional. I wanted to adjust the homing behavior to be unavoidable while still having a stabilization jitter effect, but I had to prioritize other work before the deadline (because missiles still turn back around and hit you, so it’s not a big deal). Although now that I think about it, you can probably fully dodge the fireball in the last fight, lol.
Lovely submission! I like how the art style evokes FTL :) I also like how I was able to play it only using the mouse!
At the beginning, something was making me think this was somewhat real-time, and that I needed to slot in my reactors in time before my ship started to firing automatically. When I figured out how the turns work, I also had some trouble figuring out the order in which the reactors would play out. When I got that, I had no further trouble with the game systems. The only puzzle left was that every ship I defeated “got away”. Is that intentional?
Anyways, it was great fun figuring out my strategy and building towards it. I figured out that fireballs were powerful, which was helped by the extremely satisfying giant shaking damage numbers that come up when using them. So I stocked up on those and, worrying about diluting my deck, I always picked the two upgrade options that did not involve adding cards to the deck. That strategy paid off, and I was able to smash my way to victory! Once I was at the endboss, it was great fun seeing all of my systems chain off one another. Every now again, the chains went off a bit differently than I had planned because I didn’t consider something, only to then course correct themselves again. That was fun as well!
Great job! Only wish I have left is a difficulty option, as seasoned deck-builder players will probably find this a tad easy. But I understand that balancing for a general jam audience is different from balancing for an audience made out of people who already play your genre :D
Regarding reactor order, I was thinking it would be nice to display a preview of what will happen if you play a module when you hover over it, like where it will be inserted and how the reactor will activate.
The enemy ship getting away every time is intentional, lore-wise you’re “pursuing” the same enemy ship until you finally manage to defeat it. Of course, in reality this is an excuse to save time drawing a bunch of different enemy ships :)
I’m planning to readjust the balance in a post-jam update, so hopefully you’ll find a more interesting challenge then.
Please ping me when you do, I want to revisit this!
I CANT STOP PLAYING
This game is a masterpiece! I also LOVE the music- just wonderful👌🏻
Very polished game, everything felt very clean and intuitive. I thought the chaining mechanics were interesting, but I feel like the Starter cards are too powerful since they maintain the flux chain bonus but don’t have any requirements to trigger, and at a certain point the “upgrades” just felt like they were making my setup worse. Initially, I thought the current flux when a card was activated would be used in its calculations, and the flux would reset at each Starter card, which would reward longer chains. My strategy ended up just using Starter cards and fireball cards which seemed very powerful, and I do wonder how they managed to get away sometimes…
Thanks! I tuned the game to be easier than I would otherwise for the jam, so that all players can enjoy the full experience in a short period of time. I do like the idea of rewarding longer chains, maybe I could make flux equal to the length of the longest chain instead?
Also note that you can discard up to 5 cards from your hand per turn to draw new ones, which should help mitigate the pool dilution from adding new cards to your deck to a certain extent. Even then, I’d like to give the player even more “reroll” power to tune this further. This would also allow making starter and fireball cards rarer without it feeling bad.
I’m glad you liked the game! :)
This is awesome, the sound and visuals have amazing production quality, fun gameplay and an interesting take on the theme!
This felt really well executed and fun to play!
Amazing entry! The game design is really good and there is a lot of potential with this idea. And the presentation is just great, with a lot of polish and everything works nicely.
I had a ton of fun screwing around with the chain combos! Music was awesome. Really Unique idea, and id love for more!
This is a very strong entry here, the game was a lot of fun to play, great work here!