Great game! The visuals are very well polished. You make great use of particles, screen-shakes, and post-processing effects to give everything some juice. I also like the feedback loop with the civilian ships and your currency. Keeping civilians alive gives more money, but as the game goes on they will die, so you have to be careful with your ship placement early on. There are some problems with balancing though. I had to play it twice, since the first time around I tried using every ship type. I sadly didn't make it to the end, so the second time I simply spammed the cheapest ship type, which made it a cake walk. I think the prices of the other ship aren't reflected in their power. Another thing I didn't really enjoy is how enemy ships seemed to prioritize civilian ships, even when warships were in-between them. It would be more interesting if you could use warships as shields to protect low-health ships, which also gives the player more of a reason to think about ship-placement. Overall though, I really liked the game, and it shows that the organizer knows their stuff about gamejams!
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Thank you for playing the game and for the constructive feedback! 😊 It is really appreciated!
It is great to read that the polish, UI, and VFX/SFX seem to have helped give the game a strong vibe and feel. And of course, it is always really nice to hear that you had fun with it too. That is one of the most important things for a game 😄
What you said about the balance is absolutely fair, and those are very good points. I was also trying to find the right middle ground between not making it too hard, but also not making it too easy. For a strategy game like this, that is actually quite difficult, and it really takes a lot of play sessions to get that right. With a 10-day jam, there simply was not enough time to properly fine-tune everything. So I did expect that the balance would probably not be fully there yet, but I was hoping the game would still be fun and satisfying enough to push for that final jump🚀(I hope it was). It is definitely something we need to improve, whether in updates or in future strategy games.
Using ships as shields is also a really good suggestion. There are actually two types of enemies: one that targets everything, and one that only targets the transport ships. We may have ended up adding a bit too many transport-focused enemies, so that probably needs better balancing as well, or perhaps a system where you can more deliberately protect the other ships. Definitely a good tip if we ever decide to revisit and improve that part of the game 👍
Thanks again for playing and the great feedback and for the compliments! 😊