Great game! I especially enjoyed the strategy needed to destroy the enemies with their own weapon's fire. Like others, I liked the tutorial the the level of polish you were able to add (including a pause screen!)
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Space Color Wars's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Concept (gameplay) | #63 | 3.702 | 3.702 |
Overall | #63 | 3.830 | 3.830 |
Theme | #72 | 3.965 | 3.965 |
Presentation (visuals) | #76 | 3.825 | 3.825 |
Ranked from 57 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Excellent game! Very hard work for my tiny brain to handle colors, rotation and a gun at the same time. Fits the theme excellently and loved the tutorial where you could understand exactly how the game works.
Awesome concept, great visuals and music and fluid controls.
It took me a while to get the hang of it, after a few sub-1000 score games, I managed to go above 6k and I was on track :)
I really love the way enemy projectiles are reflected, so I don't have to worry about shield curvature or anything, it just reverses their direction and BAM!
I might've been able to last a bit more if it was possible to reverse the thrusters and go backwards, and maybe instantly rotating the shields in fixed 120 degree steps with a different button might also be useful at times.
Are you planning on continuing development?
Awesome concept, great visuals and music and fluid controls.
It took me a while to get the hang of it, after a few sub-1000 score games, I managed to go above 6k and I was on track :)
I really love the way enemy projectiles are reflected, so I don't have to worry about shield curvature or anything, it just reverses their direction and BAM!
I might've been able to last a bit more if it was possible to reverse the thrusters and go backwards, and maybe instantly rotating the shields in fixed 120 degree steps with a different button might also be useful at times.
Are you planning on continuing development?
aamzing gameplay, i love the shield/bullet color mechanics, movement of the ship can be improved, but nice game
Overall, the gameplay is fun while a unique way to use the shield to reflect the project. I like the colour bullet that deals extra damage and the shield bomb. Although I find the complexity of the game is overwhelming for beginners as there's a lot of things to master in a short time.
One way to reduce the complexity would be introducing one colour shield first then introduce another colour shield, with this type of pacing will give players the time to understand how the colour shield works.
An alternate suggestion would be changing the controls, where WASD control and rotate the ship, the left mouse button to shoot, lastly holding the right mouse button with movement to control the shield. These will reduce the complexity by grouping control together.
This is a really cool concept. I liked the feedback system and the audio/visual effects. I also liked that color filter on the shield and the bullets- it definitely added more variety to the gameplay experience.
Here are a few things that come to mind-
Controls
Let the shield rotate only with the keyboard inputs; don't rotate it when I move the mouse. Use the mouse only for aiming. (Generally, using fewer inputs for multiple mechanics is a good idea, but in this case, it is confusing and messing with the gameplay consistency).
Ship Movement
I could not figure out how or why the speed of the ship changed.
Regardless, it did not help much that the ship would move closer to the edge of the screen where NPCs would spawn and instantly shoot. You could experiment and check how it feels to have the camera fixed on the ship and move it along with the ship. This way the players would always have a relatively wider view of almost all sides.
Difficulty level & NPC
Too many NPCs spawned too quickly at the beginning. You may want to make the beginning a little less difficult.
You could set each NPC to have different bullet speed so that it would not be overwhelming when multiple coloured NPCs are on screen simultaneously. This could also help with better control over the difficulty level (the NPCs in the beginning would have slower bullets) and you could use different combinations later to control the level of difficulty and variety in gameplay experience throughout the game.
I also recommend having the NPCs be taken down in three shots instead of five when colour filter is not applied. When there are too many NPCs on the screen, it gets unreasonably difficult when you need to shoot an NPC five times while also managing the shield.
UI
My attention was fixed on the shield and the NPCs the whole time. I did not have the time to look at how many lives I had left. I would recommend implementing something closer to the ship to display this information.
Same goes for the Special Ability. I did not even remember that I had that ability. You could add something closer to the ship to make it better visible. You could maybe try experimenting with the colour of the player ship, or add a glow to it or something else to convey the status of the Force.
Try something more visual focused rather than numbers for displaying these two pieces of information.
Bug(?)
I think the ship randomly rotated to 0degrees on Z(?) axis and rotated back towards the aim. This happened twice, in different play sessions.
Btw I think you should add a different cover image for the game. The present one undermines how cool the game is.
Overall, it is a really nice game with super cool mechanics and juice. With further polish, it can be even more enjoyable. Great work!
love the concept of this game. Quite a lot to do at the same time :D, i was struggling to fly and rotate and keep an eye on enemies :D. Great for a jam game, might need some refining if you take it further. But a lot of fun!
One slight thing, i struggled to know/remember which was the "front" of the ship :D, that could be made more obvious.
This is one of the best I've played this jam. The juice in general is amazing. The badass feeling of deflecting a bullet destroyin it's ship while shooting another ship and quickly rotating the shield to deflect other bullet. Hard to master but really really satisfying. Congratulations on this amazing entry!
Very colorful :D Maybe RGB Wars would be good too ;) Takes a bit of some getting used to especially moving forward as for me it felt like it was random when it would move vs not but eventually I got enough of an understanding to kill a few blue enemies... :D
Good mechanic and quite challenging. I wonder how this would work in multiplayer or a longer game with various levels.
Cool game! Reminded me of Ikaruga with the whole switching colors thing
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