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(+3)

What I liked

  • You stuck with black and white as your colors.
  • I liked the artwork. It looked really good.
  • The game mechanics were really interesting and I think you should experiment with it some more.
  • I'm a fan of the music

Suggestions:

  • You should give feedback to when a player gets hit. Personally, I had to keep looking to the top left to see if something hit me or not. In general, a player wants to get feedback like this. It provides them a sense of danger.
  • On the game page itself, you list the game controls. It's a bit of information before playing the game and you have to refer back to the page for controls. Unfortunately, there was no control information in-game. You definitely want to have a controls menu somewhere in your game. Ideally, anytime you can pause the game, or at the least, in the main menu.
  • This point is related to the above. The game mechanics are really cool, but its a lot to throw at the player at once. I would think about introducing the mechanics over time. Too much information at once can turn a player off from a game.

Overall, I really liked this game, and I think you should consider working on this game some more or using the ideas behind it to create something new. Congrats on a great entry!

(+1)

Thanks for the feedback.

We definitely considered creating a small tutorial but ran out of time. Figured it was more important to deliver a finished product, though I solved a few problems by having a begin button at the beginning so that you could kinda mess around without any real threat. My plan for a tutorial was to have each part of the game explained, an enemy that doesn't shoot at you, a pickup to bring back to the ship, how to heal the ship etc. 

As for the feedback on hit, definitely should have had some animation/hitflash/damage noise/particle effect. Definitely want to make it feel good to play.

A few other notes: The controls might feel a little loose but I kind of wanted that effect since it's space, but I find that while giving constant inputs it feels pretty good and when letting go it kind of drifts which was neat but maybe not the best experience. I'd considered making the controls super tight which would probably feel ultimately better. I've definitely had that problem of having to refer back to the game page for controls myself, so I'll try to remember that next time.

One last bit is it's pretty obvious that the single player experience suffered due to the multiplayer and we should have made it more additive than reductive, but we would have missed out on the cool interaction between the players and the main ship. Flying the ship, then jumping out to grab loot, and then jumping back into the ship is incredibly difficult for a solo player, especially as the difficulty ramps. And of course the ramping difficulty into infinity is kind of a cop out for real gameplay design but I felt it was fine for this jam.

We also should have added in a credits section, I'm noticing a lot of people did that. The art is from game-icons.net so we can't claim that unfortunately mostly. The music was hand crafted though.