Thank you so much! :D That's some really kind and detailed feedback!
I'm flattered you describe the camera movements as dynamic and the sound effects as powerful. I didn't know if I'd be able to pull off effective camera movements, but I wanted to use an engine that at least allows for the possibility of scaling the zoom, and then I was SO pleased when I actually figured out how to get it to zoom in and out in the way I wanted. I was not expecting it to turn out that well. I kept tweaking how far it zoomed out, so that it zoomed out enough to be useful, but didn't zoom out unnecessarily far. :'D But the objects were super small when zoomed out, so I came up with those crosshair thingies--at first I just couldn't get them to position correctly, but then some other thing a couple of days later gave me a breakthrough realisation on how to get them to work, so I brought them back in. I nearly had to leave them out, which would have been disappointing to me!
I also wanted to add mousewheel zooming, while still keeping some helpful degree of automatic zooming, but I figured that would take a bit too long to implement and balance at the last minute, haha, so I left it out for now. I didn't want the player to manually zoom in while far away from the sun, only to be automatically zoomed in SUPER far when going closer to the sun again. It'd be easy enough to limit the zoom, but time was running out and sadly I had to prioritise fixing other stuff first. :')
As for the sound effects, I'm so glad you like them! I spent quite some time tweaking them in Bfxr (which I've dabbled with briefly before, but never used extensively), trying to figure out how all the different slider bars affected the sound, until they were just right... ish. I have to stop myself from getting too perfectionistic about things sometimes, especially when there's a deadline. So I'm really glad to hear they worked well!
What you say about the screenshots is wonderful feedback. Thank you so much. I agree; I'm certainly not much of a digital artist, and I deliberately kept my time spent on the art fairly short so I didn't waste too much time. I didn't even think about the possibility of adding gifs! That's a great idea; I'll see if I can do that! Thank you again, and I'm thrilled to hear the camera work was so effective! :D I love when throwing some mathematical formulae together makes something super cool! And it makes me happy you refer to my game as having quality that is better than the screenshots show. :')
Hahaha, I''m so glad you iked the title screen animations! I spent kind of a silly amount of time on those; I may have gotten a little carried away. That definitely led to me running into Construct 2 Free's limitations sooner than I otherwise would have. I just started off being like "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the planet was part of the title? Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could click on it? Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the sun passed by and was glaring at it?" and... I won't say any more. :') I'm not sure how much you discovered there, but I love adding little tweaks and extra things, just for the player to have fun noticing and discovering!
Ah, that's great information to hear about your framerate! I kind of threw together some code to TRY to manage the performance, but it hasn't been tested out very thoroughly. I've never made any code to do that kind of thing before; I was just like "HEY maybe since I can measure the frame rate and count the total number of objects, maybe I can throw something together with some variables to kind of maintain a decent performance". I'd love to optimise this for when the jam is over! Right now, it's not super smart; it just destroys the oldest existing projectiles (one at a time) as long as your frame rate is below 20 frames per second, and increases the projectile limit if your frame rate is higher than that. It also has limits for how many projectiles it will allow to exist at once; I set that to a minimum cap of 50 and a maximum cap of 1,000 for now. It starts at a cap of 100 and will decrease or increase from there, depending on how your frame rate fluctuates. Maybe I need to lower the minimum from 50, or maybe 20fps is the wrong target (it should probably be player-adjustable anyway), or maybe I need to make the frame rate adjust more quickly, in proportion to how off-target your frame rate is--but then again, that could cause erratic object purgings if you have sudden frame rate drops, and I wanted to avoid that! I certainly get pretty poor performance in my web browser. I was testing this game in Firefox on my laptop. It was a bit painful. :') Had to restart my web browser quite often! I need to revive my desktop.
I'm so glad you found the fights intense and fun! I didn't want to do something too boring or predictable, that people would have likely seen before. I know it's nothing super original, but I tried to avoid making it too... generic, or repetitive, or stretch it out longer than necessary without enough content or gameplay to justify it. As for "Extreme" mode, I actually kinda added that as an afterthought--using features that I was initially using to cheat at the game during testing. I was like "HEY, this teleporting cheat is actually pretty cool--maybe that should be a feature!! But let's not give them it right away! And maybe autofire should be a thing! Clicking can get boring after a while! Oh, and it'd be cool if they no longer get limited by fuel!" Oh, speaking of fuel, one change I made towards the end after testing Normal mode and getting quite bored (when comparing it to Extreme), was that the longer you play in Normal mode, the faster your fuel starts to regenerate--just in case the player is struggling with their fuel being eaten up by moving and shooting, while being stuck far from the sun. Hopefully it's a gradual enough change in regeneration speed that the player won't really notice, but will hopefully still be quick enough to make a difference to the flow of gameplay. :') Hopefully! I didn't have time to test or finetune it much!
Thank you so much for the congrats, too! :D I've been wanting to publish some kind of game for aaaages, and I'm really glad I finally did something, even if it's only small. This is the first comment of feedback I've ever had on a game, so yay for that too!!