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Damn, hard mode's got hands; I've only made it to wave 7 so far.

Rust & Dust feels like the sort of twin-stick shooter that I would have played on a flash game website after school. This is very high praise.

I really like the the way that the crosshair locks onto the enemies. It's a very "mech" way of aiming, coming to the same conclusion as Armored Core's sight lock via a different path. I find it impressive that despite disconnecting the mech's aiming from my mouse's position, it never felt like I was lacking control over my choice of target - that must have taken a lot of tweaking to get feeling so good!

I also enjoy the interplay between the chunky dual machine guns and the powerful missile launcher. I felt that I had to be quite conservative with ammo on normal, but with the addition of so many flying units that drop missile pickups in hard, the balance was much closer to ideal.

I do question two game design decisions:

• I'm not sure of the benefit of the overheating mechanic. I found it more frustrating than anything, always kicking in when I was getting into the groove of laying down a hail of bullets. Is it supposed to create an ebb and flow to the combat?
• I wish that the pickups dropped by the static turrets and the large tanks would spawn sooner after defeating the unit. I think that the pace of gameplay was interrupted each time that I had to hang around the corpse waiting for it to despawn.

Other than that, I have few complaints. Maybe some slightly better feedback to taking small arms fire? You've already got a brilliant impact effect when being shot by the large tanks, so something a little less dramatic would be great to indicate when I'm being chipped away.

Overall, this is excellent for a solo game jam entry! I hope you do well in the results!

I really enjoyed playing this, I think that you've done a really good job of capturing that momentum-driven movement that we see in 86 within the constraints of a game jam. Even though I was only shooting at static targets, it gave me the experience of blowing up a tank with a single high-powered shot whilst skidding sideways, and there's not much more that I want from life.

If you wanted to continue working on the game, I'd like to see more to really sell the weight of the machine. Things like jostling the hull up and down as it runs and having it lean into turns would go far here.

Thanks for your feedback, I will definitely consider your advice going forward!

I did actually want to have boss fights, but there isn't enough graphics memory in TIC-80 for me to create large boss enemies! A lot of the design of this game is driven by the limitations of the system I developed it for, which is definitely a double-edged sword.

Never thought I would see a let's play of a game I made! Thanks for playing!

Your comments about the length of the game are valid. I went with 6 stages with 10 levels each because the game that inspired me also had ten levels per stage. Given that I was struggling to come up with formations by the end of development, perhaps I should have cut it down quite a bit.

A level select or the ability to save and come back later might have been good options to combat fatigue too.

Regardless, I hope you found some enjoyment in it and thanks once again!

Thank you!

You're too kind! I wanted to make the game a lot less serious than an invasion story, so I decided to do a spin on the concept where the alien was actually very apologetic about what was happening!

Thanks for the comment!

• I always intended the dash to affect your momentum, to make you think twice about where it was going to put you (e.g. in the ground). In fact, I want to go a step further and have the dash put you at a speed above your natural max speed.
• I get what you mean about gravity. There is an unused gravity value in the movement code, but I struggled to get movement to feel satisfying whilst still including the acceleration due to gravity. I would like to keep tweaking this and potentially bring gravity back into the picture, but it might need a more complex system of generating lift etc.
• Thanks for the typo spot! Can you tell that I made the UI in a bit of a rush?