Really liked the graphics, especially the mermaid character.
The way the boost works was not quite clear thou.

Time constraints, It was supposed to be big jolt of speed combined with an animation that using it to run into enemies would do damage but, combat was rushed to get it done in time, so currently it just doubles your movement speed.

Feature request: ability to leap out of the water like the beautiful mermaid I clearly am.

Wish I could ramp out of the water and dive back down. That would be fun. Good work overall! Polish it after LD

I liked the concept, a mermaid combat game.Funny is that the mermaid's weapon hit box was visible to me, and often I couldn't see the weapon animation. Graphics were also nice.

hyouko and SevenKingdomsSurvivors: Actually that was planned, but I didn't have enough time to do art for the sky. I am planning to continue work on the game post LD its going to be an adventure game.

pvwradtke: Actually I left the hit-box in, it was supposed to be replaced with a basic attack range indicator image but 11 minutes to deadline wasn't enough time to make the image and implement it. The weapon animation was giving me an hours worth of trouble before I said screw it and went with the least broken one.

Any game that features mermaids gets a +1 from me.

Could've used some audio. :) Graphics were quite good. The enemies stopped spawning when I just boosted my way to the right for a while. Also, if the energy meter reaches 100%, the cooldown graphic is not visible until it reaches 0% again.

@Candyhandy: and to think I was going to do a game about digging until my friend said "Murder Mermaids, Tough as nails, sinking ships stealing, human life force, and stuff"

@manabreak: I'm not good with music or sound-effects, I was thinking about using bsfxr but all the sounds I came up with were jarring, and weren't appropriate for what was going on. I'll look into the enemy spawning issue, they should spawn evenly on both sides of the screen.

As for the energy meter issue, it turns black to show that its 'overheating' or as its called in the code burnt out. What's happening is when you reach 100% it overheats for 10 seconds, which is much longer then getting it to 99% and waiting for it to fill up. The intention was for players to carefully choose to use shields or boost so the don't overheat. This was something that was to be explained in the story which was entirely cut from the game for the jam.

Did not understand the game :( Art was decent

Good game.
Audio would be really nice to complement the likeable graphics. The attack animation could be clearer.

Sidenote: Y and Z are interchanged on a german keyboard. So the controlls were a bit awkward until I used my Xbox Controller.

@Keehan12: The game was going to be about a Mermaid that goes on a quest to save her race from dying to a curse which she is unaffected by. Due to time constraints, the game essentially turned into 'Mermaid Fighter' press C to attack evil Mermaids that are in the white range indicator. There isn't much to the game right now, so really its, Kill Mermaids, Get Points, get a High score, challenge your friends.

@stephan_h: Good to know, and sorry about that, I'll consider adding remapping options or have different keyboards supported in the future.

My girlfriend liked this game ;)

@praporomsk: I'm glad she enjoyed it!

Couldn't run on OSX

@GreatBigJerk: do you have the latest JRE? What version of OSX are you running? if you let me know that I can look into it, and get that fixed. I think I might know what the issue is, if its not the JRE. The JRE has to be 1.6 or higher.

Nice mermaid fighting game! Nice graphics!

You can do surprisingly well just holding right and not going up or down.

@Seme: Thanks! I honestly think I spent a LITTLE too long on making the game look good, and not enough time polishing the combat(which was hashed together in the last 4 hours) But I love the way the graphics came out, so I am not complaining.

@VikingWarriors: Yeah haha I realized that pretty quick, In the current build I made the enemies move faster then you'r default speed, which makes fighting them more necessary/dangerous/rewarding. In the current build they also get harder as time goes on, but worth more points.

Nice engine. I missed some extra type of enemied though

@rogberth: I was working on other kinds of enemies but I had to cut it to only the one that was finished when I got down to an hour before deadline.

Am I in a aquarium? :D Well, this is the first mermaid arcade game I've ever played! Unfortunately it seems way too easy in its current state. I found very little challenge so I couldn't play too long without getting bored. Seems like a solid base though. The combat seemed to work well enough though I found I never used boost. It just seemed like I swam around killing orange mermaids and would have been nice to have some other enemy types or goals.

@HybridMind There was much more planned for this game then I had time for. I boosted the challenge since the end of the Jam, and boost becomes necessary because the Mermaids swim faster then you do without boost. More enemies were being planned, but they didn't get finished in time unfortunately. There was also supposed to be a story mode where you went on an adventure, but it got scrapped for time. I'm going to continue working on this, and I may have a full release at some point, which will include exploration and a story and all that jazz, but I will definitely always have the endless scroller fighting mode, which will contain all the enemies I add to the full game.

Interesting! Add some animation and effects, then this might be an awesome action game! Nice game! :)

@BlazingFanfish: Yeah I plan to add way more stuff to the game, there are going to be various spells and weapons the mermaid gets to use during her journey to lift the curse. It wont be all melee attacks and shields in the final game.

Interesting concept. May be nice game, affter added more effects. Like mermaid:)

@camlang: Yeah Pressed for time, I couldn't add more. Glad you like the mermaid!

You should update the targeting rectangle thingie every time the character moves, rather than when there's a player input; it ends up not always being accurate.

A little simple as is, but still quite enjoyable. Looks good visually, and the controls are tight.

Aside from "more content", a bit of retooling of the hitbox sizes would also improve the experience.

Good work!

@LemmingSurvivor: Yeah the target rectangle will probably be going away in a newer version, I'm adding things like diagonal attacks, or potentially changing it to a twin stick setup(or Keyboard+Mouse) allowing me to add projectiles and other types of attacks(The goal is to have something like 16 or so different attacks from standard projectiles, to AOE spells)

Im glad you like the visual style, I will probably be increasing the Resolution of the sprites so that I can add more detail and make the character more recognizable.

The controls are something I actually probably spent WAY too long on, but I dislike playing games with difficult or un-intuitive controls. So one of my main focuses was making the game more fun to play, but sacrificing content.

To be completely honest the combat was made in the final 4 hours of the Jam. I just hadn't had time to really work on it. Controls, Enemy Behavior, and all the art took me most of my time, so in my 4 hours of crunch time, I hashed it out much faster then I would have liked. currently they just use circles which makes the collision a little too large when not swimming and a little off center when swimming, and the knock back when hit is still bugged(it only hit's the player to the right even though the player should be knocked to the left)

Overall I like the game's outcome, now i'm looking to the future of the game. I would upload the current modified version, but I am making major changes to the collision system so the game is no longer in working condition.

Anyway I Hope you had fun!

pretty good but got a bit repetitive - nice job

very simple fairly fun

The parallax scrolling is really fancy, the graphics are nice and clear, there is no much gameplay to be had, but overall this is a fine entry.

@sP0CkEr2: Yeah I realize it's repetitive, I mashed the combat enemies and last minute touches into the game in the last 4 hours so there wasn't much that was in a finished state to fit into the game. It was all about making what I did have done work well, instead of scrambling to make a bunch of stuff that worked poorly.

@Nnnnneeeedddd: Thanks, Simple I can agree, I tried hard to make the simple game as fun as possible.

@jacierecf: I'll admit, I spent way too long on the Parallax scrolling... but it came out cool looking! I wanted to make sure with the graphics that I reduced a decent ammount of visual noise so it was easy to see the main character and enemies. As I mentioned with sP0CkEr2 Gameplay was crammed in last second and I spent a lot of time making one mechanic feel solid rather then 2 or 3 mechanics that felt weak.

Love the parallax background! Would be great if there were some visual indication of the attack cooldown, like some sort of animation.

@radmars: That was something I was considering when I added the attack cool-down But didn't have enough time to finish/wasn't really happy with the way I handled it. you had to look at your health bar to know that it was back up.

In the final version The cool-downs are indicated by the spell bar which is located in the bottom right corner, there will also be more then one spell and various different charges of spells which puts them on a longer cooldown but does more damage.