"My Purpose" is definitely a challenging game. Aiming is difficult since the spaceship's orientation and the mouse's position don't really line up. Trying to shoot while flying makes it even harder, so I found myself having to come to a stop if I wanted to do any meaningful damage. I tried using the minimap to help guide me to nearby enemies, but since the minimap rotates as the ship rotates, I found it really hard to navigate.

I really struggled with picking up health orbs (which I almost didn't realize was health, until I managed to carefully run into it). The health orbs are small, and it's not immediately clear that they replenish health.

After flying around for a few rounds, I realized that when the ship's destroyed it just respawns a few seconds later next to the planet. As a result, I didn't really have any incentive to fly around; I just needed to stay next to the planet.

The graphics were simple, nothing too offensive to the eye. The sound effects definitely added some texture to the sound space (in a good way). The background music built the mood up, but I'm not sure that mood was appropriate for the game's setting.

More fleshed out features would have been nice, but I would have liked to see more overall polish.

Quite fun, if a bit simple. Shooting and destroying the enemy ships is very satisfying, and the movement is for the most part pretty good, but I wish there was a way to control the speed of the ship, and a better UI to show where the planet is. The mood created by the music is awesome, and it would only need a bit of balancing/mastering to be perfect.

I had a good time playing this. I got really really far and felt it was too impossible to beat that one giant ship. I spent a lot longer on this than I had planned to but this game is RIGHT up my alley. :)

I appreciated the aiming in this, it felt good to me and I always felt able to hit what I wanted to. The movement was a little bit harder for me to get used to but I like the scroll wheel a fair amount. I had a few issues with the WASD controls at first but I got used to them and enjoyed the additional mouse control I had for aiming due to movement not being reliant on the mouse too much.

It was difficult but fun to try to master to counteract that. The music was nice and the little bits of story definitely helped the experience, along with the introduction of new enemies.

Good job!

This is one of the stronger entries I played so far on this LD, though I couldn't beat that final boss!!

Great simple but stylish visuals, gameplay is suitably hectic and stressful, feels satisfying to blow up those ships (though maybe that could use a bit extra oomph?).
I would recommend a more obnoxious effect to warn you when your little ship gets hit, and to warn you when the planet is getting shot at. Maybe even having arrows appear on the edges of the screen pointing you towards the ship currently shooting at the planet? It often felt a bit of a surprise when I noticed my ship was in the red, or that my planet was severely hurt, it easily gets lost in the action.

Played it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/139473859 (starts at 4:39:03)

I liked the game. It could use a bit of balancing to make the difficuly curve more fitting, but overall a good entry. The UI also could be more styled, but it fits the job.

Looks really good, it's fun and seemed appropriately difficult to me. I liked the minimap feature. Maybe some graphical polish on the UI elements would be nice, but for LD, quite nice.

Challenging game for sure (Especially if there is no option for inverting the Y-axis).
Best approach for aiming was for me to put the mouse cursor a little bit obove the player-asteriod, and than heading towards the UFOs.
Looks and sound FX fit, I especially liked the background music. Perfect on the theme.

Uh the controls are a big problem, I think. Once I figured out that it's better if I just stand still next to the planet and keep clicking at the enemies, I was fine, but it got boring fast. At first I was trying to rotate my ship to line up the shot, but that wasn't necessary.

I like the way you built your storytelling. Good text and good UI. Good job!

The things that chased me were always behind me, so it was hard to get them in any way. Fun game anyway.

Looks great! If you make a web or mac version, tag me in a post, I'd love to check it out!

Thank you all for your comments! This is my first LD and I was pretty nervous for putting something like this, I'm really happy with how is being recieved so I'm really grateful. I just updated this game's page to add a web version, so feel free to try it @simonhutchinson hope it works well for everybody.

The best thing about this game is the mood. The ambiance and story telling combine to create a very dynamic feeling. The gameplay is fun, but the controls could be worked on a little. Even after reading the controls, they felt pretty awkward. That could just be me though :yum: Great job on this game!

Was fun man, pretty challenging controls, but the audio and graphics were really well done. Thanks for playing my game too :smile:

Had some fun and it looks good in its retro style. Never was a fun of space shooters, but this one make me had a good time.

Wow, sound like Super Metroid music!

Nice job in the overall retro-3D vibe too, I like it. It's hard to figure out the radar in three dimensions, though!

Really nice work!

Man, I'm getting too old for this stuff, lol. Couldn't beat level 2.

This is a strange take on a space shooter. Not even really sure what to call the viewpoint. I do like being able to shoot wherever I want though. I loved how the outline of things represented their health!

Nice game, I had fun playing it! I liked the aesthetic that you went with - the outlines on the models were a nice touch.

Feedback: There wasn't any incentive for me to leave the planet so I just sat there shooting everything down. Maybe you should make the planet move so that the player has to as well? If you do though, you're going to need to come up with a better control scheme because it's really hard to move and aim at the same time.

Bug? I killed the last dude on the second level but then nothing happened. I don't know if this was the end or there was supposed to be more. I had to retry a couple times so that might be the cause.

Thank you everybody for commenting, I'm going to adress some of the comments/feedback that I think it would be useful for other people playing.

@hector-pineiro-ii if you can click the enemies the it shoots to that enemy, it doesn't need to be aligned with the shot. I agree with the health drops and the UI, I didn't have time to test health drops as it was the last thing to be included in the game. It could be a bug if you saw a enemy spawning near or maybe was just a ship that you didn't saw either way you're right and it was unfair. I'm grateful for this feedback, thank you a lot.

@chris-delta The mini map shows you were the planet is, and if you are having problem to find it you can use the middle click mouse to point the spaceship in it's direction. I agree that the UI for the planet needs to be bigger though. thank you for the feedback!

@glimaleite Well that's what happens when you don't develop the game thinking on how to "cheat" on your own game, It's weird that it never occur to me to do that. But I don't understand what's bad with the controls if you just found a weakness on the game design itself. Thank you for pointing this out to me.

@klekky It didn't occur to me how to explain them better in game, I'm really sorry you had problems with them.

@simonhutchinson good ear! I used some samples from the super metroid soundfont to give it a "space feeling".

@frenchie About the bug part that's weird, did you played the web version? If so I encourage you to play the desktop one, If it is the desktop one well... I'm really sorry. This game has a ending, after finishing the 5 "levels", the story part that follows is the ending and when that ends it just throws you at the main menu.

Nice game. Loved the fact that in the story text you can skip a phrase with mouse click and enter to skip all. Nice touch. The only strange thing for me (and note that the game is completely playable) was not being able to see perfectly a shot in my direction. I couldn't "see" or "feel" my bounding box.

I like the shooting mechanic a lot, and the intentions of the game. The sounds can get a bit annoying, though. Cool idea to use the outlines as health meter.

Found it really difficult to navigate back to the home planet. The rest of it worked well, though, and I really liked the audio. Except for the buzzing during the intro text.

I liked this! Took me a little while to figure out what was going on in terms of the controls, but once I did get it I enjoyed the fly-and-shoot feel of hunting down and destroying these ships. I had a bad moment when I pressed the mousewheel to look at my planet but the browser panned the game half off the screen and I got beat up trying to recover. Then I remembered enter was pause! Nice touch!

The free-aim shooting was critical, it would have been way too tough otherwise. Nice work making a cool 3D space shooter here, and the story interludes added some nice character.

The whole thing looked pretty good and the sound and music were even better.

Nice entry!

Nice work! I really liked the low poly graphics and the outlines that were used as health indicators. The asteroids looked a bit strange, because it looked like they had smooth normals. The controls were a bit tricky at first, but the first level was a good environment to learn them. However the game's difficulty curve is a bit broken in my opinion. The enemies introduced in the second level are quite strong, and it took me many goes before I made it through that level, after that, there were a few easy levels. I eventually had to give up on the level with the big thing, and sadly didn't find out what my purpose was. Another thing that is really tricky to do is picking up the yellow health blobs, since it's hard to tell if you're flying over or under them.

Whoops, accidentally double clicked publish and can't find a delete button, only edit...

Very nice game! The art style has a very distinct feel to it, I really liked the semi-abstract feel.

Gameplay-wise I found the game to be very challenging. As has been mentioned, one of the dominant strategies seems to be to stay near the planet, and then circle and shoot. When I strayed from the planet I inevitable got lost, although I would put the blame for that squarely on my sense of direction in space (they should probably have used a better template for the defense-android then...). The omnidirectional firing worked really well, it was effective even when fleeing (I guess I'm not exactly the pride of the fleet...). The introduction of variation of enemies gave a nice progression, especially since you had to adapt your tactics to survive.

I also enjoyed the small story-interludes between the levels (although I will probably never become good enough to read the last one).

It was a very fun game - I don't usually enjoy shooters very much, but this one felt very satisfying, despite me being completely outclassed. The dogfighting worked really well, enough so that I would often get caught up in it, which usually did not end well for my planet...

>Stalwart protector,
>fighting off the invaders.
>What is its purpose?

Good game! I liked the graphics sound effects. The music didn't seem to fit the gameplay too well. I liked how the story made this more than a 3D Space Invaders, so that was a good decision. Also, very hard! Good job!