Despite any faults, this still looked beautiful and was a really nice take on the theme. You guys should be proud of this entry I really enjoyed seeing it.

Considering this is a Jam game, it looks great. I think the movement could use some polish, mostly, but the animation and overall aesthetic are tops.

The visuals are fantastic. Great job, especially for a first time jam game.

I must have reloaded 80 or more times playing this game.

Every platform is technically reachable, and every projectile evadable, but, gee, has anyone ever beaten the game? Is there even an end? How frustrating.

After overcoming the near-impossible platforms, you have to deal with the fire from above. Eventually, there is a stalemate. Despite outnumbering the enemy 5:1, it is just waaay too difficult to break through. Some instructions would have helped too. WASD and Space are simple enough to figure out, but I couldn't find a way to fire the player's gun, so I assume there is no way.

Albeit, 80 painstaking attempts are still 80 attempts -- the game is quite fun. As has already been mentioned, the game's visuals are spectacular, and the game is quite engaging indeed. It seems futile to try to win, but one tries anyway. Well done.

I really liked the character and ship design :thumbsup: the background not so much :thumbsdown: The start is a bit confusing since the player is holding a gun but can't shoot, it took me a while to figure out what is going on. There could have been more interaction between the themes, for example you control when the ships fire. Anyway, great first entry :trophy:

Sorry, but I didn't really enjoyed the game. I think the problem is that both aspects of the game fight against each other. The (very lightweight) strategy side ask you to move forward / backward to destroy enemy ships, but the platform side forces you to move at a given pace, with moving or timed platforms. So you always have to do a leap of faith and go forward through some obstacle and pray so that no ship appears at the wrong place or that you will be lucky enough to avoid bombs.

The fact that the enemy ships appears randomly add even more chaos. Sometime you go through some part easily, with only one enemy ship quickly dispatched by yours. And sometime you have three overlapping ships throwing a wall of bombs... And often you have to move forward without knowing what awaits you after a tricky platforming sequence.

Avoiding bombs is a pain too. If you are on the ground it is quite easy: you can move left and right and with good timing there is no problem. But narrow platforms, or moving platforms are a real issue. You can try to jump above bombs, but the very fast vertical speed makes it really hard. A bit more work on the physics of the player would have helped. Also I will recycle an advice that someone gave me in a previous LD for a platform game: avoid tall characters, it makes jumping with obstacle at the level of the characters head and dodging more difficult.

So the result is quite frustrating. It happens on a game jam, you can't always predict how things will turn. But I think you could have mitigated the issues. More frequent checkpoints would have allowed the player to progress, even if only by luck. In the current version, it is just too hard and I gave up in the part where platforms are 1 tile wide because I was making no progress.

Maybe some option to ask the ships to go forward to clear the path would be nice. With some cooldown it would have added some strategy and at the same time given some time for the player to do the platform parts. You already have a good logic for ship movements, so I guess it should not be too hard to implement.

So in the end I'm a bit sad because the realization is quite good, but the gameplay don't really works. I'm pretty sure you will do better next time. :)

a little frustrating.. but I see what you tried to do... needs some work tho. I agree with most of these comments.
ship and character design was good C:

Great artwork and overall theme of the game, I'm a sucker for Sci-Fi and anything that has it's roots in it will get a second look from me.

I found the jumping to be a bit clunky, it was very hard to match it to the size of the platforms and to land on a moving platform which unfortunately made me spend more time looking at the platform's pixels to land on it then to enjoy the overall atmosphere of the game.

But it's still a great attempt set in the right direction and I hope that someday I will be able to play the full version :)

If you could do me a favor of rating my mess of a game that would be awesome :))

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/sam

Little by little, I conquered the towers. The idea is nice and the difficulty of the game is perfect.
I really liked the graphics!!

This game is beautiful. The little touches on the animations really make this world feel alive, I agree it needs music if you take this idea further. I would also have found a sprint mechanic to be helpful at certain points, I had trouble timing my jumps while watching the enemy ships to avoid damage

I wish I could also control the ships like an RTS. Otherwise it was fun. I kept dying since my ships didn't gang up on the bombers.

I'm really digging the visuals you made! I think there's a glitch where you can jump in mid-air if you walk off an edge, and I think I know why: you seem to set some canJump variable to true when you land and false when you jump. You should make it so that you check if there's a floor beneath you for every jump.

@niterich Thank you for the complement and the bug report.
You are essentially correct about the jump logic.
We discovered this as well, but we found it fun and intentionally left it in.
In the future we may add animation to make it seem more plausible.

This game simply put together two genres that I love. Too bad the ships are not controlled by the player. It would be interesting to use the mouse for this. The tip ... I found the pixel art fantastic. Great job.

I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.

I hope you continue with the project.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape

Really liked the graphics!
Likes others have said, the movement/jumping could do with a bit of tweaking and some more RTS controls would be nice too.

super awesome gfx. shame u didn't hav time to put any sound in, had to rate u 5/5 for sound, just for laughs XD the actual game had me pulling my hair out, wat i wudn't giv for sum checkpoints lol. i started off with a solid amount of backup ships, but as i died & respawned constantly it seems less & less ships backed me up, at certain points i was even running it solo! XD but great work on the whole & really impressive new stage generation each time.

I died a ton, but kept coming back - loved the graphics, the player looks exceptionally cool. Too bad about the sound, but congrats on a stellar first jam :)

Nice job, good concept. Well, it's very hard but i liked it :)