Played and finished the entire game, including the boss fight! I loved your music direction, it fit very well with the mood of the game. The theming is very innovative as well, and I haven't seen any other LD do something similar yet.

For the boss fight, I was able to cheese it by going right up to it and spam shoot, following it around. It was risk free. Are the diagonal bullets bugged? I could pass through them.

@deltanutmeg thanks!!

Yeah, the game ended up too easy because I did not have time to balance it well. I will check the bullets later. Thank you for the feed back.

Also agree with the easy difficulty of the game, but I don't think that's the point of a game jam (says me who created a horribly unbalanced game). It is still very promising, and I can see it being really good with more enemy types or weapons. I hope you'll improve it a bit after the jam.
Also, moving the mouse from the ship to one of the buttons and back gets really tiring. You should add either keyboard shortcuts or something else, so you keep mouse near the ship, for example shooting by clicking on the ship itself and skipping turn by clicking the right mouse button.

@klerembot Thanks!

I'll probably do a post-jam version, because I can’t let the game unfinished when I had so many ideas for it.

I totally agree, moving the mouse get really tiring, I found it during the jam but I could not come up with a solution in time. But your solution is really great, I will probably ~~steal~~ use it. =)

Very amusing idea, pretty well executed. Good job!

@karai17 Thanks!

You definitely adhered to the theme very well! A turn based bullet hell is something i could never imagine, but (especially in level 2) it was really good: I was happy to have the time of carefully selecting my walking path through the bullet maze :)

it feels weird that you and enemies follow the grid, but bullets move freely (at least it seemed like it?). So sometimes I was not sure whether a given cell has a bullet on it or not. Also, their movement could have been a bit animated (when they just jump from one location to the other, you can loose track of them and hardly feel how fast they actually are)

Pretty fun, played till the end. second turn based shoot em up i've played, and the combination works pretty well I have to say. With some thinking about enemy patterns and weapons that work well for turn based, I'd say it has potential. As others have said keyboard shortcuts and any other ideas to make it flow faster would be welcome. graphics simple but effective enough (like the pseudo vector style) and music was ok too. Good job

Better than it supposed on glanced look. But you may add some inventory to add strategy component. Music, as for me music should be more relaxing, that help player think. Good luck

Cool little game, I enjoyed the music and the art is nice. The gameplay is well thought to. I like it :) Maybe juste make shortcuts would be more user-friendly I think.

Keep coding :)

Solid game for ld jam. The length was good. The ability to shoot to left or right would have been nice. The boss should have had cooler and more intense music. Thanks for creating the game!

@erik-brendel Thanks for the feedback!

I agree, it need really need some animation here.

The bullets also follow the grid, it look like they don’t, probably, because they are not in the center of the tile, I did this to indicate the direction that a bullet is going and to make sure that they can not hide each other when on the same tile, not the best solution, I know, but the time was not on my side.

Also thanks @automatonvx, @alex13, @mathiouza and @cg-fred for the feedback and suggestions!

Really good combination. I love how you need to anticipate enemies moves/bullets.

I would like to control the ship bullet direction especially for the boss which goes on the bottom and I cannot shoot him until it finishes to move completely on left side. But hey! this is something boss does in classic shoot'em up, it is just longer because of tactical aspect. ^^

And with more content, it could definitively be a commercial game.

Great job!

While the difficulty is easy, this game perfectly fits the theme - it indeed combines 2 incompatible genres, which is again major pitfall of the theme.

The idea is nice, the game looks good and it is perfectly executed. The problem is that it just mixes 2 incompatible genres resulting in the game that is not fun to play.

Please don't take this wrong, I do like the game - I know there had to be a lot of work done in there, the graphics is well stylized (and if buttons were in same style it would really look great), the gameplay itself is also well done and well though - this is strictly problem with this theme in general (which in my opinion hurts all games in Ludum Dare attempting to strictly follow it).

The more closely you follow it, the more it hurts the gameplay.

Congratulations on making it though!

Had a lot of fun with this, the graphics are adequate and in fact work well to not distract the player from the core gameplay mechanics. It's great trying to plot your moves while looking ahead to see what's coming, though obviously it gets a bit crazy trying to look more than four moves ahead. I guess that's the point though! Great job.

This is one of those combinations that shouldn't work, but somehow do. Really good concept, combining a bullet hell game with strategy elements is something I haven't seen so far. It plays very nice, the graphics are really nice and the music is good as well. It can get quite confusing once many bullets are on screen, but other than that, the game is really good :)

Well I had an exiting boss fight. Was really close. :D
Thank you for this experience. I think you could do some more complex stuff. Like Bombs which explode after a specific amount of rounds. Or a tactical Co-op in which both players have to circle the enemy. The Idea has potential. I like it. And the simple art style works really well.

Cool! I really like this concept. It took me a bit to learn how the bullets move, both because of their speed and how they didn't quite line up on each tile. The mouse controls felt a little slow, so maybe adding keyboard controls might help the game feel a bit better. Also it was a little tedious having to wait the boss to come all the way around, but it was satisfying lining up a bunch of shots to finally kill as it came down the right side. Would be cool to see additions like bombs or other gameplay mechanics. Pretty fun overall, nice work!

I really liked the theme. Are you thinking about continuing with this project?

@mektidas Yes. I am planing to do at least one update using the ideas that I did not have time to implement and the feedback that I got from here.

Really enjoyed this game and the way you merged these two genres. I have played a few turn based bullet hell games during this Jam but id say your one hits the nail on the head in terms of concept. Well done

Nice game :).. was fun playing. It would also be nice, if the actions also hat keys assigned to them. It is a lot of point and click for the buttons, although there are only a few options. A mode with higher difficulty would also be nice. Overall a really good entry!

Game is quite easy, but I understand that feel, when you have to cut out features for LD release. I personally love turn based games and this game have some potential. Maybe if you add some less predictable bullet patterns (like knight in chess)? Bombs? Lasers? Many things :D

That was pretty fun, maybe too easy - bullet hell games typically have you have much less hp. As others said keyboard shortcuts would make it much quicker to play, and thus feel much better. I love bullet hell games so this was pretty cool!

Overall solid entry, I think that placing the bullets on the edge of their tiles is counter-intuitive and they were quite small so hard to read. I've however overcome that and defeated the boss! Otherwise, the music is fun, as are the graphics ;)

I really wanted someone to make something like this. I'm glad someone did! I like the concept. I think it would have been nice to have keyboard controls, since you could tap the arrow keys to choose a direction and press another key to shoot; less moving of the mouse back and forth. But I don't know how to do the diagonal moves with the arrow keys in an intuitive way. So maybe mouse clicks is the way to go. Regardless, I had fun playing the game, nice job!

Great mix of themes done great. Music was fitting and the game-play loop was easy to get used to. Kept it simple and it paid off. Perhaps to improve on it would be to add in different styles of bullets. That and maybe some method of showing clearly where bullets and enemies are heading, so that its easier to predict movement. But top marks overall.

This is a solid take on the theme and a solid game as well. It's fun to play but gets a bit tiring over time because every action has to be activated by mouse-click. I would recommend either adding keyboard shortcuts or making the buttons bigger/ closer together so that clicking on them is easier. Aside from that though a great entry!

Solid entry!
Too bad audio is an opt-out, I really liked it!
The theme was well implemented and the game was simple enough to get it at once.
Some keyboard support would be nice to enhance playing flow. I suppose that is easily corrected on touch screens.
Superb work!

Come and try mine! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tactical-hydra

It all looks great on gif but it lacks pace of gameplay. Doing everything with mouse on those small buttons is annoying after a while. Maybe that's why those themes are uncompatible :smile:
Good entry!

Quite enjoyed this - fun choice of genres, and it actually worked quite well. I beat the boss, but had to let it make a full loop around the screen before doing any real damage... (yes, keyboard controls would have helped an awful lot!)

Intuitive, if a little tedious (shortcut for skip or shoot would have been nice), controls. Looks good, fun to play.

A solid entry.

Surprisingly functional take on the theme. A mashup most obvious, no extra points there.

Currently it is quite easy to dodge dangers as bullets seem to all move at the same speed and they all have the same size too. Increased variety and more bullet patters would help.

The most pressing issue for me is the user interface. Using only the mouse is aggravating as all buttons are located in different positions around the screen. Hotkeys for shooting and waiting would be easy additions. The movement hotkeys are weird. How about direct control of the ship with QWEASDZXC?

The graphics are crude, in a stylish way. These simple pixelated doodles are quite charming, in striking contrast to black background and other titles alike. Audio isn't bad either, yet the 10 second music loops did get on my nerves in the end.

If you are thinking of a post-jam version, here are a few ideas starting with classic shmup fare.
- Power ups: bullet patterns, lasers, homing missiles, etc.
- Abilities: shield, drones, mode shifting, enemy grabbing/throwing, teleporting, bullet reflecting.
- Resource management. Spamming bullets could be reduced if there was a cost attached.
- Hacking enemy ships to fight for you with a downside (cannot move for 3 turns or a resource cost)
- A ghost which follows the ships and mimics its actions.
- Multiple ships to manage at the same time?
- Multiple ships which can join together to form a bigger ship?!
- Multiple ships which can use destroyed enemy ships to create more ships to form even bigger ships?!?

(I might have gone too far in a few places...)

Overall:* 3.5 (Above average)*
Fun:* 3.5 (Above average)*
Innovation:* 3.0 (Average)*
Theme:* 3.0 (Average)*
Graphics:* 4 (Good)*
Humor:* 2.5 (Below average)*
Mood:* 3.5 (Above average)*

@huvaakoodia thanks for the feedback, very helpful!

The problem with direct moving the ship with the keyboard, is that the diagonals feels really weird. I think that just using WASD to select a direction then pressing another button — maybe space — to confirm is the simplest solution for this, there are some drawbacks but at least it feels more natural.