Ayy I'm glad I followed you! This looks AWESOME! Heading in to play after I make some food :)

Cool game. Just one thing I noticed, you allow the ship to drop below the visible area and hit things the player can't see. I love the graphics and this type of game. The bouncing shot is a nice touch.

This is quite a fun game! The graphics are pleasing to the eye and very sharp. You can easily tell what you can and cannot hit to live. I didn't make it to the boss battle as i kept running into the ships. But, that may just be because I am a bad player. Overall good game, however, I did not see the coloration to the theme.

The art is great, music and sound effects fit. My only mild annoyance was the dialogue popups when trying to play. One of the few games I have played so far that fits the theme! OMG this get's much harder with all your bullets bouncing around. Good job and thanks for providing feedback on our game as well!

I really like the game, good pixel graphics however i do feel you fire a little slow but other than that good game and well polished.

I like how your own bullets can bounce and hurt you. I haven't seen that in a shmup before. Cool game!

Fascinating! You had the same idea as we had, about the player's own bullets being his biggest enemy...
Though by level design, the player notices this quite a bit earlier than it does in our game :-/

Very nice oldschool graphics, great chiptune! Good difficulty, though I'm not that good any more...

Astounding game, I loved the art and dialogue was fun! Game was a bit slow at first, but after a few power ups it got really exciting!

Everything about this game is awesome! So muuuuch detail and love. Congratulations and keep it up!

The game could use checkpoints or a casual mode; I was unable to reach the end.
Aside from the difficulty, it was enjoyable. The art & music are also very convincing.

This is the first game I've given 5 stars in all categories and here's why:

First of all, the visuals were nothing short of spectacular! I especially loved the detail and creativity that flourished in the character portraits and the little camera pan was a very nice touch for game feel. I also enjoyed the crescents parallax scrolling over the background; very retro! The shots were well-communicated as well, with their colors being green for friendly and red for hazardous. A small, but very necessary detail for the overall concept to work.

The writing was great! I really loved the fact that you get to play a dog (and one named Mr. Woofberg at that LOL! ARF!) — the idea that the Flight Control Leader was completely oblivious to who's actually piloting the ship cracked me up! "Are you coming down with a cold? You sound a little off." (an old gag, but a good one :D)

Sometimes dialogue would trigger after I had already died, but I didn'tsreally find this to be that bothersome of an issue.

This game was actually pretty difficult to get used to at first, with bullets bouncing every which way, but it was a very fun challenge, that ultimately felt rewarding once mastered (as truly good games do IMO). The boss was quite a crazy experience too, and the fight actually felt epic; great job!


I also loved the tunes in this! In particular, the main one that cues at the first piece of dialogue, after the intro, was fantastic! That kick drum had a real groove and had a nice relationship w/ the snare that captured the militant space-action mood perfectly! I even paused on a dialogue box just to jam out to it! The boss music was very fitting and awesome too; it really captured the intensity of the situation at hand. I'm actually still listening to the ending/intro tune on loop while writing this ;)

The level design was VERY well thought-out. Like.. sheer perfection. It had amazing pacing and was ultimately fair; leaving the game up to the player's own skill and resourcefulness. Nuff said.

Overall, this was an utterly fantastic concept, and a great take on the theme. This was the most fun I've had playing a space shooter since my favorite arcade game of all-time: Galaga.

I want to see more!! This game was wonderful and I would definitely pay for a retail release. You guys are all true professionals. You should be proud <3



10/10


If I can think of anything that I may have left out, I will edit this comment with revisions. Cheers!

The art style, as many have already noted, is top notch! ... as is the music.

The dialog is also really funny. Do I understand that I'm playing a dog, piloting a ship, because the "ace pilot" doesn't know how to pilot? :D

The fact that the player's own bullets are dangerous is cool and I didn't understand that at first.

The death seems a little buggy, because it takes about a second before the ship sprite vanishes, just leaving the engine exhaust and silence. I hit an enemy ship and managed to travel halfway to the other end of the screen before the ship vanished and I respawned. This made it difficult to understand what it is that I died to. I think @lancejz had the same problem, their comment seems familiar.

The space bar is the button to shoot and it is also the button to advance dialog. This means that if you, like me, spam the shoot button, you will lose out on some dialog when you don't expect it. Different buttons for both would be better, methinks.

Lastly, this is personal preference, but I would have liked the ship to move faster and the pop-gun shots to be a bit larger (or have hit boxes that are a little bigger) but I guess that's just me being sucky ad shmups.

Good game! :)

Great game! The music and art style is pretty cool. Shoot em ups are always fun so that's awesome. The take on theme is great too, good job!

This was great! My biggest complaint is having to go through the tutorial every time I died... which was a lot... because I kept playing... because it was fun. I love that you're a dog. You didn't have to be a dog, but you went there. Awesome. I found that I could get to the boss easier (at all) if I just didn't get any power ups. Also, I found that crashing into things was overly punishing, killing you all the way rather than just giving you one hit, especially since it meant you had to start over and redo the tutorial.
I loved the art and the music. I love the little portraits and the story they tell. Really great job.

Ok, first of all, the pixel-art is gorgeous. It's a really nice work for a jam (and the dog's cute indeed).

It's very funny that this doggo's the main character, with all those little dialogue lines doing a good job, being nearly everytime funny. The bouncing bullet thing made the game challenging soon enough, and dynamic, and I like that alot. Plus, you did a good job on the level design.

The theme's well respected too : I was some time in a real bullet hell, and the more they were, the worse it was. But that's because i'm a dork who can't run away from his own bullets.

And finally, the music's really catchy.

So, I guess i've covered it all : and it's all real good. You deserve the rate i'll give you, mate ;)

Arf!
I mean pretty pretty cool mechanics. But bouncing bullets could've been explained a little earlier with a bit more polished level design.
Music and sprites are top notch. Very appealing.

This was a really neat idea. The dog was a hilarious touch, and the bullet bouncing mechanic fit the theme really well. I'm not very good at but it's a lot of fun!
Loved the audio work too. Overall the game has been a joy to play and rate.

Great job and keep up the great work!

Great job! I love the audio, and graphics style. the dialogue was also nice.

I loved this game, you really went with the theam!.

Nice shmup with some awesome spritework, the shot reflection is a neat mechanic, i also really liked the humour, i mean come on a ship piloted by a dog with some space bruce campbell as the captain ? Groovy :p

overall a solid experience, well done guys :)

So it's no another generic space shooter. The more you're trigger-happy with those shots, those bullets will always backfire at you.

At first I thought I was going to be playing Xevious or Star Force, but then I spotted the twist. Nice take on the theme. I thought everything was a little small (would have been nice to have a full screen option) but it all played very smoothly and the graphics were very good.

Great Game, at the intro it captured all space and then fired for every space a bullet after it started. On re-spawn i would love to have a skip button. It was a little destroying to have the pause for dialog as i was evading shots that hit me after the pause was over.

As everyone else in these comments have already been gushing about, the art and music are brilliant. Only minor thing was at least the starting track had a small awkward gap when it looped. Would have liked to play it full screen. That would have fixed some issues like bullets being very small and health bars being very unnoticeable (at least in the middle of the boss fight action).

Nice to see a shmup that haves a nicely sized hitbox. Never felt like I got any unfair hits in...

At first I obviously started playing this like any other shmup and though that god damn this game is hard. After few quite quick fails, I noticed that the best way to go is a pure pacifist run, only shooting those laser gate things. And playing like that, it actually became quite boring. I was a slow slug to see if the rng gods would allow me to get past those few hard bits in the end. To boss in fact was maybe even too easy. I would have gotten him on the first try but right in the end dodging its shots, I flied off screen (without knowing it was deadly) to my demise.

And that leads me conveniently to my next point, action feedback. For example, only flashing the player ship red when taking damage isn't enough. Especially so when it can be off screen while that is happening. So that would require sound feedback also in my opinion. Same goes for those message popups. They're so small that the first few times I didn't even notice them appearing (wasn't really looking at the bottom of the screen) and wondered why the screen froze for a good second or two. And as has already been pointed out several times, they got kinda annoying considering how many times (probably) one had to try again from the start.

I wasn't a huge fan of the constantly changing shooting pattern. It was quite annoying that you'd go so big portions of the game without shooting, and when you did have to shoot you had no idea of what your shooting pattern would be and shooting in a wrong position could completely ruin your run. The angle shots were there to just make the life of the player miserable and make them want to shoot even less. But you had to get them to get sweet sweet forward shooting fire rate up. And even if you tried to shoot stuff like in a "normal" shmup, the enemies got way too bullet spongy for your weak little pea shooter which you had for like 80% of the game.

Dunno if it was just my computer being weird but I had these weird frame drops every few minutes or so. Was especially annoying while fighting the boss.

Good job guys, very nice entry yet again!

Hey, I just wanted you to know that @william-macfarlane and I do a podcast about game design called Side Quests and we just did one about Ludum Dare and in it I mentioned your game! (All good things.)

If you want, you can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/user-433639808 (We're also on iTunes and Stitcher)

Wow, this gets really hard! I like the old school graphics, sounds, and music, but the gameplay is a little tough for me (maybe I'm just not that good at shmups? Totally possible.) Would be nice in some of the close quarters parts if your bullets only bounced once or something, it's easy to create a corridor of doom for yourself just trying to shoot enemies.

Was pretty cool though! I liked the dialogue. Good work!

I'll readily admit that I was pretty bad at this game, but that was more me being terrible than the game itself.
The idea of an ordinary dog piloting a spaceship made me way too happy.

this is definitely 1 of the more fun games i played :D pretty cool.
Definitely enjoyed the graphics and sound effects. Gameplay was challenging, a little too challenging i'd say.
Make it a bit more casual for ludum dare i'd say

An interesting and challenging game! The art and music was excellent!

The basic game mechanics were simple, but effective. And without self-restraint, the game become a self-inflicted bullet-hell, which worked nicely with the theme. I'd preferred the reflected bullets to still harm the enemies, to at least be able to use the reflective shielding creatively, which as far as I could see, was not the case, but otherwise the power ups were well spaced out.

The cutscenes and indeed the concept of the dog taking over was pretty funny. I agree with previous comments that the cutscenes felt a bit intrusive, especially on repeated runs. Perhaps a more freeform "overlay" cutscene would have worked better after the initial into, but this would probably have required voice acting as well, so I can see why you went with cutscenes. Perhaps making them skippable would be a compromise (although this would still disrupt the "flow" somewhat).

The art conveyed information about threats and pickups very well. The portraits in the cutscenes were quite detailed as well, which gave the game additional personality.

An impressive entry for only 72 hours of work!

>Craven captain Chip!
>But Woofberg will save the day!
>Arf! Arf! Zap! Zap! BOOM!

Very well made game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvj17CkuZ1U