Man, this is hard xD

Love the style

Art style is really good. It is difficult yes, but true retro shooters should be like that. Coupling the "damage" to the same as weapon heat make you think twice before you shoot (or just once, you don't get much time ;)

I like the game, but it's very hard. It doesn't mean it's bad. Metal slug was also hard :P Good mechanics and nice sfx. Good idea with steam

Thanks for the feedback, guys! You're right, I may have gone too far in a few places. I've updated the game and made it slightly easier (and hopefully, more enjoyable).

Pretty fun getting a hang of the cooling mechanism, I also like how having your health(or lack of heat) tied to your damage output forces you to be sparing with your shots. These concepts could be worth exploring more

For some reason I love old retro shooters like this one. Stayed true to the genre with a little twist. Only thing I would change is make it safer to respawn just after dying. Seemed like I would crash into a ship or bullet as soon as I spawned. Other than that and not being able to mute the game, I like it!

Thanks @kbjwes77! As music was the last thing I added, the ability to mute it didn't even cross my mind :P
But you're right, it seems like a sensible feature to have. Next time, I promise!

very fun mechanic, the art and music are good.
My only complaint would be the size of the steam gauge a bit big maybe when there is a lot on the screen

Love the retro pixel art! Fun gameplay and respected theme. Congratz!

wow fun mechanics, love the the art and music

Awesome sprites! Maybe it would be better if the indicator of the corner was smaller or translucent. Good job!

Great little game! Liked the art and the heat mechanics!

Two people have commented on the size of the indicator, and I don't disagree. The steam gauge should've looked a bit differently (more steampunky, at the very least) but I didn't have enough time or willpower to make it happen. If I'm to work on this game in the future, I'll definitely revise UI. Thanks for the feedback!

I love it!

Being conservative with your shots goes against years of muscle memory so this took some time to get used to. However once I figured it out it wasn't too hard.

I absolutely love your graphics and I am super jealous of your chiptune soundtrack. I was aiming for something similar but struggled a lot and in the end I'm not really happy with the results. What tool did you use?

**Some areas for improvement:**

You provide little visual feedback when enemies are hit. A little screenshake can go a long way in my experience. I'd recommend watching *The Art of Screenshake* for inspiration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

It's not a big issue as you are doing a lot right already, but a little bit more "crunch" might have been nice.

The heat meter takes up valuable space. I see that it's crucial in the game's design, but maybe a bit smaller and in the upper corner might have been possible. Making the screen wider might have been an option but from a purist standpoint I can understand why you didn't want to do that.

The boss fight was pretty awesome, but the laser went right through it, so I was confused whether I needed to hit a specific part. But when I saw the score go up, I realized that I was actually dishing out damage.

Oh and controller support would have been really neat.

All in all I very much enjoyed the game, thanks for making it.

Really nice graphics and cool music
The idea is clever, but I have a "slow" feeling that fit not with this type of game... Or maybe it's the point that it's more a puzzle game than a shmup?

I like the mechanic, but feel that a clearer audio cue for when your overheating would make it easier top manage. Otherwise you have to keep an eye in the right hand corner the whole time.

The swerving graphics on the ship looked good.

Great fun! probably played it for too long xD love how you have to release steam to stay alive, good twist to the metroid shooter games ^.^

Good suggestions all around! @cerno-b, this is a very good video, I watched it three times already (more recently, about two weeks ago). I completely agree with Nijman's game philosophy, and I wish I had time to fine-tune game aesthetics.

@eldogg, there is actually a visual cue for overheating: your shots change color depending on the state of your engines. I wanted to include not only audio cues but also a text pop-up saying something like OVERHEAT! But, you know... deadline :D

Also, a disclaimer: I did NOT write this music, though I wish I had. That's why I didn't include the "Audio" category in the ratings. I can make sound effects, but I'm certainly no composer.

Pretty good overall. Nice graphics and mechanics.
My main complaint is that it's a bit too easy. The venting resets your heat completely and has a very short cooldown. Maybe the venting could be slower and interrupted by damage, encouraging you to avoid projectiles.
Also it'd be nice to have better feedback when hitting enemies. For the boss in particular, I didn't even know if I was damaging it with the laser.

I like it, especially the overheating mechanic. Overall most of the criticism i had has been said above.

Also graphics are quite good congrats!

Really nice graphics, I love steampunk. But this HUD...killed me it obstructs one of the most important areas of a space shooter game (bottom corners) I would really suggest changing the position of this gauge. Funny game tho :pig_nose:

I really enjoyed this. Graphics and sound are good. Gameplay fits the theme well. Venting steam has too short of a cooldown though, that's my one and only criticism.

Cool concept and lovely art and mechanics. Congratulations I had fun :)
Just a couple of things I would have liked to see:
- Bigger bullets
- Screenshake
- That the enemies take an impact when they get hit.

So basically the gamefeel could be better but hey, as I said the game is awesome, congrats.

Pretty hard game you have here! I like it but I would make a few changes.

First the overheat gauge is huge and it is place where the player expects to be able to maneuver.
Ships are firing way later than disappearing the screen, personally I didn't liked that a lot. I would expect I could simply forget about them after passing them by, specially in this game where you need to be careful about shooting.

Anyhow I liked the general idea and vibe of the game. Keep it up!

Fun shooter, the art is really nice. Mechanic is a nice twist that fits the theme, although shooters with less shooting is sort of less fun. Sadly didn't manage to make it to the boss that i see was mentioned. Also as others have said, would be better to have the meter taking up less screen space. Small point I think the enemies that pass you carrying on firing at you from behind which always feels wrong. Great job overall, especially on the visuals.

So there's alot to like here-- this is a very competently executed top down shooter. I really like the sprite work and the sounds and the music. The overheat mechanic sets it apart from classic TDS games a bit. My main critique is that this game plays REAL loose with the theme. Right on the page it says "the more enemies you have the worse it is" but I think you should have played up the overheat mechanic as the thing that fits the theme.

Suggestions:
I did notice after a while that I was flashing red when I was about to overheat AND you did have a big whopping meter for it in the corner so good on ya. However, players are lazy and have tunnel vision; you have to smack them over the head with important info. Maybe a sound cue to indicate overheating if you get hot enough? Something that starts as a vague intermittent beep and grows to an alarm. That might get my dumb attention.

Another thing is I think the two main mechanics are kind of at odds: always wanting to shoot like in most TDS games but having to conserve or you'll overheat. It is a neat concept but I think it would be a bit more fun if the player could subvert this by killing this fast/efficiently enough. I think if you kill an enemy on screen within a certain time window they should ALWAYS drop something that bring the heat rating down.


Sorry if this sounds over-critical, I just think you have alot of talent and wanted to say something meaningful.

Overall: nice job!

Thanks for the great feedback, @weeping-rupee! I agree that the mechanics are somewhat at odds, as this is the case where an idea sounded super great on paper but was hard to get executed right. Once I have more time, I'll give the gameplay more thought (as well as level and enemy design).

As for the theme, I went for "The more steam you’ve got built up in your engines, the worse it is" - which, I agree, is still kind of loose.

Anyway, thanks again for your critique, you really helped me out!

@sidewalksleeper I'm really interested in what music tool you used. It sounded like some mod tracker, was that it or do you use something else?

Just to reiterate: I didn't make this music, it belongs to Rolemusic (in particular, The Black Dot album). As far as I know, they use old video game consoles to create music. In this particular instance, it may have been a gameboy console, but don't take my word for it. Again, I was not the composer.

I don't have a good ear for music, but if I had to, I'd use http://www.beepbox.co to slap something together.

Good stuff, nice graphics and sound

Great graphics and nice little shmup! I found it difficult to destroy enemies once you die once because your weapon gets really downgraded to the beginning of the game. But in general I had quite a lot of fun :D

Great job uniting all the game mechanics so well! This game reminds me of Downwell, where one action has many different consequences tied to it so using it (the steam release in this case) needs to be a careful decision. I also really liked that you had a cooldown to it, otherwise it would've felt like any standard shooter where you reload when there's downtime and nothing else. By adding a cooldown I had to really maximum my shots and make sure I didn't need to reload any time soon. Great idea and fun game in general.

Fun game :)
I would have added some visual feedback when you hit an enemy, since many of them needed to be shot multiple time and at the beginning I was not sure if it was a bug that they were not dieing or if it was normal for them not to die.
Anyhow, very nice game!

@sidewalksleeper: Sorry to hear that you didn't actually write the music. It's flawless and I would have appreciated to know how it was created.

Just letting you know that per LD rules, technically you're not allowed to participate in the Compo if you didn't create all your assets yourself (with a few exceptions, like using audio generators for sound effects). That's what the Jam is for: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules

Oh, thanks for the heads up, @cerno-b! Changed my category to Jam. Should've read the rules more carefully, my bad.

Ah, cool, I didn't know it was possible to switch.
Anyway, it's still a very well made game, own composition or no.