Space Suckers by Patrick Woodcock
SPACE SUCKERS
You've been left on an alien planet and you must fight through five intense levels. Aliens will try to hitch a ride and drag you down to a crash landing. but you can send them spinning off into a black hole.
Keys: Arrow keys to move, space to fire a missile, space again to detonate a missile.
A game for the Ludum Dare game jam 40. Theme: The more you have, the worse it is
Tips:
Fire a missile with the space bar and then detonate it by pressing space again to propel the aliens into a nearby black hole.
Keep to the left of the screen to give yourself some space.
Aliens dragging you down? Skirt near a black hole to lighten your load, but don't get too close.
Save your crew members for a hiscore!
Made by Pieta Karoniemi, Tim Barker, Patrick Woodcock
Tools: Phaser Game engine, Leshy SFMaker, Soundtrap
| Source code | https://bitbucket.org/patrick_woodcock/ldjam2017/overview |
| HTML5 (web) | https://jimmynoshoes.itch.io/space-suckers |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/space-suckers |
Ratings
| Overall | 501th | 3.517⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 358th | 3.533⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 474th | 3.276⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 312th | 3.75⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 728th | 3.217⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 339th | 3.414⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 316th | 3.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 567th | 3.288⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 20🗨️ |

Maybe a progress bar telling you how much there is left of the level would be a nice addition. Good work! The audio really made the game satisfying.
Maybe a progress bar telling you how much there is left of the level would be a nice addition. Good work! The audio really made the game satisfying.
The graphics are good overall with a few blemishes: the background is a simple gradient and as a result boring, parallax scrolling would work great here; the sprite outlines aren't uniformly thick due to scaling which looks somewhat cheap. The audio is good too, some of the sound effects are muffled though.
Found a few bugs in the programming. Sometimes the ship can get stuck in a black hole with an alien, meaning they won't get sucked in at all. The aliens aren't pushed back by the rocket explosion if they are following you either, which is annoying.
Designwise there is only one thing I would change. Currently it is very beneficial to continually shoot rockets and keep pushing aliens back off the screen even if there are no black holes present. To reduce the effectiveness of this strategy you could make the humans susceptible to explosions too. They could be pushed back similar to the aliens or simply die outright. The radius of the explosions would need to be smaller for this to work though.
Really enjoyed this one, positive surprises are always nice.
Overall: Great (4.5)
Fun: Good (4.0)
Innovation: Brilliant (5.0)
Theme: Great (4.5)
Graphics: Good (4.0)
Audio: Good (4.0)
Humor: Brilliant (5.0)
Mood: Above average (3.5)
Good luck!
Sometimes the explosion push back won't work, like when the aliens are behind you, but overall it seemed to work smoothly.
Graphics are just above average (and well more complex than mine) and the variety is nice, could just have more polish to attract players in a future release since the first look seems to be often misguided. Sound is also okay (I particularly like the black holes) but could be improved.
Very nice work. =]
It is a bit strange that number of saved human resets to zero when you fail a level (all people saved from previous levels are gone). It made me less motivated to even try to save them and during the later levels I was basically just avoiding the aliens and getting through the level.
The music is superb! Overall a great entry!