Hi there. Good job getting it to work on the Web. Acceleration is a little slow. But, other than that good job.

Trippy game and right mood. Controls need improvements.

Initially thought the game bugged out because the stars weren't spawning hah. I thought it was fun once everything started to work out. The slow controls actually fit the game well in my opinion.

@foxxy and @publicidadeba thanks for the comments. Alice's head is very slow in the beginning because her mana is low. She has to eat stars and gain mana, then her head becomes much more agile. Stars are fuel for the head.

@rocketship thanks! I wanted the stars to start off small and slowly grow as they chase the sun. This makes the game a little more challenging and less monotonous. Anyway I'm glad you liked the game.

It was a bit weird. Even after reading that huge wall of text I was still a bit confused.

First of all, the audio was not great. There was a ton of crackling in it can that collection sound got old very fast. Adding some variation and getting rid of that crackling is the key here.

It was way too hard to get the game going. Had to try several times to actually reach a star before the mana ran out. And even after that, if the first start you went for wasn't purple, you were pretty much dead anyway. And the stars were so tiny in the beginning (and Alice's acceleration was so slow) that you pretty much had to take a stab in the dark and hope for the best. But once the momentum picked up it pretty much started playing itself becoming a DVD player screensaver and also impossible to lose anymore. Adding more control to the head and then adding some kind of fail state (maybe crashing into the moon when not big enough) would make it whole lotta better.

Anyways, good job!

It wasn't interesting at first. This game needs time but most players will quit from game at the beginning. I think this game is too difficult for me.

Thank you for anticipating. Good luck on next jams.

@antti-haavikko thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure what happened with the audio; every once in a while I hear crackling but it seems to be an intermittent browser glitch, though I could easily be wrong about this (this is my first HTML5 game and I still have a lot to learn about browser games). I think having a fail state in the moon stage is a good idea, something like that would be a solid improvement.

@mrjakhpil you may be right. With my first two games, a frequent criticism was that they were too easy. I may have made the opposite mistake with this game.

Congratulations on completing the jam, and keep at it, it's a daunting task.

I'm struggling to evaluate your game because it is fundamentally about moving around, but I find it very difficult to actually do so. I tried five or six without apparently having even two stars spawn within a radius that I could collect them before running out of mana. It seems as if you have to collect stars quickly, but also need to plan your trajectory far in advance, with the slow acceleration time. Either option could work, I just don't think that they work in combination.

After some experimentation, I was able to win with 1,105 mana!

My strategy :
At the start of the game, you change directions so slowly that it's not really worth aiming at any stars in particular. I found that the player has no max. velocity cap - this means that you can basically accelerate forward forever and keep gaining more and more speed. So when the round starts, just pick any diagonal direction and accelerate in a straight line. The bouncy walls turned out to be very helpful here, because they just change your momentum without slowing you down.
Eventually after you begin to bounce around the screen *very fast*, you will be able to collect tons of stars quickly. After several hundred, you are able to regain some control and you have plenty of time to slow down and collect stars more precisely.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the movement controls are a little difficult. It almost feels like the acceleration has a delay to it, or it follows some sort of quadratic curve. After collecting hundreds of stars, the movement becomes much easier and actually pretty fun to wrestle with!

I was confused by the significance of the 'black sky' zone - It seemed like a punishment for trying to eat the sun while I was too small. However this zone turns out to be super helpful - you can freely build up speed and collect stars without worrying about accidental sun collisions for a while.

One thing I would recommend is making it easier to tell when you are large enough to eat the sun. Any sort of feedback involving color, movement, or even text could work here!

I liked the art's 'paper cutout' feel and the color choices. It would be nice if the sun and the stars were done in the same paper cutout style as the player avatar.

Overall I had fun with this game and trying to figure out how to win or 'break' it.

The speedmanagement with low mana is really hard and you have to have a lot of luck in the beginning to get some mana.

But in genereal a solid game. Goood Work

Keep going

@justalocalhero and @deathstorm thanks for your feedback. When first starting out, mana is low and you need to build up speed by holding down one of the WASD keys and heading in a particular direction (ideally toward a yellow or purple star, but this isn't always necessary). Once you've built up speed and eaten a few stars, you can bounce off the edges, at which point you can cover a lot of territory in a small amount of time. @mbc explains it very well.

@mbc thank you for your detailed feedback. I've referred other players to your comments because you've summed up the key strategy very well — as you said, the player has to gradually gain speed, and then bounce off of walls, much like in a pinball game.

@genie, the creative artist for this game, made the same suggestion about having an indicator that tells the player when the head is large enough to eat the sun. I think that's a good idea, although making the player use his or her judgment also adds to the challenge a bit. It's something I'll consider implementing if the game is developed further.

Anyway, I'm glad you were able to reach the winning screen. I can't recall ever gaining 1105 mana, I think you set a new record! Thanks for playing.

I have so many questions! But two most pressing ones, why is it a head? And secondly, what's the black screen mode for?
I managed to not "die" on second try, but then it just became a game of sitting back and watching the head bouncing around, and the screens changing from "day" to "night" and back. I do not know what was going on or why the head ended up shrinking every time the screens changed, but some stars remained enormous! Was it random or am I just missing something?

Besides that, congratulations on finishing a functional game and setting up a relatively complex mechanics!

@ynneblack thanks for your comment. To answer your first question, I was going to make a game inspired by my previous game, Gretchen's Head (LD 42). There were going to be several heads floating around, and the player would have to sacrifice some of them so the others could be saved. That turned out to be a dead end, so I just stuck with one head for this game.

As for your second question, the moon phase is sort of a "second chance" for Alice if she happens to run into the Sun. It's an opportunity to get more mana and return to the Sun phase. What you need to do in the Sun phase is grow at least twice as big as the Sun, and then eat it as if it were a star. Then you win the game. Admittedly the instructions aren't really clear about it, but that's the goal. The moon phase makes the game a lot less difficult, although it is possible for a skilled player to bypass that phase entirely.

As for the stars, they grow bigger as they age, and eventually die and become the "ghost stars" that you see in the background. These can be eaten during the moon phase, when the ghost head is active.

It took me a while to understand how to win and i had to look at @mbc comment to figure it out. It was fun seeing the head bop around the place. Is there supposed to be any strategy involved or do you have to accelarate as much as you can to win? I feel like, I dont want to change accelration direction because it'll be slow - so I stick with the same direction. Also, what does the name of the game mean?

@mza often what I do at the start of the game is accelerate toward one of the screen edges (even if there is only a white star or two in the general direction) and build up speed by holding down the key. Along the way, I make small adjustments in direction if necessary (e.g. to eat a yellow or purple star). When I bounce off the edge, I adjust the direction toward the nearest, or most lucrative, group of stars, slowing down if I need to avoid hitting the Sun. If you can last a minute or so, you'll notice that the stars follow the Sun in its path, and you can use this to plot your course.

This is one strategy; perhaps there are better ones. Typically, you just have to play it by ear. You'll get a feel for the game with practice. I'm able to win most games now without even going to the moon phase, if I'm lucky.

The name of the game is Icelandic for "Star Head." The postmortem blog post (the link to which is above in the game description) says more about that. Glad you enjoyed the game!

Supper trippy game. Much love for a floating head, first floating head game ive played, much love for that. Seemed like the graphics got bugged up on the upload or something, they were lower resolution then the still images on the website. Oherwise the drifting movement was a lil frustrating, though the game would be too easy w/o it I wonder if there aint another way to make movement more challenging, perhaps some sorta obstacles (anti stars) I dind tsee how it fit the theme, but it was cool so no worries on that front i figure. THnx for sharing, keep creating!!! : ) : ) :P,

This is a very funny idea! Too hard for me tho :D

@miley I'm glad to hear there are other "floating head" fans out there! As for the drifting movement, admittedly it takes some getting used to, but with practice it becomes natural. In any case, I like your idea of having obstacles or something similar; it would be worth adding to a second iteration of the game, if there is one. That would probably be a better way of making the game challenging. Thanks for the feedback.

I tried and tried, but I gave up at after 1500. That being sad I hate ice levels in platformers, so a game where you not much in control might not be for me :laughing: Nice trippy aesthetic though and I do appreciate a game written in JS. I was toying with the idea of learning Phaser and coupling it with ES6/7 and HMR to dev directly in the browser. Though the elitist part of me raises their eyebrow at jquery :sweat_smile:

@secretpocketcat sorry about the difficulty level; if there's a second version of the game I'll rectify that. Anyway, your remark about jQuery caught my attention. Is it jQuery itself that you're suspicious of, or JS in general? Just curious. Back in the day, I used to shun JS and its ilk, but things have changed a lot since then.

@gamebuilder Talking about Phaser, ES6 and all that jazz should give away that I actually quite like JS. I used to dislike what I thought was JS only to realise it's mostly the DOM API that I'm not very fond of. (That has improved as well). As for jquery, it used to be a super useful tool, but it doesn't really belong in the current JS ecosystem.

@secretpocketcat that's interesting about jQuery not belonging in the current JS ecosystem. Actually for Stjarna Höfuð I didn't give it much thought; I had worked with jQuery a few years ago and became used to its syntax, so I decided to add it to my toolset (my knowledge of JS itself leaves a lot to be desired). Anyway I will look further into Phaser and ES6, maybe they'll be handy for LD44.

Ha ha, I didn't see this entry before the compo finished, but I loved it! The graphics and gameplay were so weird and kooky! I didn't really understand what I was doing for a while (those controls are pretty brutal at the beginning) - but I still had fun. I think your scores reflected this: people assumed the game did not have depth because it was so hard to start. If they had have played longer and figured out the controls your score would have been much higher.

But for version 2 I request that you go even MORE over the top with the weirdness... changing backgrounds, weird flashing pickups... more craziness!

(Also, JavaScript fan here too - all my Ludum Dare entries are in JS: I love the "write some code, refresh the browser" simplicity of it! Usually I like to roll-my-own engine - like this [from-scratch minecraft WebGl thing](https://mrspeaker.github.io/webgl2-voxels/), but for this Ludum Dare I used Phaser3: it's pretty fun!)

@mrspeaker thank you for the encouraging words, and the feedback. I agree that the brutal beginning is a major drawback of the game. Oddly enough my wife and I were worried that the game was too easy when we submitted it. In hindsight I think we both fell prey to the illusion that comes with over-familiarity. I'll have to be on guard against that in future jams.

I checked out the WebGI game and was impressed; I wouldn't be able to do something like that from scratch. In any case, I agree that the simplicity of game development using JS makes LD a lot more fun. I will check out Phaser again, I keep hearing good things about it.