Ooh, a gameboy game! This was pretty fun - I like the odd reverse direction firing quirk. Always great to see more retro games in these contests.

Nice game, how did you do it? :D

I always love to play games made for old consoles during Ludum Dare! Well done :thumbsup:!

The game requires you to be very close to the edge of the screen to scroll, which makes it likely that you run into an enemy. Also, I had to play two rounds to realize, that you can scroll at all, because of that.

Thanks Simon :) Hehe yeah, I did think a couple of times that I'd left the scroll edges a bit too close to the screen sides but got so caught up in the extra bits that it just sort of slipped my mind :)

I'm looking into adding some proper music via the deflemask tracker and fixing that scrolling issue amongst later on.

Thanks again to everyone for the feedback, I'll do my best to play your games!

Neat game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA-2r5Ryiv8

Like me a gameboy game!
I did a little video with my thoughts.
https://youtu.be/2E_VB598v2c

Wow!! Totally dig this, gotta love bees and gotta love gameboy. Really curious how you did it, very original. Cheers

Pretty difficult game. It's tough to stay on top of everything that spawns, and three hives is a lot to defend in addition to yourself. But huge props to you for going the Gameboy route. That is certainly not easy, and at least having a high score and those kinds of mechanics makes it feel a lot more like an actual game. I also really enjoy the sound effects, they're definitely spot-on.

Holy mother of god!
You went legit with the retro vibes! Now I feel like a farce haha!

Anyway - nice job! Feels very well finished and polished. But damn it's hard! =)

That is some sweet nostalgia vibes that you're dealing.

Nice graphics, controls are fine, except that I missed the text where it told me where the fire-key is :D It took me a lot of dying to find how to kill enemies.

Awesome, a bit rough, but what can you expect in 48 hours. Good job!

When you die you seem to be able to fly and sometimes shoot in the lower border. Also, I couldn't work out the healing part.

good job for a 48hour game.

feel free if you find spare time to help me towards 20 votes ;)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/island-catcher

Really cool that it was a gameboy emulator game and I loved the art when it wasn't violently vibrating on the screen. Overall nice game.

Wow, a real Game Boy game, I'm impressed! It failed to load on Firefox, but I got it running in an emulator (would have tried that anyway to see if it would work - it did!).

I thought your game was a pretty cool idea that could use some polish. I am not sure if the fact that the game is a bit raw was deliberate because you wanted to keep a more realistic Game Boy feeling, but I'm going write this comment according to modern design standards, of course taking into account the platform's restrictions.

The graphics were really neat and the difficulty ramped up well, introducing new enemies piece by piece. The audio was good but the game was really missing music. The Game Boy had a such iconic sound that some cool chiptunes would have improved the game's mood immensely. The controls were appropriate but could use a little more fine-tuning to make them a bit smoother. I love that you added a menu and the transitions were also pretty cool.

The game design idea was solid, I liked your decision to make the main character invulnerable but let each death increase the number of enemies implicitly because the player couldn't fight them off during the cooldown period. I think however, that this mechanic could use a bit more work in order to make the game flow better. One option would be to reset the bee immediately but make it unable to shoot for a few seconds, which would give the player something to do while dead.

The healing mechanic seemed pretty unbalanced to me. If I got this right, you can heal all the hives by hovering over any single one which reduces your shield that cannot be regenerated. So the player doesn't have to take into account which hive was damaged at all. Also I assume that if your shield is empty, you cannot repair the hives at all anymore. I assume this was to give the game a limit on playtime, but you already have one in place by making the enemies come faster and faster, so I thought you could get rid of that without taking away from the game.

What I think would have been more fun would be to give each hive a separate health bar (even better an implicit damage indicator like changing the hive's sprite). Now the player would have to repair each hive which would force the player to keep in motion. Then I would consider getting rid of the shield and having the repair function assigned to the second button, which also would give the player more to actually do. With that setup you could play around with different ways to balance the game to make it most fun and get a "just one more round" feeling going. Some temporary weapon upgrade collectibles might introduce a risk-and-reward mechanic.

So overall I believe you are on the right track and I am thorougly impressed you pulled off the game in C as an actual Game Boy game, and I think with a few tweaks it could be a lot more fun.

Awesome graphics and SFX.
I bet you do GBJAM as well :)
I just missed some button instructions, but I'm assuming it has something to do with it being a GB rom and stuff.
Great entry!

Very impressive code! The graphics look great. I love when assets are hard coded with hexadecimal :) Its really awesome that you managed to fit the development into 48 hours.