Cool game, I really like the way it feels when you're into it. Can be really easy if you just stay in one spot but it's also very unforgiving. Would like to see the upgrades added.

Nice! It’s a great mix of two genres that applies to this theme well.

Very cool game. Love the music and art!

Interesting concept, combining space invaders with breakout! :D I liked the artstyle and the gameplay a lot.

That's a very interseting idea and it was made really well. Oh and the story was kinda fun :laughing:

I really liked this game! The music was extremely good, I liked the gameplay elements (ships, different bricks) and thought they were clever, art was neat, and just had fun playing it. Good job!

Great Game. The breakout aspect mixed with space ships works really well!

It could be a great entry for the previous LD as well! In the beginning I didn't realize that I can also fire balls and died pretty fast, because lasers are overheating so fast. But then I launched balls and it really helped.

Great game! I was surprised how well the breakout mixed with space worked. The controls were a great choice as well, it's a nice break from using the keyboard. Well done.

Decent game. It has an interesting premise, and cool graphics. You can just sit in one spot and fire in front of you periodically though, so maybe you could introduce some difficulty spikes? (ie. Blocks scroll faster) Other than that, cool game!

Very fun game, got me by surprise with the right click and the balls, doesn't really fit the theme but it's a hell of a game, after publishing this comment i'm playing it again ! Great job guys, please do games again !

Loved the game! Super fun and a great take on the break-out style games. One issue I ran into is that I wanted to try the tutorial, but found myself stuck in it unable to restart to try another ship. Other than that, everything was really fun!

Very good game! It's just super intuitive and addictive :)

Very nice game, love the combination of shooter and ball bouncer. Graphics and audio are also good so I gave you good points.

I like the style and me music and the throwback to arkanoid times i liked it.

Really cool game you made! Its a bit hard tho!kedp ut up

A proper character controller (instead of a direct mouse mapping) would offer some more feel and "connection" to the game. The insta-death, in its presentation, feels harsh, although its probably fair or neccessary that way. Graphics are effective. Overal it has a 70s vibe with its superficial limitation to "one moving sprite (bullet)"... i think that limits the enjoyment of the brick-breaking where maybe a more "loose" firing could have been more fun. The systems (hitpoints and shots doing damage) are in place from what i figure. Overall a respectable effort! :thumbsup:

Really nice game. Liked the gameplay and visuals. The particle effects, while simple, are really satisfying.

Oh man... This is pice of art. I L O V E I T !

Love the upgrade system, makes the game extremely compelling to continue playing!

Really solid, like the mashup style gameplay. It doesn't feel super connected to the theme, but as a game it stands really well

Wow, fantastic game. I think the controls are very precise and the bounce of the balls with the ship was awesome, I had a very good feeling while playing it. Graphics and music work perfectly with the atmoshphere, and the progression and different ships are well balanced. It's always good found games that are this polish. Good one! :thumbsup:

Oh my god that was addicting... awesome game! leveling up type games always touch my heart deep, and a pong/ shooter combo with upgrades seems like a strange combination but its no exaggeration to say this game was probably one of the more fun jam games ive ever played. It might not mean much but this was awesome!.

Really like the mix between shooter and breakout. The gameplay work very well.

Wonderful!!! I enjoyed this game so much. Great concept, great pixel art, and the soundtrack really fits in well. I had to play several times... it was such a great game. Congratulations on a great entry!

Nice! :-) :thumbsup:

Just realized we can comment ourselves to respond to all the comments. Not going to tag/respond every single person but thank you so much for all the kind comments!

Hey @candlebird the tutorial isn't exactly what we wanted it to be, didn't get to add tips due to time so it ended up more as a practice mode. Exactly the same as regular game except you can't die. The only way to get out of it is to enter a portal, which isn't intuitive to figure out but it is an important mechanic to figure out. Wrote a little post about the tutorial: https://bagelshorts.itch.io/spaceout/devlog/44781/tutorial-mode-what-the

Thanks for the comment!

Hey @flashviper thanks for the comment!

Yes, it is usually pretty easy to stay in the same spot and survive, but maybe you are missing out on rescuing the space men and returning via the portal?

We kind of ran out of time before adding those tips somewhere in game and only came up with very short instructions screen.

More details on that mechanic here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spaceout/spaceout-core-mechanic-1-rescue-space-men-1

this is dope! really creative elements and variation of classic games. The second time I played through it, it doesn't end, and I don't die. There's no losing condition. I can run into all the blocks and destroy them that way, which is still kinda fun. Also, I feel there can be more variation in the sound design, but I'm also an audio guy myself.

hey @barmizzle were you playing tutorial mode? you can't die in that mode. The other mode definitely does have a losing condition!! Thanks for taking the time to review!

Cool game. It was a bit on the hard side playing with touchpad and took a few ships getting used to all the different mechanics. Finally I managed to collect some humans but I didn't understand the saving bit until afterwards. Dying was a bit too easy and sudden. I think I would have liked to have some hurt/shield that slowly regenerated or something. Music was nice. I would have liked keyboard bindings.

Wow, what an interesting concept! And really good execution! The graphics are lovely, BGM music is rocking and fitting for the gameplay and gameplay itself is really fun and engaging. Great work.

This game is visually striking in screenshots, so I was looking forward to playing it. However, I am coming out of it with a phrase I've used on a few other comments: "this game substitutes scope for a coherent concept". It has a ton of features and mechanical ideas that do not have an fluid thematic relationship. That's why you have to rush around building tutorials to try to explain how it all works - the game isn't showing, so you have to tell.

This is one of the aspects that really divides board games and video games. If I play a new board game, I expect to have to "learn the game". It is OK if it is somewhat abstract: I'm sitting there moving around the pieces and talking about it with friends. But as a video game player, I want to go in mashing buttons and seeing stuff happen - and if it's going to require training, it has to be something I believe is worth the effort to learn, which leads to themes and scenarios that support the learning process, and in-game behaviors that cohere with what I know about the world.

That doesn't mean "an abstract video game is not allowed" - just that the abstraction is very immediate and convenient for discussing what the scenario is about. Things like "lives" and "hit points" make scenarios with frequent damage and death easier to grasp, for example. Ball and paddle games make sense because they look like the physics they represent. And so on.

When you have a game like this that mashes up genres and ends up being crammed full of rules that are basically only there to serve the game on the level of "interesting decisions"(which the game is good at - I can tell because it provoked my deep-think habit of chewing my fingers), either the player is eased into it really slowly(which has the common downside of "the game is boring, who cares if it gets better") or they will leave remarks like "I am so confused, my brain hurts now". It's often a lose/lose, even if you have things tuned and tutorialized such that they are clearly capable of playing the game successfully without understanding it.

But if you get the scenario elements to align well, they will either get it immediately, or feel like it was obvious all along and they are merely incompetent, or remain blissfully ignorant. And all three are OK. They're playing and having fun.

This is the first game that I've played for longer than just a few minutes, I'm hooked!

Very cool game. Would like it if the UI was in a different place so it didn't block my vision but other than that I think it's a very cool idea executed very well.

Guys amazing job! The Art and the music are just awesome and the vibe of arcanoid-like game is super cool. It took me a while to be bit better at it, but after a while I managed to rescue quite a lot of spaceman! :) Really nice entry where everything together works very well. Hey! And I dig the backstory! :) Great job!

Who would've thought that a space shooter - breakout - mashup would work that well?
Tight controls and different ship attributes make each playthrough delightful.
Parts of the soundtrack reminded me of classic DOOM games, which was awesome!
Maybe the laser cooldown was a little too harsh : you can often break bricks with your balls (heh.), but not get the spacemen out of their capsules due to the laser being on cooldown.
I needed the explanations provided via GIFs, would've been neat to include that in the game so it could work better on its own. But still - this game was great fun!

Hey, great variation of arkanoid, I like mechanincs and art ,sound is also really cool!

Digging the music! Thanks for that.

I liked the graphics and the music was awesome, it reminded me of the original Doom's soundtrack. I especially appreciated the Atari-esque digitized speech. The gameplay was simple and fun to play for a little while. I would have liked a clearer explanation of the mechanics that wasn't done via text, but considering the time limit of the Jam it's excusable - just something to look into doing if you decide to take it further. Solid work!

had fun! I played all of the ships since I would inadvertently explode one of them. I bought a ship back and saw that I lost all the upgrades I had for that ship so that was a bit sad haha. I liked the different balance between the ships. The high rate of fire might have been the best? I guess the balls are good for lateral destruction of bricks though. It also would've been nice to get something from all the bricks you've destroyed, but saving the space people was a nice mechanic. good job!

Thanks for the feedback @aeveis! We first had setup to get points for each brick breaking. Then when we added the spaceman I (the dev) switched points over to being strictly on the spacemen. Meant to bring up the question when the others woke up (different time zones) but with the time crunch completely forgot lol.

Yeah, you lose the upgrades when rebuilding a ship. It seemed logical...and we also like to be mean :)

Interesting concept! I like how the balls were a much faster way of clearing out bricks, but harder to control than the lasers, which were precise but had cooldowns. I like the idea of the upgrade progression, though it felt quite punishing to accidentally run into a block when trying to navigate.

Ratings are over, hope this wins :smile: