The gameplay idea is interesting, but it also take some time to understand how to play it. The visuals a nd the music is simple and pretty good. Overall an interesting jam game.

I like the idea, and your vocal sound effects have a charm. There wasn't a lot of pressure, though; it wasn't hard to move around enough to keep the cooling lines topped out while avoiding the beasts. I actually found myself wishing the laser would charge faster so I could finish a wave.

:) Cool game! I like the mechanic! The exposition up-front was a lot to read, and I was still a little confused about how to play afterward. Lol, really great music and art!

@jk5000 @ukulelefury Yeah I liked my mechanic idea but definitely it was too complicated to not have a tutorial; putting walls of text in was dissatisfying to me but I had no time... Next jam I'll focus on more intuitive mechanics as a goal.

@jovialknoll It's always hard to get the tutorial bit right! My game this jam suffers a lot from this too.

Haha! The audio is awesome! Love the acapella theme and sound effects! There was a lot of text at the beginning of the game, maybe a little too much. I know there was a lot of tutorial information you were trying to cover to explain all the mechanics of your game, while also establishing the story. It might have been better to separate the two. Give me all the flavor text that sets up the world, then just go over the mechanics in a briefer, matter of fact way. That much text before anything has happened in your game is a tough ask for a player. For example, the first time I played I completely missed what it was that triggered the weapon to fire and was mashing buttons trying to find the shoot button.

And speaking of mechanics, once I understood how the weapons and cooling system worked, I thought it was pretty interesting. I like how I don't have full control over when the ship will fire. It get's tense when you're waiting for that gauge to fill up as an enemy approaches you. It's a great player choice they have to make of when to let the ship fire. One thing I quickly realized was that the green gauge fills up based on button presses, not on distance traveled. So you can spam back and forth really quick, not move anywhere, but fill up your green gauge. I would like to see what the game would play like if it the gauge filling was tied to my on screen distance traveled. I feel like I'd be more likely to have to make dangerous moves near the enemies if I wanted to keep my gauge down, instead of being able to sit safely in the corner wiggling back and forth.

I liked your art style, and I think your mechanics are interesting. With more time to develop the enemies, more variety of enemies, and some power ups, this could be a really interesting game! As it is, it's a great jam game. Excellent work!!!

@the3rdhunter thanks re: the audio, very glad I had a cat on hand lol.

good point on the mechanic, probably if I could do it again I'd leave the green gauge working the same but tweak the acceleration so those twitches move you around a bit more. In this case I focused on making the movement accel feel good separately from developing the green gauge, but there should be more of a trade-off. Though there is a bit of a (less indicated) other relationship with moving: If you're moving, the green bar drops off a lot slower than if you stay still. What was also not really communicated (and probably should have been more of a dramatic effect) is that the beam bar fills up fastest when you have no green bar, so the idea was that sometimes you'd want to stay still to charge more, as another trade-off.

It took me a minute to understand what exactly was going on, but once I got the hang of it I was having a good time. This has a very unique gameplay mechanic. It was a smart way to keep it simple but make it challenging. I would play a mobile version of this.

I like your low key "music" and it's pretty good idea overall. Nice one!

Pretty fun game, and also a challenging one. The mechanic of having your ship fire only at certain moments made it so you need to actually consider firing a weaker energy beam, or saving power for stronger foes. Only thing i had misunderstood was that my ship would explode if i had gone to the final bar, so for some time i had problem dealing with the redmost enemy. Other than that, i really find it to be a nice game

has a serious "one more go" factor to it, love it!
A+++ for the music

I haven't stopped laughing! The point is that thanks to the particular music it has had me hooked for a few waves. Seriously, very funny.

Nice job with this game. Very interesting mechanic with timing the firing of the laser. I love how you did the audio and that you had didn't tracks for each level.

Very amazing sound and music :smile: Best choise!

The game mechanics require some thought :thumbsup:

@ciderpunk @milq @itskdog @fifut thanks for the compliments on the audio! It's very much a product of "I have 2 hours left and no skills with trackers but I will *not* submit a game without an audio track per level". ^_^;

Cannot run this on Mac :cry:

@chuckeles How old is your macOS? I don't have a mac myself so this is being built by github actions running "macos-latest"; my understanding is that due to how pyinstaller works this wouldn't be expected to run on older versions of macOS.
That being said you should still be able to run this directly from python source! You just need python 3.10 (somewhat older may still work) and this directory: https://github.com/JovialKnoll/ludum-dare-50/tree/master/src
You would have to install the packages in the requirements.txt files but then you should be able to launch by running main.py

@jovialknoll I have the latest 2022 Mac :grin: . Actually the problem was that I'm lazy, I did not see an `.app` file which I could run, nor any setup instructions, so I gave up :shrug: . I'll give it a shot hopefully today now that I know how

@chuckeles ah, got it. There should be a README.txt file inside the zip that explains everything.

The concept is original for sure, but I feel like it's a little bit convoluted. Having to tap buttons to keep my gun from firing feels like a really arbitrary thing to have to do. The biggest change that I would suggest, though, is making the gun charge faster, and giving the player something to do while they wait.

Anyway, the audio and story are really charming, and it's cool to see such an original concept in compo. Good job.

@quinn-patrick I was hoping that the tension between having to dodge and having to move to prevent firing just yet would be an interesting challenge but I would have loved to have more time to tweak the balance (in particular how the movement feels, increasing accel a bit).

I really liked that you didn't use the theme to mean "delay the end of the game" but incorporated that delay into the gameplay loop! I think the tension between dodging and delaying fire was well-executed, but with the length of the levels it did get a bit old by the end there, especially once I realized I could just stay in place by wiggling a tiny bit and it largely turned into a waiting game. I would also say that the colors are a bit too similar and sometimes it was a bit tricky to tell which purple I needed. I'm not sure if it would be difficult for colorblind people, but maybe having more variety in color and then additionally a pattern or shape to make sure color isn't the only indicator? Overall, it's a fun game, though!

@acearcher Yeah, I should have taken the time to make the movement accel / top speed high enough that it's difficult to wiggle in place, but I didn't touch the movement much after I got it feeling good.
And it definitely would have been nice to have time for another indicator besides color, like an icon or dithering pattern, but alas.

There is a certain weird charm to hand drawn space beasts and the purely vocal sound track. Refreshingly unprofessional or something. The gameplay is a bit weak though, the concept is sort of interesting but after a couple of rounds is not really that much fun. I was initially a little bit confused about when the weapon was going to fire but got there in the end, and some of the colours were a bit similar for me (I am slightly colour blind though so ..). Does just end up basically moving back and forth waiting for the charge to get to the right level. Interesting idea, executed with some charm but ultimately perhaps a bit flawed gameplay wise. Good effort though.

Well, what can I say. I like SciFi :)

When the music started, I laughed. Then when I noticed the music got more intense as the levels advanced, I was impressed. And still laughed. And I loved the sound of the laser itself.

The simple-looking production values hide a very compelling set of mechanics. Once I thought I got the hang of it, I found I was paying too much attention to avoiding the enemies and accidentally let the power level get too high too fast and fired only to realize I had no one to destroy and so self-destructed as a result. So that combination of waiting to fire but also not firing with too weak of a laser was very good design. Nice work!

I have yet to make it to the first friendly base, and I assume there are more? I also couldn't save, which maybe is what happens at that base?

Ok, I had to try again, and I finally did got to the friendly base! Whew!

Also, I was surprised to find that the music was stuck in my head when I stepped away from the computer earlier.

Nice job! I like it!

@gbgames Thanks for the detailed feedback! I didn't really communicate this in-game but you can save in between game levels. It's just the built-in saving for my game engine so I only took the time to implement save/load for the game modes (sections) that have nothing going on (so, the "press a button to continue" bits that aren't the start or end of the game). You have to press ESC to pull up the pause menu.

I really like the art style and the music & sound effects done with your voice are charming.

I tried with a controller (an old Xbox 360 wired jobbie) but it didn't work that well - it seemed like it only recognized inputs when they were changing, not when they were held, if that makes sense. Didn't have that problem with keyboard.

@rjhelms thanks for the feedback! I mostly tested with d-pad, it might have some issues with the deadzone I set for the joysticks.