Look Up! by Cinar
Developer's note: Look Up is a classic asteriod shooter game and my entry to Ludum Dare 50 "Delay the inavitable". This is my 4th LD entry. My previous entries were fully focused on producing a creative or a different, unique idea. Because of this they were generally partially polished. Even one of them was unplayable. This time I go with the first idea I came up with and tried to create a relatively more polished game than the others. So I focused on visuals, gameplay, difficulty curve and optimization. Hope you'll like it. Look Up was originally a compo entry. Unfortunately I discovered a game breaking bug while 30 minutes remaining to the deadline. So I have gone for a bug fix next day and submit to the jam. But Look Up is developed by one person, there is no ready assets used and developed under 48 hours. Game guide:
Scientists say we have no chance with this meteor rain. But goverment started a mission and launched a weapon to the orbit.
You are in charge of the weapon. You realize you can upgrade the weapon with the IRON collected from the meteors. Also your team discovered GOLD in some of these asteroid which governments love. So you can sign some contracts with them for small improvements. Press ESC for upgrade menu.
You shoot with LEFT CLICK and hold RIGHT CLICK to use a nuke. But you should upgrade your weapon first.
Good luck and God save us all...
Logic:
Game idea originally inspired by recently published science fiction movie Dont Look Up. General idea is defending the earth from asteroids. Asteroids spawn rate and health increase while you upgrade your weapon with materials you collected from same asteroids. so there is a classic power up and face harder level cycle. If you power yourself up wisely you will survive longer and longer. But eventually it is an endless shooter.
I hope you will have fun :D
Game On!!!
Çınar
| Link | https://cyaygel.itch.io/look-up |
| Link | https://cyaygel.itch.io/look-up |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/look-up |
Ratings
| Overall | 823th | 3.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 830th | 3.25⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1204th | 2.688⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 601th | 3.771⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1106th | 3.063⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
Just a thing of game desing that can help: the iron and gold seemed to me an attack instead of something good. Maybe changing the way they arrive the earth (it seemed too fast, more similar to a missile than a coin) could reduce this effect.
One of the things I noticed was that the game never really got any harder without upgrading, so there wasn't any extrinsic motivation for me to do so. When I did upgrade the game got way too hard all of a sudden and it wasn't fun anymore. But that's okay, considering how much time we have to work on these things, balance is the last thing on our minds.
I feel the game could benefit from a wave system, if you would choose to continue working on this game after LDJ50. It would fit the theme well (asteroids often come in waves, or showers), it would give the player time to make decisions in the upgrade menu, and it would give them time to mentally prepare for the onslaught of the harder difficulty of the next wave. This would be better than upgrading frantically between shots.
Overall a lovely game, well done.
thanks again, glad you liked it :)
It took me quite a while to understand that you need to press Esc to buy upgrades. I would have expected some kind of level system where there is a pause between levels for you to buy upgrades. But the upgrade system itself was fun and I liked the upgrades you can buy for the turret.
Overall, a solid jam game and great art!
Game rly lacks some great soundtrack.
Actually, toughness of asteroids on level 5 is really huge. Yow have a nice pew pew gun, but i couldn`t survive more than a minute))
Good graphics but I think some chunky sound effects would really do a lot for this type of game. If the game had more upgrades and weapons I could imagine myself coming back to it to play a few rounds now and then, so you're definitely on to something. Good job!
Had a small issue with using the Esc button, because in web version it works as quitting the fullscreen mode
You could also make it so we can click the earth to upgrade and make sure we know we can click on the earth etc.
Small things like that to give you information while playing the game is great.
As mentioned before I also think that having some kind of level or wave structure might give a better feeling of progress to the player.
I also noticed that it becomes harder if you buy upgrades which felt kind of weird.
Of course is has to be more difficult because otherwise you could play forever..
Using levels with increasing difficulty might be a nice way out of this problem as well.
The Artwork is nicely done and the shooting feels good.
Well done. :)
Also i managed to do this:
