Apologies, I didn't submit on time so I can't rate officially. However, I love this! This is adorable and lots of fun! The tiny pixel humans are adorable and the whole vibe of this game is great!

Suggestion:

I made it to level 3 (I kept crashing haha) but I wish I could have at least seen the other levels before I had to move on! I recommend adding a special cheat for the purposes of game jam play which allows the player to skip ahead to the next level early. This let's less skilled players still get a sense of all of the cool levels you made without requiring too much time investment.

Man, this game is so addicting! I absolutely love the gameplay.

@roulette thank you for playing anyway! Will you still submit for the jam or extra? Would love to play your game if you do submit!

Am I allowed to update the game at this point with a level skip cheat? 😅 that is a fantastic idea!

Edit: OK I added it and made a change log. :-P Thank you again for the suggestion!

@termight That is the best compliment I can get! Thank you for playing. 😁

I love the retro style! The audio matches it perfectly. I enjoyed learning how to pilot the ship. The tutorial was also really good. Very impressive!

Thank you @shimmerscale! :smile:

Ahhh reminded me of my old MSX games. I loved it.
But I'm so bad at controls. When I finally (after more than 2 minutes) got the ship to the little guy(or girl) I didn't realize that i had to thrust up and crashed. The person died as well .. ahhhhhhh...

Very well made. Congratulations. Good Mood!

Although the use of the theme here is... By force? What we have here is a really nice, fully executed game with which to spend a pleasant few moments.

I don't know what to complain about, because I liked the game itself, and the controls involving the operation of the engine are interesting. The only such drawback really is the fact that you can accelerate to the max and before hitting the ground press shift to prevent a crash. It would be nice if speed mattered when landing.

@mdotedot :laughing: so you basically nailed the era - this was inspired by an Atari ST game "Oids" that I loved as a kid. Back then the controls would have been one or two inputs to rotate the ship. I went for a more modern control scheme for the "kids these days" but I understand that it can be a bit hard! Thanks for playing!

@bukkaketears Very interesting mechanic idea! Personally I think landing at full speed means you have wicked pilot strats :sunglasses: In the end my choice was to design for faster gameplay (especially for the later levels where there are more enemies and larger levels to complete within the time limit) but I do like the idea of incorporating speed requirements for landing if I choose to expand the game post jam. Thank you for your thoughtful feedback!

I really enjoyed playing your game! I managed to beat a few levels before crashing my ship :boom:, then I spent a little more time to appreciate the quality of the art, sound effects and music. For a compo game that's incredibly impressive, very well done!!

Thank you @minipeps! I was a musician and an artist before I became a developer so it makes me feel good when those things are noticed! I appreciate the compliments and thanks for playing!

Love the old school look and sound of this. Really satisfying controls and feels great to move, pick up humans and shoot

Super nice to see a Game Maker! What can I say - the graphics are great, music is absolutely amazing and the whole game is simply a joy to play. Really feels retro in a very nice way. Impressive amount of work for 48 hours. I would make landing a little bit more forgiving though. Anyway, I absolutely loved this and you are very talented!

Great Game!

Pretty great! I managed to beat all but the last level, gave up on that one ^_^. One time I encountered a bug where I both won and lost a level (timer counted down to 0 about 2 seconds before the shield charge fired), and it advanced me to the next one (felt fair ;).

Great art, sound, level design, all comes together nicely. Controls were difficult, but rewarding. One question... are we in space or on Earth? Why is there no gravity on my ship?! Must be some high-tech device... ;)

Nice retro style, and great tutorial too, i thought i would get lost with all the buttons but i didn't.

@jumbly The answer to your question is...yes. :laughing: Man I dunno, Lore can get weird when you're on 4 hours of sleep. :laughing: I like your idea - high tech device. The aliens have removed the gravity from earth - nevermind that the humans aren't floating around. It only removes gravity from ships...yeah that's it. :laughing: Well anyway, thanks for the great comment and thanks for playing!

@dzejpi I see you once did GM as well and switched to Godot! I've considered doing this before I start a big project...would you say the skills transfer well, or is it a steep learning curve? Anyway thank you very much for your compliments :blush: In previous jams I got too caught up in the art and had less time for coding/level design, so I'm quite happy with my balance this time! Thanks for playing!

@pixelydian we are very similar. I too usually got caught up in the art or story and then had no time for level design, haha! Took me a lot of jams to learn how to prioritise that. I would say that learning curve is actually not steep at all and I am super happy that I switched. Most of the stuff in Godot is self-explanatory and switching from Game Maker is super easy. I liked Game Maker, but I think that unless you want to release on consoles, Godot is better at just about everything, while being similarly easy to use.

I can recommend getting familiar with [this dictionary](https://github.com/coppolaemilio/gamemaker-godot-dictionary); it makes learning everything even easier. I decided to switch, because I wanted to go to 3D eventually, and Godot supports both 2D and 3D natively (reason why I didn’t go with Unity). Plus I disliked when YoYo Games decided to switch to the subscription model, I am not fan of those.

Since you use GML only, you should feel right at home with GDScript too, it’s similarly easy. :) The biggest difference that you will notice is how blazing fast Godot is compared to Game Maker, and how incredibly fast it compiles projects. GML always felt kinda sluggish. And HTML5 export works much better. There were always some quirks I hit on that front in GM and I always had to deal with some issues there, but I never had any issues with HTML5 export in Godot. Maybe I sound like a fanboy, but I really love it. :)

@dzejpi Thank you so much for your valuable input and the resource! :heart:

Great job! It's very atmospheric. I like spaceship control

Nice game!! The controls feel good when you get used to them. The game loop is interesting and it works!!
Well done!

Great visual clarity with the use of color. Felt very retro. Music fit your genre, and the theme was present in the game mechanics too. Well done :slight_smile:

I actually died on the tutorial because I ran into the ground, embarrassing.

@googlypoo :laughing: aww! No shame, I admit the controls can be a little difficult when you first start! Thanks for your compliments and for playing!

Love it. Fun retro game. I liked the tutorial, made the game easy to understand and play

Not really a fan of the direction controls, but I get used to it after a while. Looks very nintendo-ish, like it

Great game, I love the art and animations. It's a little bit difficult to control the spaceship but it's part of the game 😁 Very fun, good job!

Very good work - it reminded me of an old game that I also loved. Turbo Raketti :thumbsup_tone1:

:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:

@p-r I understand! Back in the Atari era (which is where this was inspired) the controls would have been one or two buttons with rotation like Asteroids. But I wanted to take a chance and try something different, and maybe a bit more modern. Thanks for playing!

@purpledartfrog I've never played Turbo Raketti, but it looks fun! I was a big fan of these sorts of low gravity ship shooters when I was a kid. Thanks for your compliments, and thanks for playing!

Fun little game with a lot of lunar lander vibes

The graphics are charming and the music set a nice tone without being annoying.

I didn't really understand what was going on. Why was I destroying the buildings of the people I wanted to save? Also I didn't catch how the timer came into it.

It felt like a great new take on an old classic and I'm down for it. Solid entry.

@matt-green because knocking on the door didn't seem near as fun. 😂 the "lore" is that they're in prisons and you're saving them so they can arm the shields and protect earth. The timer was to push the player to go fast, with being able to add 10 seconds by destroying enemies. Not saying it's a strong link to the theme but...meh lol.

Thanks for the high compliments and for the play!

The graphics and audio were done masterfully. This is a really cohesive and polished game and I'm super impressed with what you were able to do. I really enjoyed the gameplay as well.

I think this is the most polished entry I've seen! I really admire how you managed to put all of this together in 48 hours!

Damn, you nailed the retro feel! I love the tunes. Graphics are also on point and the gameplay feels coherent with slowly increasing difficulty in levels.

Skipping levels is such a fantastic idea! Maybe I'll implement that in the next one..

Great job, one of my favorites this jam!

This was really fun! I looooved the retro nes style music! Very good gameplay and challenging -the more I got used to the controls the more satisfying it was to pull off close calls from going too fast! xD Great amount of polish in this too -excellent job on this! :D

I love the music and art style! Great tutorial, too! I wasn't very good at the controls, so I appreciated the skip level button. It's impressive that you fit in so many levels and a variety of challenges.

Great game! The gameplay, visuals, and audio are spot on. The only issue I had, was that enemy ships tend to bug and go outside the map which sometimes is quite annoying when they appear close to the player.

@undermountain yeah when I had enemy collision on so they stayed within the area, the game was a bit difficult. 😅 I'd really like to get their behavior fine tuned post jam though. Thank you for playing and your input!

I loved the little people. The game got really hard! I wasn't able to pass the one with three landing pads. Those little red cursors kept popping up and they are so small, move fast, and are very challenging to kill. All the while i'm expected to pick these little engineers from buildings i'm killing and save them. haha felt a lot like defender. :D

You nailed the golden era arcade feeling even down to the sadistic mechanics. I think the inertia is overblown (and unnecessary aside from the final level, but on the other hand the landing mechanic is forgiving), and enemies shouldn't be able to spawn offscreen or move through terrain, but otherwise this entry is pretty flawless and honestly impressive. I was like "no way this has another stage", 3 or 4 times. Controls were hard to get used to; return to shoot is not a common binding

That was super enjoyable. I loved the music! It was top notch quality and very nostalgic. In fact, the graphics were too! Perfectly arcade-like. The gameplay was very good too. I tend to be very impatient with the lunar landing kind of games, but the auto-landing feature was _so_ good, and really helped out with my lack of patience.

I have no complaints, this was so good. Amazing job!

Very cool game, I love the minimalist style and the music is amazing! Congratz on achieving all that in such short time!

Great game! This is probably one of my favorites that I've played from this jam. I'm a fan of the music.

This is pretty good. Graphics and music are great. Sound effects are good, gameplay is solid, and I appreciate the shift button for landing, rather than having to slow down to proper speed. My only complaints are that the little fellows walk kinda slow, and I did run into a bug where my screen went black after one of the levels, but I was able to get back there with pressing n. Otherwise, great work! This is pretty crazy for a compo entry.