Nice but very rude. Pay attention to aesthetics (font, color, etc.) and feedback.

Good Idea, but could use more consistent aesthetics and maybe some QoL features, but overall good game!

The game is not balance, quickly there is so many birds you can't do anything. The difficulty should scale, and maybe a warning sign could help the player to know where will spawn the next birds

@dhavavamba Please define "rude" for us. What is it about the aesthetics that makes you say that?

@gecko64 How do you mean more consistent aesthetics? What stands out as particularly jarring for you? What QoL features would you like to see?

@taeghen Sounds to be working as designed. I (Balimaar) coded the spawning so that the seagulls would be the ones providing the "limited space" to move around. I would argue that the difficulty does scale but perhaps the spike happens a little too fast.

@balimaarthebassfish by rude I mean rough. However, by aesthetics I mean the visual architecture of the game with all its elements.

@dhavavambra I've never done art for a game and I haven't done art seriously in many many years, we would greatly appreciate specific feedback about what in particular within the aesthetics you find abrasive so that I can improve next go around. For example, is the the life/sandwich count font? The beach graphics? The title or end screen? Color choices?

Or if you want to answer one specific question, what part of the game did you feel was far less than what was expected of a 72-hour build, where do you think we dropped the ball?

For any interested, you can listen to the music track I created for the game by itself here. :)
https://soundcloud.com/elizabeth-biz-diedrick/beach-invaders

Very coool soundtraaack! :smile: Solid little entry, it doesn't really had depth to make me continue playing it after a few runs, but I enjoyed it. Maybe a custom cursor with a better contrast would have been nice: on my 1440p screen the white cursor on the beach was nearly invisible, making the aiming a bit hard at a this fast game. But I managed to fix it by playing it in windowed mode at a smaller resolution, so no probs. :slight_smile:

Overally nice entry, wish there would be more content! :smile: Keep up the good work!

@tudvari thank you so much! There's so much we could have done with it given more time, but hopefully next go around we're able to implement more within the time limit :)

@tudvari Thank you :) I remember you from last LD!

I had considered a custom cursor but by the time I got to that point on my list, I had received some rather sad news that kinda dampened my enthusiasm for doing much more. Something always seems to come up in LD for me.

After doing that and a couple more things, I was going to quickly implement a secrete password screen on the main menu. The password would have been revealed on the Game Over screen if you reached 100 points.

The password, correctly entered, would have taken the player to a beach themed snake game - the almost definition of a "limited space" game.

Cute little game. The audio was funny and the graphics were good. I felt like the gulls ramped up too fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uROm0ffJW_A

Thanks for the review @bangkerpow .

The spawn rate of the gulls was the subject of some debate in the team. Biz pointed out to me though that this was supposed to be a limited space game and with the old spawn rate, we werent being crowded at all and scores of 500-1k were easily achieved.

I may have gone too far with the spawn rate the other way looking at this gameplay from a... well... gameplay standpoint but from a LD theme point of view I couldnt turn it down by much.

It's humorous and makes you want to keep challenging, it would be nice to be able to shoot in bursts, but that might not make a lot of sense considering it's shells that are being thrown. (XD) Nice job.

Hahah the funniest game in this category! Why are seagulls so angry? Maybe we should just feed them lol? Those red eyes drive me crazy and make me shudder. The seagulls got what they deserved, but there were too many of them, I was defeated

Music is so awesome. :D woooo hoo i felt a bit trapped, almost like there was very limited space to move around. I'm suspicious of a theme relation here. ;-)

@balimaarthebassfish Sorry to hear that, hope it's better now. Knowing the circumstances, it's an even bigger achievement! :) Congrats!

@ffffchai I did consider a burst fire mode then thought "the player is only limited by how fast they can click". Thanks for playing and your review!

@noobgeek :D All the signs I see everywhere at restaurants and such near the sea say "dont feed the gulls". Maybe they are seeking revenge! I wonder if anyone playing has understood the "Noooo my sandwiches!" voice line reference xD

@commanderstitch thanks for playing! You can thank my partner Bizzybee for convincing me to up the spawn rates, she reminded me of the theme.

@tudvari Only my second Ludum Dare and first with a team. I hope Bizzybee is free next time around because damn not having to do art and sound saved A LOT of time!

[Thanks for submitting your game to stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1945057375?t=01h38m59s)

Also, thank you for letting me destroy my arm trying to click as fast as possible. :sweat_smile:

@coleslaughter AW yeah here's our high score holder with a whopping 303!

Thanks so much for playing the game, the reactions made me so happy.

@commanderstitch Thank you! I wanted to make a battle theme with beachy elements, and ended up mixing in some seagull sounds to give it that extra pizazz. SO happy the music is being noticed. ^~^

@coleslaughter Probably my favorite moment- https://clips.twitch.tv/BombasticGlutenFreeTrianglePeanutButterJellyTime-QoKbmaRoXcCcztHz

An excellent game! I only got to 54 today in a bunch of attempts, but I'll try again when I'm feeling fresher!

The seagulls look great, and the music creates exactly the right mood. Well done!

@frank-gevaerts Thank you for playing! I just played a couple runs myself and managed to get to 400+, I think maybe that's a challenge for NamedMoose :)

NamedMoose says he thinks he can do it!

@balimaarthebassfish Sorry for the late reply! I meant by a more consistent aesthetic being with the somewhat detailed background to the very simple coloured main character, and also the more jarring hard outlines on everything and with the text in the top without a font matching the theme. I'm sorry about mentioning QoL as when I first played it the play in browser caused it to zoom in and lose the ability to see the text, that was one of my main gripes when I first played, playing again I realised I missed out on seeing this. Good game otherwise, great mood and humour :)

Pretty fun! I had a bit of a hard time seeing my white mouse cursor over the light background to aim. Love the voice acting. MY SANDWICHES 🥪🗣️

@gecko64 The "zoom in" on the initial upload was entirely my fault. I had forgotten to adjust the player size in the settings before the build, so Ludum Dare tried to resize the game... which obviously did not work. I would have changed the cursor but I ran out of mental energy late on the last day following receipt of some sad news.

@kyle-farwell thanks for playing! will confess we were inspired by the poor cabbages guy in The Last Airbender!

It's easy to get started. Good use of the player's nerves.

This was funny! I enjoyed the character voices that you recorded.

Others have mentioned the difficulty curve. You might consider a wave system so that the player has time to relax (mentally or physically).

I quickly realized the best strategy was to quickly spam the mouse button. There was really no need to move at all. If that's not the gameplay you intended, you can shape the player strategy in other ways, such as requiring the player to collect shells (so that they have limited ammunition and must walk around).

To me, game design is about understanding the motivation and the mechanics and controls you provide, and making sure all those are in agreement, so that you curate the exact kind of experience you want. As long as you are happy with the experience you made, then you should be proud!

I got this far before my arm just tired out XD Thanks for the game!


@hawkin Thank you for playing and the excellent advice! Also congrats on the score! I think that's the highest score I have seen outside the dev team. We score up to 500+ but I think part of that is knowing where exactly off screen the spawners are!

There is a lot more that we could have done with this game. I think there is room enough for us to develop it a bit more as well.

I think we might translate this game into Godot and work on it behind the scenes until the next Ludum Dare :)

@balimaarthebassfish omg yes the "dev advantage" is real. That's one of the biggest hurdles in releasing something that other people will find playable. If you have time and people, playtesting during the jam is super valuable!

I hope you do keep working on it!!

very funny game love the idea !

Fun game! Spamming the mouse is a good strategy.

@hawkin thank you for the kind words!

@katanajellyfish and @knexator

Thank you for your feedback! Your ratings have just given us what we need to be ranked once the scoring wraps up.

Thank you! Glad you found the game funny Katana :D My personal favourites are those seagulls that try to sneak in from the left and right... and of course the "Cabbage Guy" inspired "Noooooo! My sandwiches!"

Knexator, I agree the spam is an ideal strategy. Glad you had fun!

Fun game, good job!

@psv-games-studio thank you for playing!

it's hard to see cursor, but that was a fun little game

Top score 65. I started doing better once I realized my health and my sandwich count are different, so I started by standing away from the sandwiches and firing, then once I was almost done I stood over the last sandwich to bodyblock with my health. That way I didn't die until I really had just one resource left.

Simple gameplay, but it's short and quick to retry with cute art, and a jammin little tune, did you make original music? Very nice.

@madasski Thank you for playing!

@pkenney I promise the soundtrack for the game was composed by @bizzybee who graduated from College in the USA with a relevant degree :)

Good soundtrack and also some extra sounds. I read all the comments and noticed that you didn't really agree with some of them or asked for more explanations. When I read them I understood immediately, sometimes we leave comments that are not so clear because we don't want to be so specific that it's a negative comment. So sometimes even if you say little you can understand. In my case, I think it's a good entry for this jam and it's good that none of them managed to send it in such a short time. But the criticisms regarding the graphics and difficulty are clear and I agree with that, the feedbacks are there to help, paying attention to them is valuable. Regarding the graphic, all the text in the fonts, including the buttons in the home menu, are word-type letters, common letters like notepad letters, it is not a font that matches the beach theme or even an artistic gaming font. The graphic is simple but pleasant, it would only be cooler if the character moved his legs or some type of animation when moving. The birds are cool. I think the biggest issue that took away the fun was the fact that it was too difficult and there was no progression in difficulty. It doesn't get more difficult little by little, in just a few seconds so many birds come that it is very difficult to survive and loses its appeal. I stayed in the corner just shooting but still death is certain. I also didn't see much where it would fit into the theme. But when it comes to a jam, it's a good entry, good original music. I would improve the fonts, add some animation to the main character and better balance the way the birds appear, gradually becoming more difficult. A gun to kill the birds or a shotgun would be cool lol, but it's just my crazy mind working lol... I received a lot of positive feedback, but a lot of constructive criticism too and they all helped me deeply. All the negative criticisms I received I recognized immediately and some I fixed on the same day, others are noted to be implemented. They know what they're saying, the ones who spent some of their time evaluating your game. Don't ignore them. On my page I tried to argue with one of them, until 3 more came reporting the same bug. Then I saw that he was right, after fixing the very serious error that he warned me about, he even posted a gif alerting me and I still insisted on him lol, afterwards I thanked him immensely for the feedback he gave me.

@lincolnsalles It's not that I didnt agree with some of them. Some choices had to be made to make the game fit the theme. I had the spawn rates at a more reasonable level in the last couple test runs before submission. Then my partner and I had a small debate over the seagulls spawn rate. She argued I needed to increase the rate because the gulls never crowded the player / limit their space for maneuvering. I was in the camp of a lot of respondents here at first but my team mate pointed out that it was supposed to be a limited space game. We didnt have anything in the game to limit space with aside from the seagulls themselves. So the solution was to increase the spawn rate. I agree the game is difficult, nowhere have I said it was not and I have even said the difficulty spike is perhaps too fast.

Fonts/cursors were on my list to fix but by the time I had to go to bed and therefore submit the game, I ran out of time. I don't like to resubmit or upload new versions after the deadline unless its something truly gamebreaking AKA the issues I had with the web build. Feels too much like cheating to me otherwise.

Never considered guns for the game but I am glad we did not go for them. Can you imagine everyone's poor ears after a few rounds of this game with the pistol sound?

I'm not ignoring anybody, merely explaining in some cases why things are the way they are and in other cases saying "yeah you right"

@balimaarthebassfish I know how it is, my time is also up and I haven't even managed to add sound and I haven't added anything either, so much so that there's still no sound or any graphical improvements. Only bugs in the code I fix, but the content I leave as is. But I think it's worth putting up a post-jam version in case anyone wants to test how it got better. I can't wait to do this and add everything I wanted to add, but at the moment I'm busy playing and evaluating the games.