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Starfighter Mercs 2's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visual | #18 | 4.083 | 4.083 |
| Audio | #23 | 3.708 | 3.708 |
| Overall | #36 | 3.708 | 3.708 |
| Fun | #71 | 3.292 | 3.292 |
| Theme | #137 | 2.458 | 2.458 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you use any third-party assets or skeleton code?
Google font : Orbitron, The Jam's logo.
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Comments
Great game! The soundtrack went quite well with the visuals, and it was fairly fun to play. My main complaints are that you can't know the differences about the ships without trying them and that they feel a bit floaty. Also, the textures in the first stage look flickery a bit? I'm not sure how to describe it but it makes my eyes uncomfortable. Still very solid overall!
Thanks glad you liked the music !
Yeah can’t argue with that, i think i should have made more detailed menus and have at least text indications to which ship has which shot pattern etc…
The floaty controls are there cause i tried to make them analogue but i think i didn’t finetune them enough.
You’re also right about the textures, and that is cause of the fact that i tried to have the game very low res to help with performance but since the textures are a bit on the busy side (and very low res themselves as well) it ended up aliasing like crazy > <
Sorry for the visual discomfort, i tried to limit this as much as possible. I think next time i make something 3D i’ll try to use simplet textures to help mitigate that when rendering the game at super low res.
This is a jam game no way - the music and 3d assets go so well together and I appreciated that you could continue playing with a different character after dying. Maybe for limited it could be like the max number of retries is the number of characters (that's what I thought was going on at first)
Part of me kept trying to shoot at enemies as they glided onto stage, but I figured they were invincible while spawning - wish the player had the same starting invincibility since I felt like I was taking some damage just while my new character was still loading in.
Great game and would love to see it further developed!
Thanks for your comment, glad that you liked my entry :D
yeah the enemies’s i frames when spawning is something of a compromise i had to make, i made so thtat they have some because if not, you could just blast them offscreen as soon as they spawned. But i came across a problem where, since i used multiple cameras for rendering the backdrops, they could trigger their hitbox multiple times or be counted multiple times “escaped” when leaving the screen which caused a whole lot of trouble like not triggering the boss and softlocking the game etc…
So i baked the moment where the hitbox activates into their spawn state to fix it, can’t argue it’s not ideal since this gives them quite long spawn protection but it’s the best i could figure out to avoid shenanigans ^^’
I like the idea of multiple characters to choose from in games even if it’s not necessarily changing the mechanics, so i’ve had character rosters like that in jam games any time i can, cause i feel it gives a bit more personality to see the pilot instead of having the player choose just the ship :p
Like the graphics, nice job
Thanks ! Glad you liked the graphics :)
I made it to the end! Was a real nostalgic feel of games I’ve played long ago, great work!
Thanks for playing all the way till the end ^^
I tried to aim for a PS1/Saturn era feel so i’m glad if i managed to get you some nostalgic memories :)
This has a huge classic arcade look and feel, and it's pretty fun! I think the hitboxes could do with some work though; playing as the big chonky ship was weird because I had no idea where my hitbox was meant to be. The enemies were pretty neat, though there could be a bit more variety(however this is a jam and you've crammed a ton in already!), and I think the sound effects were pretty well done.
Thanks, happy that you like the retro look, especially since i’ve not made much in 3D yet XD
Yup i kinda messed up a bit, but the player hitbox is always meant to be very small and is always located on the bright green canopy window of the ship. I tried to have it be as well placed as possible by offseting the ship model accordingly, though i can’t argue it still is a bit awkward on the larger ship :(
Glad you liked the enemy designs ! I tried to take advantage of using full 3D this time to have them look a bit more abstract compared to the player ships to give them a more alien and strange feel, it’s no Gieger but hopefully it looks decent enough haha :p
Love the classic arcade look and feel of this one! The ability to take over as a new character when you die is also quite interesting. I would love a little more variety in the enemy types and bullet patterns, but overall this was a lot of fun!
Thanks for playing !
I didn’t go too crazy on the bullet patterns cause i wasn’t sure how this would affect performance especially since i still havent made much in full 3D yet, glad you had fun regardless ^^
the key event seems not working in chrome, but fine in firefox
the graphics has a PS1 feeling, it gives me a good retro vibe. the gameplay is decent spaceship game. but i can't tell where is my hitbox, i sometimes just stay still
Thanks for trying my game out !
I’m sorry i don’t understand what you mean exactly by “key event” ? So i’m not entirely sure what issue you have encountered ^^’
Hope you still had a good time despite this issue though, and i’m glad you like the PS1 look XD
Yeah i might have not made the hitbox as clear as i hoped, but the thing is on all of the ships the green canopy area is the hitbox and is generally quite small even on the bigger ships :)
I thoroughly enjoyed this one! The effort put into the customization is nice, even though I mostly went with the ship that was a bit reminiscent of an A-Wing, in pink. The music was very fun, it somehow feels nostalgic.
I'm also thankful that you put infinite continues - or at least enough for me to finish the game, if they're not infinite. I played kind of badly and my score was really low as a result, but I got to see everything you made!
My only two minor gripes would be the controls indeed being a bit "slippery", like RedWool also mentioned, and the fact that something about the pixelation, or interplay between the resolution and textures and models, kind of made the whole screen flicker a bit during gameplay, at least on my end.
Overall, I had a great time with this game, well done!
Thanks for your comment ^^
Yeah i try to improve that customization aspect each time i make a jam game where i can have the whole multiple character thing going, so i’m glad you liked that aspect XD
The ship you went with was definitively A wing inspired (hopefully not too much :p) in both design cues and role since it’s way smaller and less durable.
I wanted to have music that didn’t sound too chiptune this time around to make it seem like this would have been a kinda PS1/Saturn era game with CD audio ^_^
The continues are infinite, partly because i didn’t prioritize making a lives system, and also cause i felt that for a jam entry it would be better so that people could choose if they wanted to go till the end or stop whenever. Also no worries it’s not you, the difficulty balance is way off, especially on the 3rd stage where things can get rough quite quickly, and i should have made more of a score penalty for dying rather than just have it reset to Zero.
Yeah can’t argue i’ve messed up the fine tuning on the controls, you can check the details on that in my reply to RedWool below since he adressed this issue as well :p
The pixelation is a bit of an oversight due to still experimenting stuff with 3D, on a past entry wich was my very first attempt at 3D, i used my usual resolution i had for 2D games which was then upscaled to the 720p window you then get here on itch. The thing is, i had some performance issues so i decided that for the next 3D game i’ll try to lower it a bit more, however since i went for a bit more pixelated textures like in PS1 games, the low resolution combined with the quite busy textures ended up causing some heavy aliasing. Hopefully i’ll find a balance to not have such an issue in future works.
Sorry about the looong reply XD and thanks again, have a good one :)
It's really cool to see the customization, especially in a jam game! Don't worry about the ship design, the A-Wing was always one of my Star Wars favourites (or even the top favourite), so I was actually happy to see something inspired by it. :D
Great work on the music, once more!
I think infinite continues are a really good choice for a longer jam game, since it allowed me to see everything despite playing badly, so I agree with your reasoning. :D A score penalty might be nicer indeed for people who actually want to go for high score, I think that's a good idea!
No worries on the controls, it was a minor thing - maybe I should have also tried it with a controller, I was playing on keyboard.
And also no worries on the textures! The flickering wasn't too bad overall, just something I thought I'd mention. I think it's kind of hard to strike a balance with the texture "density" in pixellated 3D from my (rather limited, as I've made mostly 2D games so far) experience!
Very nostalgic art style with an OK shmup. The movement is a little slippery making it difficult to navigate sometimes. Great job on the visuals!
Thanks for giving my entry a shot, really happy that you like the artstyle :)
Yeah i wanted to have a bit smoother movement compared to some more Dpad style movement i had on other past entries, so i added some interpolation to the movement to make it better on analogue sticks, but i didn’t finetune it as much as i should have :/
This is definitely one of the best looking and playing games in the jam! Great stuff, if you made me give one complaint it would be that the limited ammo should probably come up more, its not a very impactful mechanic rn!
Thanks a lot ^^ glad you really liked the visuals !
Yeah the ammo system and the weapons themselves ended up a bit lacking i gotta agree, like i said below, i didn’t made them do enough damage compared to the base shot so it didn’t really encourage much weapon conservation :p
Good stuff! I like the music, art and overall feel. Although, I was able to clear a stage by sitting in the death menu then spawning to defeat the boss. I was expecting the bullets to be more limiting. I wish I had more control of the bullet rate. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for your feedback !
I was supposed to have the gameplay pause whenever the ship select menu poped up upon death to prevent just that, but for some reason whenever i tried to do that i had a weird issue where no matter what i did, i could pause the game, but the menu would get stuck in limbo where you couldn’t unpause to resume the game, so i had to ditch that and it ended up like it’s here in the release ^^’
yeah i think i didn’t have a big enough difference in damage between the weapons and the default shot so this sorta makes runing out of ammo less of a big deal than it should have been to make the player want to keep their weapons instead of just spamming away :p
Very nice Shoot ’em up!
The 3D sprites have a nice retro filter, that makes me feel quite nostalgic for the games I used to play long ago.
I feel like there could have been some explanation on how each ship differs, but it’s completely understandable there was no time for it in the jam.
Overall, I had a lot of fun! Well done 😃
Thanks ! Happy that you liked it.
Well retro’s my jam so i tried to have it look authentically PS1/Saturn esque era as i could :p
Yeah i didn’t spend as much time as i should have on the select screen to have all thge necessary info about the ships their shot patterns etc… :(
Glad you still had fun despite this ^^
Very nice. Feels like a very competent shmup with a lot of variety. I’d personally love a bit more feedback on bullets colliding to feel a bit more weight. the blinking is nice but an sfx or slight particle could give it a really good feel.
Nice job!
Thanks for your kind words :)
Yeah i didn’t add many oomph to the impacts, cause i wasn’t quite sure how i could acheive similar effects in 3D (since i still havent made much yet with the extra dimention) though you’re right about at least adding impact sounds that would have spiced up things a bit at least :p
I liked that you have diffrent power ups (my favorite is green one with wavy attacks) and is nice arcade game (it reminds me with lost viking from starcarft 2 ). Good job!
Thanks for giving my game a go !
Glad you liked the weapon powerups, i tried my best to have each their own feel, even if some powerups for some ships end up quite OP but i guess the limited ammo thanks to the theme compensates that aspect a bit :p
Funnily enough, i didn’t play Starcraft 2 so this wasn’t an intentional reference if something made you think of that game XD
so nostalgic and so fun, i adore the visuals and the ship model designs are absolutely perfect
Thanks :)
Really happy that you like the ship designs ^^
That's a fun game and so friendly to play
Thanks glad you liked it :)
I generally try to not make my games too hard, so i’m happy you found it friendly :p
I have made it to the end.
12 ships is a lot to choose from, I have not checked if every single one shoots differently but that at least the ones I tried do is very cool.
You've got quite several environments and I really like the music, only a minimum of sound effects are there but there's a lot of work put into the game.
The gameplay is very traditional so obviously it's fun, the bullet patterns are good enough.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for playing till the end ^^
Well in terms of gameplay differences there’s a difference between the 4 ship types (different hp values, number of weapons, shot pattern of the satelite drones) the 12 pilots are more visual preference variants of the 4 ships but i’m glad you found them cool:p
I managed to make 3 environements, so not a lot but hopefully enough for a bit of variety for a jam game XD
I went classic vertical cause here i mostly wanted to see if i could manage using 3D models instead of sprites but i kept the gameplay stuff 2D.
This goes pretty hard, but I think it would go even harder if the stages were a little shorter. The amount of stuff you got done for the jam is remarkable, but the repetition does shine a bit of a shadow on the gameplay.
This could be a super neat skeleton to use for a future expansion or jam.
Thanks ^^
Yeah the stage lenght kinda was hard to balance cause i had a few issue where sometimes enemies would either be killed or flee and the boss wouldn’t trigger and softlock the game, and sometime it would trigger the boss multiple times, so i left it as it is in the release when i reached a point where these bugs wouldn’t occur even if this caused to have some down time in between enemy spawns (mostly cause i randomized the spawns a bit to help break monotony)
But i have to agree i couldn’t manage to not have the game be repetitive, hope you liked it despite this still.
Thanks for your comment :)
This took me back to the Sega CD days. I liked having new ships every time I blew up.
Thanks for giving it a shot ^^
I always kinda struggle to do proper difficulty balance for jam games, so i went for unlimited continues and let people change pilots for variety’s sake.
Glad this took you back to some Sega CD memories, my game’s no Silpheed for sure but i hope you liked it still haha XD
This game has a nice retro feel to it. It reminds me of Star Fox and the likes, and looks really good. Congratulations on your entry :)
Thanks a lot for your comment and for trying my game out ! Glad you liked it ^^
Yep can’t hide the Starfox inspiration haha XD