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Irritating Ship's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Polish and Completeness | #2 | 4.056 | 4.056 |
| Overall Impression | #2 | 3.944 | 3.944 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.744 | 3.744 |
| Sound | #4 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
| Originality | #9 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
| Art and Style | #10 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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This category is reserved for games. Any tools or toys should be submitted to the other category. Mapper 28 compatible entry up to 64KB with NO PRG-RAM is required! Must be free or include a free demo.
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This game may be used in a physical and digital multi-cart release and distributed by jam organizers as part of a digital archive (ZIP).
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Comments
awesome arcade game Fisk, just top notch. I played it for a couple hours before I beat it, and kept going. The sound design is crisp and adds a sense of tension and focus. Loved the music starting over, it added a lot of character and sense of continuity.
Honestly it was perfect, I wanted more. More graphics, more levels, (more color lol), etc.. I suppose thats the hallmark of a great game, leave people wanting more.
Bravo, not only an excellent entry, but an excellent game. It felt complete and polished, thats hard to do in that short amount of time.
I'd like to thank you first and foremost for having a name that's satisfying to yell in frustration. This is such sleek and stylish blood pressure medication. And it must have been a Foxtrot joke from thirty years ago, but this is the first actual game where I've died in the menu. Hit "Normal" expecting Easy, then hit "Hard" expecting it to go back to Normal, and at some point clipped "Gravity Off," and basically that screen is a thorough warning of what people are getting into.
What this game nails, and what I've dinged a few other submissions over, is that you're never fighting the controls. The obscene difficulty matches the razor-sharp input. The player feels fully responsible at every hair-pulling moment. Collision is aggravatingly accurate, on your ship made of pure explodium.
But yeah, a pause button would be nice.
I'm thrilled to hear the title screen was a hit for you. For simple games like this with unusual movement, I think the title screen is a great opportunity to teach the player, integrating a tutorial in a clean, non-obvious way. I did something similar in my entry last year, but this time the game is simple enough for the title screen to really teach you everything you need to know. I did have a brief thought of disabling death there, but kept it because it's funny, teaches a lesson, and helps show off the really cool sprite-0-hit collision.
Thanks for the kind words about the controls, and I appreciate the feedback about a pause feature. I discuss both in my reply to Matthew Justice further down the page, if you're interested. As for collision, I touched on it above, but I used sprite 0 hit for it and I think it turned out fantastic; it's hard to think of a better use case. Sprite 0 hit has so many limitations that make it a bad tool for object collision and I'm really fortunate it works so well for this game. Having to replicate this in software would be a serious challenge, and less precise collision would really hurt the game's feel. Dodging an obstacle simply by rotating the ship feels great!
Literally slapped my forehead going "how does that screen show off the sprite zero--" Yeah of course. The background is black space. Using that feature for its intended purpose has become a clever twist.
this is a fun game, with perfectly checkpoint placement! i did end up using a game genie code to give myself unlimited lives — but that’s probably going against the creative vision a bit!
one thing i really grew to appreciate is that it’s very rare that you’ll want to push yourself in a direction you’re already going. there’s probably a metaphor for life in there somewhere.
the sound and visual aesthetic are perfect for this game, spot on!
I appreciate the kind words! I'm not much of an artist and was worried my basic art here wouldn't land, but I think it might succeed in giving a vector arcade feel, which is very appropriate for the style of game.
You're not the first person to want unlimited lives, and I strongly considered this for an easy mode. I was concerned it would hurt the feeling of progression and achievement as the player masters the game, and worsen the difficulty curve by allowing players to get to the much harder sections when they haven't had sufficient practice yet on the earlier ones. Difficulty was always on my mind in part because my biggest inspiration for this game, Gravitar, failed in the arcades because of the insane difficulty curve new players face. I got a lot of feedback that normal mode feels pretty good after maybe a brief rough start and that it's fine as-is, and I figured people who really wanted unlimited lives would probably be happy enough with saved states. I definitely didn't expect someone to make a Game Genie code for it; that's really cool!
I didn’t have too much trouble until the parts with little round asteroids scattered all over the place. But then I was like, alright, let’s just work on this section without having to play through the whole game again!
I feel like the code is better than savestates because it still enforces your checkpoint placement design, rather than letting players plop one down anywhere :3 Certainly feels more satisfying than coming to a stop and making a savestate after every turn!
I was using PZAOGO for infinite lives, but it breaks the game if you die on the title screen or before the first checkpoint lol.
This game is tough - and yet fair! I feel like my repeated failures were my own fault! Most importantly, it is fun. The physics are just what I'd expect. The parallax starfield is a nice touch, as is the title screen where you can die before even getting started! A pause feature would be nice to have.
Overall - quite fun! Good work.
I'm glad the physics worked so well for you! Doing a rotation-based system like this was new for me and I had some issues getting the right scaling for things like aspect ratios and frame rates, but I think it worked out really well in the end. After my experience in last year's competition where I had trouble tuning gravity just right, I ended up going with 8.16 fixed point (16 bits of subpixels) for position and velocity here instead of the usual 8.8, which I think made a big impact in having the angles feel right. Without that precision, there'd be a lot of adjacent angles with identical X or Y components.
Omitting a pause feature was an intentional decision, because I was worried it would be too tempting to abuse it and it might cut the tension too much. As a compromise, I made it so you're perfectly still after respawning even with gravity enabled, and the in-game timer pauses until you start moving again. I'm surprised by the number of requests I've had for a pause feature, and while I'm still not sure it's right for the game, I'm definitely not sure what the right way would be to add it in. Two options I've considered are to have a cooldown after unpausing where you have to wait some amount of time before you can pause again, or requiring that your velocity be low enough on both X and Y to pause. The latter might be harder to abuse (depending on the thresholds), but is much less discoverable and clear. These also present more headaches for me in terms of speedrun timing; speedrunners have requested I change the in-game timer in an update to time deaths, but I plan to still have the timer be paused when you respawn until you move. If you can pause the game, I'd prefer not to time it, but I worry that would enable speedrun exploits of the in-game timer like we're currently seeing with deaths.
I definitely appreciate the feedback!
Your reasoning about pause makes sense. Maybe you could have a "casual" mode that allows pause, and a normal/speedrun mode that does not allow pause. Or just leave it as-is - the lack of pause isn't a deal breaker!