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A jam submission

First HopeView game page

Atari style space shooter game
Submitted by DrPineapple21 — 21 minutes, 8 seconds before the deadline
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First Hope's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay#13.9003.900
Art Style#14.4004.400
People's Choice#23.6003.600
Staff's Pick#3n/an/a
Representation of Theme#33.1003.100

Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

  • A well polished shoot-em-up. I would've liked to see the theme directly represented in the game itself, but the story logs were a clever way to incorporate the theme.

Is there anything you want to say about your entry?
Enjoy the game!

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Comments

(+1)

hope to see this game getting even better 

Developer(+1)

This may be the first time you played this game but it sure won't be the last!

Developer

The game resolution has been updated to be smaller, everyone should be able to see the entire game screen now!

Submitted(+1)

Outer space is badass, and so is this game. There are a lot of things I like about this game. You gave me a lot to comment on, so rather than give you a bunch of paragraphs, let me list them out a bit more cleanly:

  • The music is probably the best of any submission in this game jam. It's so good that you earned an extra point from me in the "art style" category for it, since music really should count toward that anyway.
  • Speaking of which, the art itself is great, too. I love the spaceships and different-colored energy blasts.
  • The gameplay is fun at its core. Flying around space, dodging enemies, and shooting energy blasts is just fun.
  • The space logs are a great addition. I love things like this; they make games with simple but fun concepts more engaging, and they show that you're serious about it.

Here are my critiques, with some suggestions for how I would improve on them:

  • I think that my biggest complaint is that the game is too slow. Though it's a fun game with a classic concept, it's not very engaging because everything moves so slowly. On top of that, the player's speed is relatively pretty fast, which makes the game too easy.
    • Easy solution here, just speed up the ships and projectiles.
    • I'm not sure if it gets harder as you progress - I probably played for 5 minutes - but if not, that would be a good thing to consider, too. 
  • The power ups look more like obstacles. I didn't read the guide you posted showing that they were power ups before playing, so I avoided them thinking that they were enemy ships.
    • I wouldn't use ships for the power up sprites - it isn't really intuitive that flying into ships gives you power ups. Instead, you should use sprites that set them apart from the enemy ships somehow.
    • If you really want them to be ships that's fine, but make it super obvious that they're power ups. For example, put a huge plus sign on the health ships to show that they'll restore your health.
  • Though I love the concept of space logs, I actually don't know how to progress to unlock them. After playing a couple games, I looked at the logs and didn't see any change. Also, I might just be stupid, but I actually don't know how to exit from the instruction or space log screens back to the main menu, lol. I just have to quit the game when I go to the instruction or log screen.
    • Did you actually implement the logs, or did you not get to it?
    • If you did implement them, then...
      • Maybe make it a bit more clear how to unlock the logs in the instruction screen, and
      • be sure to make the "escape" button take you to the previous screen.
  • The instruction screen is cut off for me. It's zoomed in, and I can only see what I assume to be about 80% of the screen. 
    • The controls are pretty straightforward so it's not a big deal, but just decrease the scale on this screen.

All these criticisms have pretty simple solutions imo, so don't be intimidated by the fact that I wrote so much. Great work on this. 

Developer

Wow! Thank you so much for the compliments and critique. I spent ALOT of time looking for good music and I'm glad that so many people like it as much as I did. Also, believe it or not but I would actually sometimes keep the game running in the background while I was writing code since I enjoyed the music so much. 

I also think the game is quite slow. I played the game so many times while developing it that I convinced myself that I had gotten quite good at it and didn't see the need to make it harder since I thought it was easy just for me lol. I'll definitely go in and make the enemies and blasts faster. Also, yes the enemies spawn in greater quantities as the level increases. 

I will admit, the powerup art was something I had to do quickly since I was running out of time for the game jam. Before submitting, they were simple 5x5 rectangles that had a different color based on what they did. I think I will stick with the idea that they are powerups sent by the player's allies but maybe I'll make them look like storage capsules or something.

The space logs are implemented and are definitely my favorite part of the game. The way to unlock space logs is to destroy enemy ships and they reveal a bit about the history of the player's world each time they're unlocked. Each space log requires you to destroy a different number of enemy ships and all of them are unlocked once you destroy a total of 750. I guess I should have written somewhere that "collecting data" is the same as destroying enemy ships. Also, if you look at the bottom right of the space logs page you'll see the total count of enemies you've killed so far. 

The reason you can't see the entirety of all the screens is since the resolution of the game is hard coded. I forgot to take this into account when developing the game since my monitor has quite a large resolution and so the entirety of the game screen was always visible for me. I will likely go in and either change the resolution or make the window resizable.

Thanks for all the feedback, this is the first game I've ever made and I was scared that it would be terrible but your feedback gave me hope so I'm very grateful!  

By the way, your game, Your Buddy, was really fun to play. The art, game mechanics, and overall vibe of the game was super cool and I definitely want to make a game as good as Your Buddy in the future. Thank you again for the feedback!

Submitted

I can relate to being scared when releasing it - it was also my first game, so I was overthinking and redesigning everything during the testing process, too. You did a really great job though. 

Knowing about how the log unlocks work, I'll have to go back and try it so I can check them out. I love to unlock extra lore stuff like that. The other things I mentioned are really just minor things I noticed, things that tend to slip by you when you're developing and constantly testing a game over a two week period. lol

Your comment about my game made me really, really happy to read. I totally blew out my scope when conceptualizing this game - in future game jams, I'll definitely focus more on making a game with fewer features that are more polished, rather than a game like YB with several features with mediocre polish. I'm also glad that you liked the assets, because I was worried that scraping them together from the free section on Itch would leave the game lacking some visual cohesion (which it definitely does, but I'm glad that it's not so bad, haha)

Anyway, thanks again for your really nice comment, and congrats on your first game. :)

Submitted(+1)

The music is cool !