itch.io

Uh what?

I like this game.

I like this game.

I was also having trouble finding it.

I found the reveal video on the Global Game Jam Discord: 

Just added a Mac build! Sorry about that, I guess I forgot.

Thanks so much for checking out my game! I hope you enjoy it.

Have you ever wanted to face off in a battle to the death against the cold steel of robotic enemies??? Have you ever wanted to blast away foes in the liberty of low gravity???

Well now's your chance!

THE MOONSHOT ARENA FEDERATION FORMALLY INVITES YOU TO:

Fight until your last breath or until the timer runs out in this fast-paced shoot-em-up action-packed arena. Can you prove your mettle, and beat the high score?

* The Moonshot Arena Federation is not responsible for any maiming, burns, electrocution, shrapnel damage, lost limbs, lost eyesight, brain damage, death, or stubbed toes a contestant may receive while competing in the arena *

(Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I wanted to try my hand at marketing a game, since apparently that's really important in game dev. Let me know what you think, and post your own marketing spiel/advertisement below in response!)

Thanks for playing! Sorry about the bug. I thought I fixed it before submission, but I guess it got through :(

Played through the game. I think it had difficulty communicating purpose to the player. Who was I? What was I doing in the house? What was chasing me? Were there any strategic choices to be made? What did the smoke particles indicate? Were there objectives to complete (besides survive)? What did my stamina bar do? I quickly found myself wandering the house without a real purpose, occasionally getting killed by the monster with very little explanation. I thought that the intro where you cross a street with floating text around you was a very good format for communicating purpose and story with the player, but once the actual gameplay starts that format is no longer used.

Other problems were more technical. For instance, when the player moves in diagonals by pressing two move keys at once, the player's speed is doubled. This is a common mistake that many devs make, but it can be solved fairly simply by normalizing the two vectors. In a game where speed is a big factor, this bug can be game-breaking. The clock also stopped at a certain point in time, making the game impossible to beat.

I see some potential in this game (I really liked the intro scene!), but it really needs some polishing to make it shine. I can't say what that polish is as that again really requires better communication. I'm still not sure what the format or direction of the game is, and so I can't tell what's a feature, a bug, or design choice.

I hope this was helpful and that this becomes something great in the future :)

Not sure why nobody has rated this game yet, since it looks so good.

 I really enjoyed playing this, but there were some issues. I found that the feel of the game was good, but mechanically it was lacking. There were a number of bugs, including enemies and the player being able to see through walls, the player being able to shoot through walls, the weapons sometimes not reacting to input, and there being almost nothing you could do once an enemy was attacking you at close range (the gun wouldn't fire for me and there was no way I could see for the player to get out of melee range; feel free to correct me if it was just my noobishness). 

I really respect and admire that you went for a more feature-rich game. The inventory, the crafting/combining, the heartbeat monitor, even the loading screen tips, all made the game feel full and finished. The problem with having all of these features is that I think the core gameplay quality suffered. Personally (for a game jam with limited time), I think that it would have been better to focus on the core aspects of the game and made them as fun and functional as possible. The scope was a bit too large, and I think that hurts the game, especially if it's done in 10 days.

Another thing that I think could really use an upgrade is the sound design. A lot of the sounds felt out of place or were poor quality (I think the footsteps in the snow sound is the worst offender). The footsteps were also kinda repetitive (one tip I would suggest trying is to change the pitch slightly of each footstep. That should help to add some variance).

Still a cool game, and I think you did a good job with this :)

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks! I definitely agree that mouse controls would work better, but I didn't think at first that going through the trouble of setting that up would be worth it. Now that I have the finished product, I can see that my mistake. Oh well, live and learn!

Thanks so much! I've been tempted to try this again, but with a bigger scope.

Thanks for your feedback! I'm glad that you picked up on that last line; I was worried that people wouldn't get/notice it. I liked your analysis of the trade-offs between knowledge and suspense, and I agree that I think I went a bit too far in the knowledge direction with this. Originally, I was going to have the readout on the monster/alien fade in and out like you suggested, but when I tried to implement it, it was taking too much time to get right and so I scrapped the idea for the sake of progress. I was planning on having radar upgrades around the map that would decrease the interval between readouts as well. I agree that the suspense can really be ruined at points when you KNOW that the monster is about to get you. But thank you for your kind words. This was my first game jam, and I've been blown away at how supportive everybody is!

No problem! Again, I really enjoyed it.

I really liked seeing the similar inspiration sources between our two games. I also drew inspiration from Alien:Isolation, but ended up with a very different game. While I did gripe about your game's labyrinth-like setup, I also admire it. In my game, for example, I really struggled with adding variety and avoiding uniformity/symmetry in the levels. A lot of my designs started off as just squares, and I didn't really start expanding my polygon repertoire until around the third level. With your ship design, I actually felt like a rat in a maze. I think it really would have worked with a little more direction and some more room for player error. Without saves or checkpoints, it felt like every wrong turn was precious time/ammo wasted rather than a chance to learn the level. This also extends to the alien as well. While I really wanted to try different tactics, I knew that if I screwed up I would have to restart, which made me stick to the more tried-and-true tactic of shooting everything that moved (or crying in a corner once my ammo ran out).

I should start off by saying that this is one of the best games I've played in the jam so far, and I wouldn't be writing this long of a comment if I didn't enjoy the game.

Really enjoyed playing this! The first time I tried it was late at night and I got too spooked after the first encounter with the alien to continue, but the second time I was able to make it a bit further. I thought the sound design was quite good, and the pacing and storytelling through HUD popups was tense as well. I did have some gripes though.

First, the map was way too confusing. Most of the corridors looked the same, and there wasn't a very cohesive system to room placement. I think this is best illustrated if you imagine having to actually live/work on that space ship. It would be hell trying to get from one place to another, and you would probably get lost easily. I think this could be remedied with varied corridor sizes, shapes, colors, etc; a more practical layout theme that feels realistic; and possibly a minimap or HUD indicator for where you need to go.

 Second, I think that the limited quantity and effectiveness of ammo is too much of a challenge for the player, especially with the very limited alternative options available. Perhaps there's a lot more ammo that I didn't find during my forays into the game, but it felt like as soon as I ran out of ammo, I was dead in the water. In games like Alien: Isolation with similar limited ammo systems, the games prevent the player from falling to helplessness by offering a multitude of alternatives to shooting wildly like stealth and distraction. With this, as soon as I ran out of ammo it was "game over man."

Other commenters also shared opinions that I agree with on other problems in the game.

I'll wrap up by saying that I'm only giving this much criticism because I enjoyed the game, and I think it's worthy to take time and effort to offer this amount of feedback.

Ah cool! That's similar to what I was originally thinking for the waypoints, but I didn't have the time to pull it off. I'll definitely have to check it out now.

You're not the only one! I feel like game jams are a great reminder of why we shouldn't write spaghetti code :P

Thanks for playing! I was going for a sort of radio transmission sort of feel, but for some reason the radio filter I added won't work with the WebGL build. You can hear it in the downloadable version though!

Thanks! I haven't heard of Duskers. I'll have to check it out. Sorry about the text, I was having a lot of trouble getting the font to work correctly, and the room labels were something I added in at the last minute, so I didn't really get a chance to test their readability :/

Dang, I am not a smart player.

Oof. Yeah, I didn't get a chance to fix that bug before the deadline. Glad you enjoyed it, though!

Played through to the end. It was quite enjoyable! I got called incompetent by a blind diviner. I found the black and white effect used to be quite trippy at times, so I would watch out if you get motion sickness. The story and interactions were quite interesting, though limited in scope (which is understandable for a game jam). I'm not usually a detective-game kind of person, but I found this entertaining.

Thanks so much! The stairs with the icons above them are the ones you can use. I don't know if you tried those ones? It could also be that you somehow dropped the package. You normally can't transverse levels if you dropped the package, but I think that in the rare occasion where the subject dies as he's leaving a level, it might result in the package being left in the previous level. That might have been what happened.

-Joe