Pretty tough. The boss fight ended up being pretty simple, and I thought the ending was gratifying.
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Author Comments
Update
Now it keeps your zoom level the same if you die on a level and/or restart it. That should help a lot if you want to do the Escape level zoomed out. The zoom will go back to default if you exit to the level select screen and restart.
Comments
Entry for the Phaser game jam, going for an action game since it seemed the best way to test and show off Phaser's abilities to do cool stuff smoothly and without turning games into bloatware (this whole game is less than 2 MB zipped). Coded by someone who didn't know JavaScript or even HTML when the jam started and still pretty much doesn't lol.
If you have trouble handling the ship and think this is an impossible game about trying to blaze full speed at tiny targets: try not blazing around at top speed and learn to make good use of the inertial dampeners (brakes) because they can be helpful.
If it's still too hard, camera zoom keys are B and V. And if you used the camera zoom on any levels and want to try for the no-zoom medal, the level select screen will have levels completed with zoom in green so you know which ones to redo to go for the medal.
Controls
Up arrow: Accelerate
Left / Right arrows: Turn
Down arrow: Inertial dampening (protip: this is more effective than turning around and accelerating the the opposite direction if you're going really fast)
Space: Fire laser
B / V: Zoom camera (the game is meant to be played at the initial zoom setting and using the radar -- only use zoom if it's too hard without it)
R: Restart level
X: eXit to level select
Tidbit: you can press a number key from the level select screen to start that level, so you don't really need the mouse after you click Play
the idea is really cool but enimes are way to hard they shoot you as soon as they see you and the one heart does not help eaither !
3p0ch responds:
You just gotta be going fast to make the mortars miss you.
But once you get to the boss level where you're fighting two Wraiths and dealing with a bunch of fighters that get spawned until the Wraiths are dead, then yeah, that really will be super hard.
Thanks for playing!
What?
Concept-wise, I liked this. A sort of asteroids with extreme zoom levels was a nice take. Honestly, it was only really playable when zoomed really far out, otherwise those bloody mortars just nuked you instantly! It felt good flying past a mortar at close range to pick-up a star thing and have it shoot at you and miss. Going in too slow was just insta-death, though. I didn't get past the mortars level I'm afraid. I had just one star left to collect and I got nuked on my way to it and didn't want to redo them all again. So I never even got to use my laser :) I think it would have felt more fair if the mortars actually fired a projectile at you which you could see coming and then have time to avoid, rather than the one-shot kill it is currently.
3p0ch responds:
This is good feedback to hear. As a dev who tests out my game a lot as I'm making it (and gets a lot of practice in the process) and especially a skill game where I also know why I'm designing the levels the way I am and know what I want to force the player to do in order to win, I think I fell into the trap of not realizing that most players aren't going to spend hours playing to get practice and/or read my mind on what the "right" way to play should be. I'll plan to tone it down a bit in future games.
Controller support would've been appreciated, because I think analog works better for this.
Zooming out is a must for playing this, should just be integrated into the camera. The default zoom is borderline useless, even if standing still. Camera is my biggest complaint. The game occasionally bugs out between writing this review with it losing and gaining focus, but I understand Phaser isn't crazy used. Button choice is a little weird, if I miss the zoom button, I exit out of the level.
It has its fun tho, and I'll probably play more of this later to be honest.
3p0ch responds:
I guess the buttons are weird because I was originally planning for the game to be substantially different, but only ended up keeping the elements that you see now. It would be fairly easy for me to remap the keys (although making them user-configurable would be kind of tough for me to do before the Jam deadline), let me know if you'd like to suggest different and more natural ones that are still AZERTY friendly 'cause I got too used to this layout during development. I'm not sure why you're exiting the level if you miss the zoom button though, I intentionally made X be exit with the C key falling between that and the zoom keys to avoid that problem; are you exiting if you press any other keys or something?
And now I wish I had a gamepad so I could program for one and be able to test it.
The zoom level forcing the player to rely on the radar was intentional and I meant for operating by radar to be part of the challenge, but I realized a lot of players might not like it so made zooming out an option. I hope that you consider it reasonably fun when you can set the zoom however you want. If enough people think it would be worthwhile, I should be able to recode the game so it stays at whatever zoom you were last at between levels, or at least when resetting a level after you die.
