Nice game. I like the way the music changes depending how close you're from the power ups.

It's seriously hard, but I like the whole idea of using the enemies sound to power the weapons. I just kept shooting the noisy enemies by mistake and end up without any power :P

The bullets move extremely slowsly (in a nice pattern though) which makes it hard to aim over longer distances cause the enemies moves. If the the bullets were faster it would be easier to aim over distance and not shoot the "good" enemies.

Nice prototype though!

This is a really cool concept, and fits the theme well. I especially liked the bullet patterns. I did find the enemies' sounds to be pretty grating though, perhaps you could find some tunes that mesh better together?

Thanks for the comments so far!

I toyed around with the shots quite a bit, didn't quite get the patterns the way I wanted but I'm glad the effort's been noticed. :)

I went into making this game with a bit of a negative attitude and the sound was intentionally meant to be a bit grating, not that I can claim to be enough of a musician/sound guy to make something that isn't! I'm considering developing this further post-compo, though, and if I do I'll try to make (or get someone else to make) something a bit more harmonious.

Yeah, the bullet speed is a problem. You shouldn't be able to outrun your own shots and run into whatever you're shooting at. Otherwise it's a pretty solid arena shooter, with a little tweaking this could be pretty great.

I really like the idea of this one. =) Was really enjoyable aside from being able to outrun your bullets. =P

This is fun, I like it. The idea's good, and once I got the hang of it it was very enjoyable. It took me a little while to get the hang of using such slow bullets. I settled on spewing bullets around loosely rather than targeting one enemy until it's been destroyed.

I like the Blue-green bullets- are you using a vector field for those? I've been wanting to play with similar effects, it's nice to see that :D.

I seriously think this idea has potential- I'd love to see a really polished version with really slick tuning and a reduced learning curve. I think something like that would do really well on Flash portals...

Cheers!

Thank you, I'm amazed at how positive these comments are! While I'm normally one of those people who'll fight to save standalone exes from the trend of making everything Flash, the idea that this would suit Flash did cross my mind. Of course, I don't know the first thing about Flash coding yet, but I guess I should use this as a project to learn Flixel or Flashpunk with.

The bullet speed is an interesting thing to play with, really changes the style of the game. I quite like it as is, with the bullets acting like some sort of space-mine or torpedo, but it works as a more typical shooter with faster bullets too. Maybe I'll offer both as an option, perhaps a choice of different ships each offering a variation on the gameplay.

I'd love to be fancy and say I'm using a vector field but honestly I'm not entirely sure what one is. :) The cyan bullets are simply following a sine wave pattern. The others are technically following wave patterns too (yellow = square wave, magenta = sawtooth) but due to the nature of their shapes they're not quite as clear and don't make such pretty bullet patterns.

A good idea but it needs some work. The bullets felt pretty weaksauce at the best of times, and I didn't really notice any difference in power when there were more sound enemies around, unless they were all gone and I was super weak. I would have liked a stronger gun that really blasted away at the enemies and gave me some crowd control powers.

Each living sound enemy activates one of your three guns, but when you're flying within 100 pixels of one (or more) of them, you'll hear a somewhat annoying constantly changing pitched sound of their wavetype, the shots of their type will become brighter, and they'll do 5 times the damage, enough to kill a level 1 enemy with one shot. Even at the highest health 3 powered shots will do, though the balance is dreadful and I doubt many people will reach that point - I certainly can't. :)

This is an awesome idea that I really enjoyed. The use of multi-layered sound to denote your weapon strength worked really well to indicate what was happening - well done! The bullets definitely could have been faster (it was a little hard to not die, to be honest, and that would have helped a lot)

Could have used a bit more polish, shots were a bit too slow, but the idea is brilliant, congratulations!

Awsome! Best use of the theme ive seen so far; I had to give you 4 for audio because its such a central part of it.I agree with comments about bullets being too slow, and that with a bit of tweaking this could be a winner post-compo.

Great idea! The gameplay works well, (and the sound wasn't too grating). Out-running your own bullets was definitely the main problem, and the fact the difficulty ramped up so quickly!

Well done.

Excellent concept. Fun game.
The sound did get a bit irritating after a while though.

I like the concept and the layered music. The weapon is kinda weak though even if powered up, and it was hard to avoid hitting the powerup enemies. Might work better with a gamepad with two analogue sticks.

Thanks again for the comments! For curiosity value I've put up a post-LD version (d6) which doubles the bullet speed, fixes one of the graphics, maybe other minor changes I forgot. :) I don't think HGE has any gamepad support, but it's something I'll keep in mind whenever I get back to working on my own engine.

My priority for now is getting the Flash version running, but once that's done I'm going to try to sort out the balance a bit and make the enemies more interesting.

Very, very cool concept. I don't know if I've seen this done yet - good, original idea. Controls were extremely frustrating, though.