Great mechanics and game-play, i even appreciated the narration. Awesome idea and it feels great doing the final stand at the end of each level with all of the ships. only thing i could ask for would be for the other formations to readjust themselves like the circle. Good job.

@snecko Glad you liked it! I was definitely planning on rearranging all the formations. I originally wanted to have a "shuffle" key for that, but unfortunately I ran out of time.

i was looking forward to this game and i must say you did an Amazing job :D
i Loved The story in the Background. The Controls are Easy to Understand and Simple. All mechanics work Well together.

I followed the development process during event. I really loved the game. Fun gameplay, great looking graphics and nice sound effects. Good job !

Followed the development during the event - and was not disappointed. Enjoyed the difficulty progression and liked the story format.
Would definitely follow future adventures of Nathaniel Lipschitz!

I'm absolutely terrible at all games involving any kind of strategy so I couldn't make it past the point where there were two ships, but I was having a lot of fun up to that point! Awesome game!

REally cool concept. Really reminds me of the ender game. GJ!

I was excited since I saw your first post, wasn't disappointed - awesome game! Keep up the good work :)

Great game ! The experience is smooth and I absolutely love the graphics and gameplay. The ambiance is great too. Awesome work!

That's one awesome game! One of the pest I played so far. And the narration is superb

@loligxp @berkin @neon-glass @reimari @whoismawal @jeu-embouteillage @kornel Thanks a lot to all of you. I've always been hesitant to make a strategy game because I thought I couldn't pull it off. Your comments make me really happy.

@duuuude I've had a discussion with a friend you said the same thing, and I was totally confused why multiple people saw the parallel to Ender's Game. It is one of my favorite books but I haven't read it in ages, so apparently I totally forgot the aspect of sacrificing ships in a "simulation". Must be getting old...

Great job with this strategy game, enjoyed playing it.

Yeah that ruled, you watched me play it, shit was cash. Good job.

@madjackmcmad Thanks a lot for streaming! Watching someone else play the game is really nail-biting. Glad you liked it!

This was pretty good! I don't have any complaints to speak of. It was fun to solve and it made me feel clever when things lined up right lol. The narration was good and the music set the tone nicely. good job :thumbsup:

The development of a strategy game is not a peace a of cake in three days. You did well! Nice entry

This was a fun one. Also reminded me somewhat of Ender's Game lol. No real complaints from me dawg

I remember seeing this project when I opened LD site on Saturday. It looked so much fun. I was waiting to try this out and... WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED AT ALL! This is really fun, I wish it was a full time game with other features like buying new ships, upgrades and stuff. For me it was the best entry I've played so far :)
PS: The narrative makes it even better!

Feel I'm playing boss,Sooner or later to death under the player's bullets:(

This was a very good entry. I really enjoyed so many aspects of it, especially the audio narration. I could play this for hours. I also saw the parallel with Ender's Game, which I really love.

Very nice compo entry here! You are hitting all of the elements: theme-derived gameplay that is well-realized, nice graphics that communicate somewhat complex state to make it easy to understand, solid controls, good sound effects, and fitting music. Impressive -- I enjoyed your past game as well, but you've upped your level here, in my opinion!

I enjoyed this one a lot, and it made me feel powerful and clever to create these complex dodges. You avoided blunders and did not send me back to the start, instead respecting my time by immediately restarting me at the beginning of the current fight so that I was right back in the meat of the interesting gameplay with no reason to quit.

So of course I played to the end. The escalation going into the conclusion was very well-done, and the overall game length was just right for the amount of interesting content you had. Any longer and it would have overstayed the welcome a bit, and you were smart to telegraph "this is the end" in the voice lines.

I always have a bit of a mixed feeling with developer voiceovers, but yours are pretty decent. Sometimes games are SO weird and crazy that devlines work, but a lot of games it's kind of trying to be polished but the lines aren't working. You did a solid job though, and the voice lines did not pull me out of the experience.

I'd usually like to offer a critique to the feedback. There were no real splinters here to speak of, though, and no serious gaps. The only items I can think of are these: First, I would have preferred the smaller ships to be a sprite layer above the main ship, as a lot of times I lost sight of them, yet had to click on them. I'm also not sure it was necessary to make me click on the little ship, instead of anywhere on the cluster, but then I'm not certain how you'd deal with ambiguous clicks on overlapped clusters. Controls were generally very strong, but they were a little bit fiddly due to the tiny and sometimes-hidden click targets. It also took me a little while to realize how to use the mousewheel feature, just input-wise. I spun the wheel and was like "what should this do, it does nothing?" in the first few moments. Pretty soon I realized.

My last point of critique would be that the game is a tad bit easy. I don't WANT to lose a lot in this game, though. Perhaps some kind of second-level difficulty of optional goals that are a bit tougher, maybe? Perhaps some of the littlest ships are a different color and I want to preserve them because the pilots are important officers or something? Then I can ignore and play, but if I want to opt into some extra-fancy dodging, I can? I don't know, but by the end I had found my strategy and just went with it over and over.

That said, the core was compelling enough that I still had fun even if it wasn't super-tough. I very much appreciated the escalation of complexity at the end.

The stand-out feature here, though, was the absolutely excellent predictive transparency, with the lines and circles projecting accurately what the consequences would be. Very well done here. The two mobility circles per ship were also smartly done, and I appreciated that you didn't tutorialize me to death with all this stuff, but just presented clean, clear information and respected my intelligence to figure it out.

Very nice entry, well done!

This was a lot of fun. I think you have a lot of room to expand this idea. :)

Solid idea and fresh! Very impressive amount of work for such a short compo. Love the attack predictions and tactical use of resources, and the narrations and level design really sold the setting. Great job!

@iluvatar I've been toying with the idea of expanding the game post-LD after getting a lot of reassuring feedback in that respect. Maybe I can get some prototyping done over the holidays.

@pkenney Wow, thanks so much for your super-detailed input!

It's funny how sometimes decisions appear so deliberate when actually they are mere coincidence. I decided to add the "final round" line so that it would explain why the boss was suddenly defeated in this round and not earlier. It was basically a cop-out to rationalize the ending because I didn't know how to communicate this visually as there are no walls in space to back up against.

I think you hit the nail on its head with the "decent voiceover" comment. Its ok for the time I spent on it, but I'm not 100% happy and should probably have spent a little more time to record second takes for the lines, but you know how it is, time pressure and such. Also I'm not 100% sure on the writing either, but for game jam quality I guess it's good enough.

About the smaller ships, you're right, I should have changed that, a single line of code would have fixed it, but frankly I hadn't noticed at the time. The original plan was to prevent the player from overlaying the smaller ships with the larger one, but the range checks of two circles were hard enough to solve as it were. Also I just didn't imagine players would move the ships that way, but to be true, it can be a pretty good strategy.

I also agree on the mouse wheel. Even if one keeps text to a minimum one should never assume the player reads the manual, and I am pretty sure some people will not realize you can rearrange the ship formations at all. I always like to suggest that having a visual instruction screen with a few arrows works much better than a wall of text, yet I never get around to implementing one myself. Communicating game mechanics is something I should work on, Boiler Room Defense also had many people confused as to the rules.

I also realized it wasn't the hardest game, which I guess is okay for a jam, where it's a good idea to include as many people as possible, but I love the idea of adding secondary goals to resolve this issue. Watching people play the game, there seems to be an intrinsic motivation to save as many ships as possible, so there should be some reward for playing that way. This is definitely something I should keep in mind if I decided to polish the game some more.

Thanks for noticing, I'm actually really proud of my hit prediction, as I knew it would be an important feature that would make or break the game. Losing a ship because the outcome differed from the prediction would be really demotivating. Getting the prediction for the spread shot right was a head-scratcher until the very end because my first implementation was super slow, and I kept that part of optimization open until the last few hours. I only fixed it after I found a specific Game Maker command by accident. I swear, this stuff nearly gave me an aneurism.

So thanks again for taking the time and giving such detailed feedback, much appreciated!

Probably the best game I've seen so far in this LD. I would totally play a full version of this. Congratulations!

Your game was played on my stream ( https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos ) on the fifth day of Ludum Dare streams (Part 2). Thank you for sharing your game with us! You can find the timestamp of when your game was played here: https://goo.gl/N2rkr8

Reallllly great entry. I'd say this takes the cake in terms of hitting the theme because although of lot of entries show sacrifice, this is a game that REALLY made me consider what to lose and what I had to gain from it. There are many tough scenarios where I had to consider what to keep alive for the longterm and if it was worth the risk of keeping certain units around. Brilliant gameplay and presentation, never expected to see a game like this. The overall theme of the game reminds me of the Ender's Game movie. I loved how the fleet works together and sacrifices everything to overcome the enemy. Even the ominous music loop helped the atmosphere and I just had to play to the end. Awesome game, if not slightly painful whenever I accidentally let a bullet slip through and rip my formation to shreds!

Awesome entry. I can imagine this game on mobile device. The controls is just made for mobile phone even. I hope this is not last time I played it. So keep working on it because this could be potential good game on the market. Nice audio and graphics.

@ursagames Just found the time to watch your video. Thanks so much for streaming my game. It never occurred to me to make subtitles, thanks for that input. Should I ever make a game with voice overs I'll try to remember that.

This is actually pretty great, the main mechanic works well and the overall mood fits perfectly. Well done!

Hey, tis was super fun! Voice acting was on point, mechanics were, cool nice usage of the theme aswell. I would say it was also lengthy and ambitious

The game really was great! Also it's nice to see another gamemaker 1.4 user here.

I love the narration (did I hear Lipschitz !? xD) and the easy to understand controls and gameplay. It wasn't to easy nor to challanging and after playing (only died in the last level but several times) I got your source code which is also quite impressive (for me at least).

Also made a "Texture Pack" for myself!

That all said - great entry!

A really unique and fun game. Loved it. Similar to a board game I almost created once.
Liked the simplicity of the mechanics, but also the numerous strategies you could employ in regards to where to keep the ships and which formation to use. Maybe a minor nitpick, but being able to see the formations on the right of the screen just to help visualize which one was where would have been nice, and sometimes it could be hard to find the ships hidden underneath the flagship.

But other than that, top marks for innovation and enjoyability :smile:

@willoxs Wow, that's super cool! Could you send me your version to try it out? I'd love to see how it looks in motion. I think GameMaker games have become quite rare these days, but I still love it for allowing proper pixel-precision instead of mixed resolution that Unity usually produces.

@mr-chocolatesalmon Thanks for the input. I know that the ships should be better visible while on top of each other. I thought changing the z-value may have been enough, but a second tactical view may also be helpful.

What an awesome game! The voice-overs really improved the quality of the game, and the gameplay was very intuitive. It was annoying that you had to click a specific ship to move the whole formation, and sometimes the ship was under the main ship. I quite liked how you could see exactly which ships would be destroyed for direct, vertical projectiles, but the sideways ones didn't inform you where they would hit. Consequently, things I thought would block would sometimes just miss and hit my flagship instead.

Otherwise, the game was very fun, and I played all the way through! Great little creation, keep developing! :thumbsup:

I usually dont like turn based games due to their complexity and sometimes difficult to comprehend the mechanics, but you manage to make one with two buttons. TWO BUTTONS. That are simple to understand. Outstanding. While i think the graphics deserved a bit more attention, they dont compromise the game experience, as the controls and core are flawless. The narration also adds a layer of quality to the game as well. Nice job.

Neat idea! I included it in my compilation video series of games from the Ludum Dare, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/o0MHxxyY-UU

I watched @jupiter-hadley play it but didnt play it myself.

I think it's a cool game with a cool concept.
art is a bit lackluster, but the puzzles are the main thing of interest here. i say well done!

@jupiter-hadley Thanks a lot for finding the time to play my game. It seems like the title screen that explains the controls has been skipped in your video, but I guess I should have added a description of the controls in the game itself. Mouse wheel allows you to change formation. Glad you liked it though!

Thanks everyone for playing and rating. I am planning to turn The Omicron Fleet into a full indie game: https://the-omicron-directive.manakeep.com.

I am planning to post weekly updates here and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/Cerno_B), so please follow me if you're interested.

@berkin @duuuude @daniel-grinshpon @derek-volker @iferit @iluvatar @justcamh @james-dunlap @jupiter-hadley @kornel @mr-chocolatesalmon @nelson-william @neon-glass @peachtreeoath @reimari @snecko @verbante @whoismawal @willoxs @wizard-exe @acaral @chauchau @hugonun @jeu-embouteillage @loligxp @manimal @madjackmcmad @morriss @pkenney @shieldgenerator7 @skettynmeebs @ursagames

Great news, man! And congrats on your game's results :clap: