Update:

My favorite game so far! Love the controls and having the plane drop so close to the water only to jet up a few pixels away from death! Great controls! Do you have a twitter account causeeeeeee I want to follow you good sir.

Lookin good. Loving the music! Needed some more feedback when the enemies were hit tho.

Got to play it and really enjoyed it! I found it difficult to control it at first, but after I dropped to my death multiple times, I got the hang of it, haha. Also, you mention all the things you missed but you really should know that regardless of not having a menu, or tile screen and all that - it's a great start of what could be a really cool game.

@zapakitul: I have a twitter but I rarely use it :D But thanks for the nice feedback to all of you!

Suberb, the music compliments the game great and those graphics are fantastic! And for making this much in just 48 hours im very impressed

I've been looking forward to this ever since you posted about your fragment shader. It's absolutely gorgeous, and plays really well too!

@darylsteak: Thank you for the compliments :) Sadly I couldn't be at home over the whole 48 hours to implement what I had in mind..

My top score was 1050.

Wow this was beautiful, it's really a great combination of shader programming and artistic taste, and the music fits great with it! It's oozing with style.

Gameplay-wise I like the rush of the sharp turning and boosting, and there was some great aerial acrobatics possible. My high score though was when I did something boring: just pointed my ship up and pulsed the jets now and then while holding down shoot... this sort of let me go infinite. No big deal though! That just let me take a closer look at the art.

Only thing I'd change would be the effect of hitting an enemy ship. Took me a little while to realize they were getting down down and flying into the water.

Oh, and I liked the way my health was indicated by the shader effect of encroaching darkness rather than a meter or number! Well done, you've got a serious eye-catcher here.

Amazing graphics, solid game. It just needs sound effects. I'd also like if the music didn't restart every time you die, and also the bullets being of another color.

So cool, I loooove the art in this game, and the gameplay reminds me a lot of luftrausers. Seriously this is the best looking game I've seen so far. My only complaint is I can't really tell when I've hit an enemy, so a particle effect would benefit a lot.

Wow awesome! Art is unbelievable!

Needs more explosions! — or rather some visual feedback for the enemies as people have already mentioned above.


When it comes down to the art and music, you're absolutely killing it! Amazing work. I love your visual style.

I have listened and I hope that I have delivered:
http://www.fatihtavukcu.de/NeonHell
Enjoy "LD40 - SirPumpy" as JAM submission "Neon Hell"
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/neon-hell

Nice!! I gave it a quick re-play and this time it was much more of a dogfight than originally.

Wow! That was neat! Blown away by the art :) The reflecting ground and that feeling you get when you just pull up in time was really cool. The only thing I'd say is when I was shooting the enemies I really wanted them to blow up. It felt like I wasn't making progress and I wasn't exactly sure why my score was going up. I know it had to do with hitting the enemies, but like previous people have said, it would be nice to have that feedback.

Stellar work though!

@chipmonkey thx for the feedback :) I simply had no time but I added those things into my jam entry. If you liked it check out the link in my post above yours. It's much improved :)

This is insanely beautiful. I haven't seen anything like this for a long time in the Compo. Absolutely great. The music is perfect as well. The controls are really smooth and the game feels great.

A tremendous achievement, congratulations.

There is some room for improvement though.

You don't have any clear visual or auditive indicators that you actually shot down an enemy. Took me a while to figure out that the enemies just drop into the sea. Changing the particle parameters and color, adding an explosion and playing a sound effect would do wonders here I think.

I didn't get the feeling that the game got progressively harder over time. I understand you implemented auto-heal which is fine, but should be counteracted by an increase in difficulty.

Should you keep working on this game, please let me know if there's a new version, I would definitely replay it.

Great job overall. Probably the most beautiful game I've seen so far.

@cerno-b Thanks for the indepth review! Really appreciate it :) I did exactly that on the day after the compo entered and created a JAM entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/neon-hell

Would love to hear your feedback for that version! Appreciate it man :)

I also asked @PoV via twitter to merge my two accounts as I was somehow not able to post my JAM submission with the same account, so sorry for the confusion! (No, I'm not liking my own posts or rating my games, no cheating going on here :) )

It's not my place to suggest this, but why not keep it as it is for the Compo and use your further progress as a post-Compo game?

It's much more impressive as it is for a Compo game, but will look much less impressive as a Jam game because you have to contend with teams of developers and their results are usually much more polished.

I love the background and the music, I wish enemies could explode as it would be more satisfying, and maybe enemy bullets are too fast.

I really like the game. physics is awesome

Graphics are so a killing, i didn't notice things missing (like better explosions..) :D
Music is so killing, i didn't even noticed the SFX missing (truely)
Ok you could implement lot of things and you completely missed the theme but what a killing !
Nice jobs!

Good controls and beautiful design.
It was nice to play it. It feels like it can become something bigger. I hope you finish it one day.

### FOREWORD:

First of all, that's a great first-time entry, I hope you'll be entering a second, third and whatever time (if you enjoy this sort of thing of course). I followed you, so you can expect another review if you enter next ludum dare.

### GRAPHICS:

I dig the aesthetics, that's what got me to try it, I see you put a lot of effort into it, that's 5 stars from me. Nice reflection, nice color scheme, smooth frame rate, tiny details like ship trails and such, you did well on getting people to try your game!
This is where it goes south though, I hope you don't get discouraged by my criticism, treat it as compliment because I take my time to point out what I think is missing in your design mindset.

0. I don't see a shooting animation.
1. I don't see a hit animation at all, if its there, it's not visible enough and it's a vital piece of information.
2. I don't see enemies exploding, same thing, vital information is missing from the player.
3. I don't see me being hit, vital information.
4. I don't see my health clear enough (It took me a 3rth look to figure out that this black vignette is my health, it should be screaming YOU'RE DYING)
5. You get the point.

You should focus on these things first, because this will make or break your game.

### SOUND:

Music is ok but it gets old really quickly. I don't know if its a bug or not but when I played the game it had no sound

0. Shooting
1. Hitting stuff
2. Enemies dying
3. Me getting hit
4. Me dying
5. You get the point.

Sound is a vital for articulation of gameplay mechanics and it's just good to have it, you've made a rookie mistake here. :)

### GAMEPLAY:

Well, not much here. Enemies take too long to kill, they spawn too fast, you could be better off just spawning a single enemy each minute for the first 3-5 minutes. You could add some variety by having just two types of enemy, big slow ones and small fast ones, I don't think that would take too much programming time, but I'm getting tired here, so that's the end of my review.

### CONCLUSION:

Good job, a little more conscious direction and it could be a really fun game with awesome aesthetics.
I hope I won't sound arrogant by suggesting you to check out my previous entry, it's a spaceship shooting game too (be vary that's a jam entry though, but I was working solo) you can see the difference those little things make there.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-2

Have a nice day and excuse my grammar! See you at LD41!

@xk-the-name Thanks for the feedback man, I really appreciate it! I saw the same shortcomings, this is why I added 6 hrs more development on monday to the game and also submitted my jam entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/neon-hell which just makes the entry a little bit more complete. I think you'll see the quite obvious difference some hours can make :) I wish I had more time on the weekend to put all of that onto my compo, but I wasn't home half of the time and I made music for the first time, so those 27 seconds of repetetive music took ~6 hours to make :))

@angry-squirrels Really honored by your words! BTW I loved your game, the animations were absolutely superb!

That's pretty impressive, congrats! I'll go test your jam entry then!

Wow! Considering you say this isn't "finished", this is still one of the most polished entries that I've played!

The graphics and style are fantastic - reminds me of futuristic sci-fi greats such as Blade Runner.
Combined with the great music and enemy attacks, this game - even as it is - was fun to play!

Good luck! :D

nice luftrauser clone - i did not like that i could not turn while firing - very nice graphics

This is an amazing start you've got here! The graphics are absolutely great (in case you didn't get that from the countless other reviews stating the same thing) and the attention to detail is phenomenal! The little things like the reflection of the ships off the water and that LD40 neon light flickering and turning off when the sun rises really added to the immersion and mood of the game (and also made me completely freak out when I noticed it xP). The music was also very fitting and definitely added to the overall immersion of the game as well. As far as the controls, I thought they were just fine, but I did have to go back to this LD page to figure them out (A title screen could easily fix that though). Overall, this game is worth the high rating I gave it. I understand that there are probably a thousand other features you wanted to add, but this is nothing short of an astounding achievement for a 48 hour game (I totally understand the feeling of not adding enough. Just take one look at my past entries and you will see exactly what I mean). All in all, you should be proud of you great entry, and I am looking forward to see what you do with it next!

wow i got really flashed by this one :) The graphics are amazin - i mean you have water reflections too and a real cool setting ... and this as a compo game...great respect!

The movement is great, fluid and slinky. I cant wait to see what you did with the extra time

Dude looks dope! The gameplay might be boring but the graphics are awesome! Musics pretty cool too!

Vlambeer talk about this: If you don't lose anything when you are not shooting, then why even have a shooting button? If you dont lose bullets, and theres no knockback it could be just shooting all the time nonstop 24/7

Graphics are fantastic!

Great graphics and sound. The gameplay was fun as well. One thing you probably didn't have time for was a more visible animation that tells the player whether he hit an enemy (such as an explosion). Really great work though!

@peredom I'm sorry to hear that you find the gameplay boring, but bringing up Vlambeer is relevant here: I am aware that they "punish" the player to not shoot all the time with their implementation to block health reload, but I plan to "prevent" this by adding a weapon heat display. When you overheat your weapon you won't be able to shoot until the systems are cooled down :) Drops during gameplay will also heal your or cool down your weapon, so that an aggressive tactic will be more rewarding. I don't want the player to fall asleep :P

@lexi Thanks, this is just the compo entry, I sadly lost a lot of time bug chasing so this version is really barren. Please check out my JAM entry or if you fancy the latest version of my game:
http://www.fatihtavukcu.de/ludumdare

Oh and thanks for the rating!

@sirpumpy Yeah, I checked out the post-jam just now. It's a really great improvement over the compo version. I enjoyed it and promptly send it to some of my friends. The feel of the game and the graphics are just really well done. Very enjoyable!

It's an interesting gameplay, I had some difficulties to understand how to play it well, but I finally managed to get 470. The physics are uncommon, but once understood, it's well playable. Among everything else, I think the firt thing to be added in a post compo is the feedback on ennemy hit/destroy, but this is yet a fun game to play with. Well done!

@lereveur Acutally hit feedback was one of the first things post compo and directly made it into my jam release :D

http://fatihtavukcu.de/ludumdare/ Check it out here and feel free to play the updated version too (and leave a rate or two :p) The latest version also features an alternative control method for people unfamiliar with this type of movement :)

Wow! The post version is way better! Congrats! I don't know how I managed to get a better score (630, I guess), because I was a lot staying near the mirror floor : I was litteraly hypnotized by the result of this effect! XD

Wow, this is such a greatly done game. The original entry is a bit more difficult to handle but it's still really fun to play. The upgrades you made to the final version specially in the pace made the game 10x better and making it way more playable and entertaining. The music even though being really short and simple (still it's a killer track considering it's a Compo entry), and the art also added an special extra value to the the game. Overall an outstanding job!

I love the art style, and the music was pretty fitting. The graphics in general were eye-candy, really nice work on that. The basic gameplay was fun as well. I see some good potential in this! Keep it up!

Damn I love the style. I can imagine it's best for me to play the Compo version before the Jam. It's too bad you didn't get the multiplier into this one though since it those seem to be the main element linked to the theme. In itself it's still a gorgeous and fun entry for the compo and the music is great.

Though maybe making the music loop instead for this version would have made it better for when I died constantly when I started playing. In any case, I'm off to check out the Jam version!

This game looks absolutely incredible. Most of my criticisms have been covered previously and fixed in the jam version.

I would like to point out one problem with respect to graphics (that is fixed in the jam version) that I haven't seen anybody else mention, which is that the smoke particles are difficult to distinguish from the enemy projectiles, given the fast pace of the game. I'm guessing you already knew this, which is why it is fixed in the jam version.

And, in an effort to be informative -- my problems with enemy feedback extend beyond most others' -- I had absolutely no idea that it was even possible to kill enemies (until I re-read the description), because I never managed to do so. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that there are a lot of enemies that spawn in, so it's relatively difficult (especially if you're not very skilled, like myself) to shoot at one enemy long enough to kill it.

That's a reaaaally polished game you have there! The gameplay itself is simple, yet fun! Bullets don't feel like they do a lot of damage, though, and the hardest thing about the game is moving your ship around... It's unfortunate you couldn't properly implement the theme in time, but this would still be a great game once you've added in the other details (which you already have). Good job!

@sirpumpy Cool that sounds more fun! YOu can make a great game with that with some gameplay polish dude! Good luck with it!!!