A little difficult when the ship became bigger, but the idea is nice !

Interesting idea! Pressing the letter to shoot from the corresponding block is a cool mechanic and I enjoyed the parallax on the stars. It gets a bit easy to just button mash when you have a lot of blocks but I had fun playing. Nice one!

Really like the zoom out as I get larger. There seems to be a bug that I can hit any letter to pick up a letter, not just a matching letter.

The aesthetic is cool. I really like the way the letters attach and snap at the attachment point of contact.

I like the idea! There is a lot of potential. You could increase the degree of difficulty by giving the letters cool down, so you have to use other more frequently letters also. When my ship was getting bigger I didnt have the feeling nothing could stop me, so it could be a bit harder with the time.

But its a really cool game!

This is a really neat idea, reminds me of Captain Forever (if you're familiar). The challenge does decrease a lot once you start accumulating lots of letters all over the place, but for a game jam that's understandable. Great work, and great idea!

Delightful idea. Brilliant.

Good take on the theme! Very innovative, you can come up with a strategy bu picking letters you feel comfortable with! The graphics works together. With some music and/or sound effects this would be perfect! Good luck and hope to see you next time!

Interesting little game! At some point the player becomes pretty overpowering but it's fun to build up to that point and it's also so nice at the beginning to make everything snap together. Nicely done!

This was a really cool interpretation of the theme! The jigsaw piece like connection system was also very well made! It was also very fun to connect the pieces in different ways to make it seems as though the different letters on the keyboard were somewhat buttons to activate cannons! There was also a tactical side of trying to get the same letter on the outsides to make it so one fire button would do the job for defending against any direction of attack, the camera zooming system was also very good! With some audio,the game could have felt a bit more atmospheric! Overall, this is a very good jam entry!

Minimalistic with the graphics (though there's still that boom effect and the asterisks in the background) and there are no sounds whatsoever, but the gameplay concept is pretty strong for this little game.

I like the idea of attaching the letters to the ship, how it counts the unique letters - indicating that you need to gather different letters to increase your score - and the strategic element of placing the same or close letters on the outskirts to keep the bad glyphs at bay. The zoom-out effect, aside from being neat in and of itself, is greatly helpful to see what's around. I think it glitched at some point, because I collected a letter yet the game zoomed in instead of out, but otherwise it still worked well.

Once I grasped the rules, I enumerated the alphabet in my head to find the missing letters and eventually managed to get them all, winning the game. Glad you included the winning condition here, especially since after you get all 26 there's nothing left to do.

One minor complaint I have is that the game seems to be restarted by clicking on the "restart" button (at least that's the impression I got on my first few tries). I'd rather have it done by pressing Enter or Space or something.

Overall, pretty neat gameplay concept and executed quite well mechanically. ^^

@alphish Wow! Thanks for finishing the game! I didn't play-test it that much before deadline (and actually never won), and only later found out it's not that easy (the letter distribution could be more helpful and the sluggishness can get a bit too much).

And to everyone else who rated and took time to write a comment thanks as well :)

I jumped in without reading the page first, so I didn't know you could shoot for quite a while. I think I almost like the game more without shooting, because once you can shoot the game can sort of lose strategy in favor of keyspamming.

Playing a while without shooting, I have a little feedback.

First on the early game:

If I could change one thing about this game, it is how the restart works. I have to take my hand off the arrow keys, move it over to the mouse, and then in the second it takes me to reorient my hand back on the arrow keys it can already be too late and I'm dead. This got me steamed, it happened over and over. I would change the restart to a keypress since the whole game is on the keyboard except restart, and then I would also make it MUCH FASTER, basically instantaneous.

The early game is also hard - at least when you don't shoot! You need to shield your core, but to do that you need to move in the direction that's most dangerous! This is actually really interesting, but difficult, and so it was GAME OVER, GAME OVER, GAME OVER.

Last thing about the early game, I believe the character has a bit too much inertia when small, and it was a little finnicky to line up with a block enough to snap it. It's like, HERE COMES THE ENEMY but I'm frantically trying to line up, and I overshoot, and it's game over.

Second, on the late game:

Here the game really changes, because I can suffer hits for a while. I think with shooting, the strategy is just to keyspam. But without that, you kind of have these interesting choices about what parts of yourself to use as a shield, and what to pick up. The problem is that I don't know which letters are important. I can't run the process of elimination in my head to see what letters in the field I don't yet have, or what letters in my body I have only one of, vs expendable duplicates.

If I could change a second thing about this game, I would add some graphical indication of that. So in the field, letters I don't have yet would appear different (maybe solid?) and for letters on my body, letters I have only one of (and thus shouldn't lose) would also appear different (maybe the same, solid?).

That would allow me to have moments like "oh look, there is the letter I need, it's guarded by a # but I can slam this unimportant part of my body in for the trade, and then snap up the new letter!"

Anyway, that was a lot of rambling, but maybe maybe something in there is interesting.

Overall I think there's some cool stuff going on in this game, but maybe you haven't quite found the right way to capitalize on your raw material. Still, a nice entry that I had some fun tinkering around with, nice job!

This is cool! Really unusual gameplay - I'm not used to having to use the whole keyboard while also navigating around with the arrow keys. I didn't get far, but I liked it.

I love the concept. It felt almost like a tongue-twister at some point, using the arrow keys to move around while hunting for keyboard letters in order to fight back. The look is a little minimal but I like the animations, they're very expressive. Overall pretty fun!

Hey, i like the idea :)

Its hard, zooming around, trying to collect letters, not coliding with the nasty ones!

Maybe consider to change the restart option, because i died a lot, and had to take the hands of the keyboard to grab the mouse.

Thumbs up!

Simple, but surprisingly addictive. It took me a few tries to get the hang of it but eventually I was able to surround myself with a few letters, start shooting, and gradually snowball into a giant unstoppable wall of death.

I think it could use a tutorial, even just a single screen to explain the mechanics and goals. The first time I booted the game up I was like "okay, what do I do" and then I died. I didn't realise you could shoot until I read the game page a second time, and didn't realise your goal was to collect all 26 letters until I read it a third time just now (I was wondering why the number on the central block wasn't always increasing!)

It's still a good game, though! Proves you don't need fancy graphics and music to come up with something that's fun to play.