Great game! It took me a little while to get used to it at first, but when I got the hang of it, it was really fun! I also really like the hexagon tile system as an oppose to a square one, its a nice touch. Overall 9/10

It was a little tough at first getting the mechanics down a better tutorial could help. It was also an interesting choice that you can only take an action after moving. I really loved the art and sound design/music. Overall great submission well done!

Really love the concept of this one! Good job

This was great! There were a few glitches that made me lose some valuable actions, but this is a great proof of concept!

This is the first game I rated so far, and we're off to a great start! The two things I noticed right away were the great background music that wasn't too repetitive, and the impressive animations (my favorite was the spinning globe). After I started playing, it dawned on me how impressive it is to write an AI to play against for a gamejam game! Also love the Futurama reference; and how the title, promo dialog on the ldjam page, and the theme all tie together nicely. Nice job combining a turn-based game with an "inevitableness" aspect of the black hole.

The storytelling in the presentation really set the mood straight.

Got a weird bug with the UI tho. Among other things it seemed to select options of a different ship than the one I clicked on, like sometimes I could use the long range thingy with the gunship one.

Other than that, really nice entry.

This is a great game (probably my first 5 star overall rating in the jam so far), but I think the game bugged on me.
The Tophat and Wraith ships are at -2 health and selecting them does nothing (no move prompt, no action prompt). Yet the game tells me there's possible actions left when I try to end my turn (I already moved the gunship).

Still a great game, 10/10 would play again.

Nice concept! Being to move before you take an action could be a feature rather than a limitation :wink:

Sometimes the UI bugs out and I can't see any of the actions of the ship.

Nice entry, i don't vibe too much with the gameplay but i still managed to get to turn 18. I think with a good overhaul to the controls and general game-feel this could be pretty good!

Great game! As said before the UI is a little funky, but the game rocks!

It's a great game, I found it very fun and well designed. The design of characters and ships is very good and I liked the music a lot, it also gave me the feeling of playing the NES like when I was a kid xD Good job!

Gameplay is fun! The UI is somewhat janky as mentioned in other comments, but it's not a hard barrier to enjoyment. Well made hex-based tactics game!

Really fun game, well done! I love seeing strategy and turn-based games in game jams, and this is no exception. I particularly liked the unique abilities of each ship, and if you expand on this in future it'd be great to see even more factions - maybe they join you as you travel away from the black hole? More things to encounter on the way generally would be great to see, but I still like how much there is, especially as the difficulty ramps up and more and more enemies spawn in! The artwork was great as well, I love the effort that went into it particularly for each of the character sprites. It was very visually interesting; I liked it! Overall, a you've made a really solid game and I had a great time playing, congrats!

Nice game but there are some glitches in the UI.

Excellent storytelling and gameplay. There were a few bugs here and there, but it didn't take any fun away from the game.

Really fun game! Better tutorial and UI design is all this game needs! Great work! :)

Incredibly good game, I'm really impressed on the overall package you guys put together in the amount of time the jam has given you. I like, that the space ships that are player controlled have different abilities. Two of them do feel quite similar though, a tiny bit more variety would have been even cooler. But still absolutely incredible, that you even had the time to create that many different abilities. Awesome job overall, everything fits together and really feels as one matching bundle. I could easily imagine your game being a cool mobile game, as the game layout mainly focusses on a vertical rectangle in the center of the screen. Keep up the good work! :)

Great entry, although it would be really nice to have some tutorial as someone above mentioned already. Also I like the hexagonal design instead of the classical square one. Well done.

Good strategy game. I liked how you could control units and move them on hexes. I know how challenging it can be to program that as well as the AI for your game. I think there should be more indicators for the actions you select. Like if I select a ranged weapon maybe the mouse pointer changes or an animation will show on the unit you are about to attack.

I loved the rolling nature of "the board" and the concept as a whole. Think its a pity you didn't get a chance to implement the ability to fire without moving as i think it would have made it more strategic however the mechanics were really well implemented and it looks great. :)

Nice game and beautiful graphics.

The intro image is a really good idea. It's a perfect compromise between a real intro in-game that would have taken too much time to do, and simple text dialogues in the game description that would have not pushed us in the story. All the elements in this image contributes to build the "game lore".

As many other people said, the UI has some glitches. Here are some improvement propositions :

- Selecting a first ship, then a second one does not refresh the ship info on the left. This is the main UI glitch thas confused us all. We have to deselect the first ship, then reselect the second one to have a complete updated UI.

- We can deduct which ship is currently selected by the green-lighted hexagons around it, but it is not clear enough. Especially when ships are packed. The selected ship should be explicitly shown on the map, for example by coloring its hexagon borders with a light green color.

- You don't need to describe empty space. We know what an empty space is ! It adds some useless UI showing/hiding when we move our mouse cursor near a ship.

- The ability descriptions tells : "targets enemy ships". You should add : "targets adjacent enemy ships". One little word that would greatly help the new players who discover the game.

- Ranged weapon seems to be blocked by game elements, but not the movements. (Or maybe only the movements of one or two ships among the three, I'm not sure). It has to be made clear, or at least explicitly told somewhere.

But these glitches are not so important, compared to all the cool things in the game.

The character design and their abilities/weapon immediatly makes us understand the behavior type of each ship : a short-ranged tank, a middle-ranged fighter, and a multi-purpose wizard.

The difficulty and game speed is progressive and let us discover the game aspects one by one.

It was really fun to hat-twirl these nasty enemies in the void !

Having the ships starting with no full health is a really good idea. It forces us to use even the first planets, and we imagine the ships had to suffer previous battles (one more little dose of game lore).

I love the character animations in-game. Wraith is moving his/her strange eyes, that's cool.

It's too bad that there is only one ship animation for every of their actions. Are they supposed to act the same when they attack someone and when they harvest a planet ? That's strange. The Gunship animation is particularly confusing, because it fires everywhere. At first, I thought the "Blaster" attack would touch all the adjacent enemy ships, but that's not the case.

Please, show our score at the end-game screen ! I was quite proud of my game and all my heroic actions, but I can not tell you how heroic they was, because I do not know my final score.

One last thing : Why is it called "The great filter" ?

Hey Bishop @recher ! Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Yeah, the UI had minimal playtesting due to time crunch. Your proposals surely would've led to a more smooth gameplay experience.

The game concept we came up with in brainstorming was based on the Fermi Paradox (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox). That's why the in-game device designed by the IO is called the Fermi Device. The Fermi Paradox addresses the question of why, given the size and complexity of the universe, we have yet to encounter other intelligent life.

One explanation is the Great Filter. Some aspect of becoming an intelligent civilization and surviving to encounter other civilizations is so unlikely that it filters out most civilizations, destroying them before contact can be made.

The best we can do is... Delay the Inevitable. Vote Filter!