Pretty good idea, but I couldnt play longer than a minute since the control was really weird.

Level design here is pretty chaotic: I like the room with three save points and nothing else! My one major issue is that, if you die when rapidly clicking, it's pretty easy to accidentally click the 'Quit' button, so a small pause between dying and having the menu come up would be nice.

The game is slow at first but once you get some upgrades it gets really funny !
As mentioned before, the level design sometimes makes no sens, like this room with TONS of healing but you can't get in because there's water.
But still a great game, good job !


Really cool retro style game, I feel like I played something like this 20 years ago. Lots of great features that dont always make it into a game jam game.

Despite it's simplistic graphics I had so much fun! The fact that you've made an engine in two days is even more awesome. That ending crystal maps are kinda hard. Maybe It would be nice to have some defense (other than absorbing the damage) against the turrets. Also it kinda reminded me of battle city arcade game for some reason :smile:

I don't know if you've done it intentionally but you can opt out of humor category if you want. So it doesn't drag down your overall rating since your game doesn't have humor elements.

@effarek the levels are procedurally generated, so, yeah, they sometimes look like that. I implemented a system that makes sure all exits are reachable from one another; should've used that for reaching items as well, I guess!

Interesting game. I like the retro style. The random generated map is good, but level design is sometimes a little bit messy.

That is such a good entry ! Had a hard time on my first try, the core crystal room was the 3rd room with no other solution that going through it... I tried many times, but nah, couldn't pass!

Upgrades felt a bittoo powerful. In my opinion, you start too weak, then imrpove too fast. After a few upgrades, it becomes almost impossible to die (I went up to 20 shooting speed).

The gameplay is nice, the prodedurally generated maps add something. Some more variety in adversary units could have been cool. The tank and turret models is very well done, and the music fits perfectly. Nothing more to say: great entry!

Congratulations on your first Ludum Dare Entry! The music is very fitting somehow, for this type of game. And even though the music was relatively fast, the game felt kind of relaxing. Nice work!

I won this game on second try :) Very good game, fun, kept me entertained and interested all the way through. I actually passed over a "boss room" and it scared me so I continued to farm for upgrade. Was some tense moments. And I eventually reached another boss room that I completed in two passages. I liked the retro controls and the pleasure of upgrades.

Maybe another upgrade to augment turning speed would be interesting. Also, in retro games like Galaga or Roketz, too much of something (speed for example) is sometimes bad depending on the player and its control style. Allowing player to orient their style between agile, bruteforce, etc, could be fun also.

Actually if the difficulty kept rising we could reach insane level of upgrades :)

I like the music and the pace of the game. Some of the levels are created with inaccessible areas. Might be nice to have the turrets rotate their barrels constantly when the player is out of sight to enable an ambush, and maybe change their target speed to make it a bit more forgiving.

Overall I enjoyed playing the game! The randomly generated levels can sometimes be hard, especially at the first few rooms because you start being very weak. I got like 4 enemies on my second room, without any upgrade/health. However, it's otherwise very fun to play.

This reminded me of games from my childhood right on the first screen. And once I found a save pickup? Sent me straight back to the 90s.
The controls are a bit clunky, the level generation can sometimes screw you over and that boss fight is ridiculous, and I firmly believe all those are what gives this game its old school charm! I loved finding ways to deal with messy rooms, even if it did mean cheesing the enemy fire delay when entering a room. Hell of a job making this on your own in two days!

Cute game! 5/5 for Mood

Oh no tank controls!
Well i've gotta learn to use them eventually right
also i appreciate that you did this game in your own engine, i'm looking into making my own as well so it was nice to come across your game
Also, yeah came across the same generation issues as some of the comments, wasn't that much of a problem though in my case

I love it.
Gameplay is hard at the beginning.
Its much easier once you get enough upgrades going and you slice trough enemies like butter ;p

Very fun! A really solid sense of progression, pretty sweet music, good difficulty spike with the boss room, and all with even less time than normal?! How did you manage all that!? Great job!

Nice to see someone also is using his own engine) as I noticed it is based on sdl? that's cool. Game was fun overall, but controls felt a bit wierd and also there were some levels where you enter and just instantly die)

@corporation Thanks! Yes, the engine uses sdl2 for OS-specific stuff and OpenGL 3.3 for rendering.

I died a bunch on the first room since you die pretty quickly and cant dodge that well. Looks like on some lucky rolls you get to the last room immediately lol. Interesting way to have save points as items. It was fun "outsmarting" the enemy and hitting them through walls.

Wp for this nice little game, quite hard at the begining, still it's a good entry for your first compo game with your own lib (and for using SDL2), gg !

Great compo entry !

The music is punchy, and the SFX are too.

I had no problem with the tank movement controls (though, mouse aiming in a room-by-room game is pretty disorienting, as the relative position of the mouse pointer jumps between each room).

The gameplay was hard but cool ; however the tanks gets hard to control when you take too many velocity upgrades (and there's no way to tell them appart from the other upgrades, which are required to win the game :-( )

And also, it's nice to see other folks using their own engine!

OpenGL + SDL2 FTW ! :metal:

@ace17 sdl2 engine gang 🤘
Yep, I shouldn't have made rotation speed reach those ridiculous levels, makes controls quirky. Thanks for playing!

Pretty cool to see custom engines in LD

Respect for using SDL2 in your first compo^^. That was a fun game. A little hard a the beggining but got used to the tank after a while.

Hey matey, thanks for submitting your game to the stream, I had a lot of fun playing it! I hope the feedback was helpful. Here's the vod if ya wanna rewatch;

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1004858368

I understand the classic 'tank controls' you were going for, but I think the dynamic lighting on the tank actually hindered this. It was difficult to tell which way the tank was facing and I often caught myself going the wrong direction which didn't feel great. There was one room that spawned a turret right on top of me upon entering, too. Audio was super loud - could have used volume controls in-game. But sorry for all the negative stuffs. The upgrades and progression were pretty nice. I liked that you could ram obstacles. You're a tank! Just because you're a tank doesn't mean you have to shoot everything. And the self-damage from splash makes you be more thoughtful about just spamming shots which I appreciated. Good job on the game and thanks for making it!

This gave me a lot of nostalgia for games I used to play as a kid, I really quite enjoyed it! The controls could be a little unwieldy at times especially once I had a lot of velocity upgrades but also it kinda added to the charm of how silly it felt to be zooming around at high speed, and once I had quite a few shooting speed upgrades the overlapping explosion noises could be too loud to be comfortable, but overall it was a blast, great job!

nice graphs, cool looking ui, good job!

Very fun, tight game. I had some slight problems with the procedural generation, where power-ups were inaccessible behind water. Procedurally generating maps might have been too ambitious for LD, where most people will only play through once. The boxes vanishing after you touch them was a smart choice, and removed some of the frustration with the typically clunky steer + forwards/backwards control scheme.

These retro graphics are really well-made and very suitable with the gameplay. Great Job..

Well done! Very well produced, funny and smooth game

Cool game ! Old school vibes and a bit difficult at first, but I liked playing it.

Good jbo :slight_smile:

Thank you for making a Linux build :smile:

This was fun! Took me a while to get used to the tank controls. Really unforgiving :laughing: but I guess that's how it was back then. Well done!