I enjoyed playing this. Felt fairly polished for a jam game. The upgrades start to get a little too expensive for the buff they give after a bit. Wish that shield would destroy your ricocheted shots.

Cool game! The concept is good and the graphics are quite well polished however the upgrades started getting too expensive for the buffs, also the ricochet bullets idea is cool but can be quite annoying as there isnt a way to have them bounce off of your shield.

I really like the idea of an upgrade-style game like this starting you off with such a crazy recoil, made for a much more interesting start of the game than if you hadn't gone with that. Nice particle effects, overall very fun and polished!

I second what some of the above commenters mentioned: this game feels quite polished for a jam game. Loved the kickback in the early game, really cemented the instability concept

Cool! I love the trails!

Really cool game! I like the gameplay, the recoil is original, and the fact that you can play around with it is incredible. Maybe adding enemies with some kind of shield that requires you to do some tricks with the rebounds would be cool, but it is a really good game

Definitely a lot of polish here! It took me a while to figure out what the shield slowdown was, when I decided to try spamming shoot I figured that one out.

Thanks for the feedback guys, If I hearted your comment it means I played your game

I love games about triangle shaped spaceships! I was not disappointed, this was a fun one too. Getting new upgrades is addicting.

I like the general concept, and the recoil idea is genius!

One point of improvement, in my opinion, would be warping the ship around the layout. It wouldn't allow the player to sit on the edge of the map and just snipe enemies.

Very nice job!

It's funny. I kinda just added the recoil to make the movement more interesting, but everybody seems to love it. Interesting how the afterthoughts are sometimes the best things

The game was fun and the graphics were clean too! However, I couldn't quite feel the effect of the powerups so they felt redundant. Also think the game could've benefited from an infinite play space where the camera follows the player.

Initially I thought the game was somewhat limited, but when I realized you could upgrade your character, that really added to the metagame aspect of it. The recoil on shoot is not an original concept (you see it in game jams often) but I think it's clever how it applies to the unstable theme here. To me, what is more interesting is the idea of the upgrade system. While I agree with others that you could make the upgrades "feel" more impactful, for a game jam I think it's still pretty good.

It was a simple but fun game.

If you wanted to further lean into the theme, I could see you starting the character off with less recoil, and then giving more recoil in exchange for upgrades, making the game more and more unstable over time.

I can see myself playing for hours and notice where the time goes by. Graphics are very pretty and nice choice of sound effects and music. Liked the concept as well as the mechanics of the game. Good job!

@skallywags thanks for the feedback. I'll be sure to play your game, like I said, I actually play everybody's game who comments on mine. I also made one of the music tracks, and my friend made the other :)

Cool! I like the color and music they are great!

The progression system really makes it. I can definitely see myself sinking a lot of time into this. I love the visual style as well, the glow has it feeling slick. Great work :grin:

Very well done! the graphics + effects are cohesive + eye catching even as simple shapes. Especially enjoyed the looping lifecycle where even if you died, you could pick up w new upgrades; made the gameplay forgiving and was satisfying to improve with each cycle :D

Nice and simple and fun lil game. Love the explosion effects. It was pretty hard to get the upgrades after a while haha the scaling was pretty harsh :D

I liked this game a lot, and would probably pay for it on Steam or something if you decided to add more content to it (and balance the upgrade costs a bit, as at the moment they take a long time to get, especially later on). The game really fun twist on twin stick shooters that made it feel fresh, I loved it.

Very well designed game! Really liked the gameplay =)

Nice game! Easily feel the potential with more dev time!

I like the VFX and SFX a lot. Gameplay seems solid.
The HTML5 version is not nice to play, probably only works in fullscreen. Maybe you should put some border about the game area

@wakka2 That's why I provided the download links to windows, mac, and linux. Sorry that the HTML version didn't work too well for you...

Cool mechanic and visuals!
I liked the rougelike aspect too

After each shoot i'm bump backward like crazy ahahah ! Well played for the one !

I liked it! The progression is really nice as well, the newer upgrades cost more and more so you have to really master the mechanics in order to reach the new upgrades. Well done!

I really like the art and the movement of the player! And the upgrades really helped for the game to not feel limited. Well done!

I really enjoyed it! The game really impressed me graphically and the control scheme is nice. One suggestion I have is to maybe make the enemies glow more if they are on the side of the screen as it can be hard to see sometimes. Good job!

Oooohh I'm gonna keep this one and make all my friends play it. You must have done other jams before, right? This is much too good for a first game jam hahaha. Well huge congrats on your first LD jam either way, you deserve some very good rankings for this one.

The sound effects and animations make it SOOO satisfying to shoot the enemies. I like seeing games like this where "yeah, the enemies are just squares" but that doesn't make it any less fun. The game feel is on point.

So the 2 critiques I have are super minor:
- Since we're moving the mouse around really fast, I think a more noticeable crosshair sprite, possibly in a good contrasting color, would be easier to track. I lost sight of my mouse cursor just a few times.
- You have a really nice color scheme going with the 3 buttons on the main menu, and also during the gameplay. I think if you kept that color scheme during the upgrades page, it would have tied together really nicely.

Bonus points for you because I played it on an ultrawide screen and it worked flawlessly.

@mhorth thank you so much! You made my day. And yeah, this was my first game jam.

As soon as the menu screen loaded and the music kicked in, I said to myself, "Aw, yissss."

Great vibe from the art, music, and gameplay. I loved your take on the theme.

The 'upgrades' felt a little boring due to the costs all being the same, and I sort of wish there were more different 'types' of enemies, maybe with different movement patterns or attack abilities?

But overall, EXCELLENT work for a game jam game! This could easily be flushed out into a mobile game and I could see myself spending hours and hours playing this style of game.

Excellently done on the polish and effects aspect, especially the effect when the player dies. I have a few recommendations: 1) Having more enemy variants would go a long way, even if they are really simple and you have to take shortcuts in other aspects 2) The difficulty curve might a bit wonky, ideally the difficulty should remain the same across the game, the current system you have only makes it easier which does not give the player an incentive to keep playing 3) Maybe make the camera size bigger so we can see more things at a time. Anyways well done on your first game jam, hope to see you in upcoming jams as well!

Nice game. Simple yet fun mechanics and graphics. It got boring after a short while though as I sort of expected new enemies, more maps, new weapons to open up etc. Overall, a nice entry though.

I already gave you my in-depth feedback during my stream earlier, but I just wanted to say again that I really enjoyed playing this. It's a simple concept with good execution, great music, and fantastic visuals. More particle effects please!

I really love the aesthetic of this! The graphics are technically quite minimal, but in practice they look really good because of the special effects. Great job! :smile:

Loved the polished visuals and audio, gives the game a lotta juice! Also really liked how the shield slowed down projectiles instead of repelling them or simply destroying them, I feel like I haven't really seen that before and it made dodging them even more satisfying. I was a little frustrated with the starting speed, but it ramped up pretty quickly and after two upgrades it felt a lot more comfortable. Look out for those squares!

Cool concept! I enjoyed

This was really fun! I really enjoyed the progression and visual feedback in the game.
I do think it gets a bit too chaotic at some point and maybe a power like wiping the screen would be cool to just clear out the current enemies and ball to cool off from the action.
Solid entry!

Loved the audio and the graphics, especially the bullet trails and explosion lines. the atmosphere was great! The upgrades definitely get too expensive at a certain point and I wish there were some upgrades that changed the shooting mechanics at some point, but the game was really fun to play and you did a great job!

I really liked the sound and graphics in the game. The mechanics are also interesting, the recoil from the weapon was especially surprising.

I really liked the sound and graphics in the game. The mechanics are also interesting, the recoil from the weapon was especially surprising.

I like the graphics and sounds, the overall atmosphere is very good. The gameplay is difficult but it is really fun, good concept. Great work ! :)

wow this game is polished! Shooting feels great. Also I liked the curve of the powerups. Eventually I found out you shoot endlessly, turn this into a bullet hell game and create a bullet shield around you :DD Good job for a LD entry!

Very nice game . reminds me of an arcade game we played like 30 years ago . Effects are amazing and the game is polish . The speed of the game is a little too fast for me but i loved it . Awesome !

Neat game that works smoothly! I Like the aesthetics, audio, and the monetary power ups theme! Great Job and fun to play!

Pretty fun game ngl. Liked the music and the way you interpreted the theme. Very nice. A bit more upgrades would've been nice like getting more money after you kill an enemy but otherwise a great game.

I promise to write out a more thorough comment, but in the meantime, here's a recording of my live-play-through:
https://youtu.be/8_LZxCDpWIE?t=5395

Awesome! That polish! The best polished asteroids I've ever played :)

The concept of the game design is really creative. The art is amazing and the music sounds very nice too! i think you can balance a little more the prices of upgrades with more time. I liked it very much.

This was amazing. Lots of comments praising this already, and I agree with them. As a really minor thing - it's really frustrating when enemies spawn right behind you when you're on the edge of the screen. Preventing spawning near the player or giving some kind of warningwould be really nice. But I played this a lot, it's awesome !

Alright, a proper comment this time:

Of all the things you've implemented in this game to deliberately make difficult (and thus, make the upgrades meaningful,) believe it or not, the absurd recoil was probably my favorite. Unlike most shoot'em ups, the recoil really forced me to focus on the accuracy of my shots, which gives a decidedly different feel than what I'd expect from the genre. If the map was larger, I was thinking the recoil could have been a really cool way to travel long distances quickly.

That said, I did feel like the game didn't give the player a lot of room for experimentation. As such, I felt like I only focused on making my shots accurate (I didn't both to prioritize which enemy to fire against,) and staying alive longer. This makes the gameplay rather stale pretty quickly. I also felt like I hit a wall with the upgrades, as I found it too expensive to purchase them at the very end. And of course, I would have appreciated some sort of signal on where enemies will be entering, so I know which edges of the screen to avoid.

Still, the presentation of the game is highly polished, and I actually like the disadvantages you've added into the game (recoil, bullet bouncing, etc.) I think with a bit more experimentation on what double-purposes each of these things could do, you can develop some new and interesting ways for players to play the game.

I enjoyed this one a lot, had that sweet addicitive game loop. A simple enough concept, but well executed and the perfect scope for a jam game. Congrats!

Top 200 in fun (most important category in my opinion) for your first game jam, hell yeah!