Cavexploder

I love the stylised appearance of the game. The rock animations are simple but super effective. Appropriate levels of chaos ;)

As you say, some indication of health would be useful (for a moment I was wondering if I was even able to die). I think audio, especially SFX, would really add to the mayhem. Other than that though the gameplay is solid and obviously it fits the theme :)

Overall a really solid effort and quite impressive!

Since the original version has really bad framerate, I have added a new version that uses allegro instead of SDL_GFX and runs much faster.

Note on the original though, I should have known better in the first place :)

The Ubuntu 18.04 version works great on a fully upgraded Arch Linux too. I had no framerate issues at all.

It's amazing how juicy this game is, given that it's basically all flat-shaded polygons and lacks sound. (Thanks for not adding screen shake by the way. It can be effective but is way over-used these days imo.) Especially the rocks look really… rocky thanks to the variety of different shades. It's super effective!

The gameplay is smooth and feels great, but gets old quickly because there is no variety of enemies, terrain, weapons or powerups. There's also no reason to stop shooting, ever (though this is common in the genre, I think).

Health bar (and maybe score or distance counter) would have been nice indeed.

@thomastc

There is some more information if you press F1 (but that's for debug at the moment). I'm continuing to work on this but to your dismay I've added screen shake when added damage, maybe i'll turn it into an option :D

Stopping shooting could make the health regenerate, but I'll also need to balance the bullet damage (currently it's quite hard to die from enemy fire)

Neat game, at least once I tried the allegro version lol. I loved the way the rocks break and the way the turrets get destroyed, it feels very stylistic. I think the turret fire could be tweaked a littile, maybe with slower moving but more high damage projectiles since sometimes they could feel impossible to dodge.

Liked the randomness in game, and shooting, it's feeling clear. Alo effects on hit & destroying of stones are super cool.
But of course it's need to add more info to player:

• health
• points

And maybe I'd add more enemies.

Graphics has a nice style. It's like an upgraded asteroids. Too bad the game is barely playable on Windows :(
I think you have too clashing ideas for a horizontally scrolling game going on here. You are given a weapon to fight but the speed is fast so you can't really fight. Maybe it's different if the game runs nicely :D
But I beat the highscore so I really like it! Good job!

I think my favourite part of this game was the game ending breaking everything to bits and falling down smoothly :D Somehow reminded me of some old-school games, nostalgia. Otherwise unfortunately since I was also playing on Windows it was a bit rough with the framerate. The graphics with the rocks and breaking them was nice though :)

technical issues:

• i had to switch user in order to do the sudo command (a bit annoying but nothing more)
• the sudo sh ./install_dependencies didn't work for me, in the end i typed every single command out.
• the reason why install_dependencies didn't work might have been because the names (at least for me) ended with 0-0 not with 0.0 as you typed.
• the game lagged which happens quite often for me.
  game:
  great! it was quite fun even though i wasn't able to experience it too well. solid entry!

@Kesslwovv yeah, unfortunately i've realised too late that the sdl_gfx package is waaay too slow to draw what i want. I have switched to allegro post-jam (after a brief stunt of reimplementing it in bare opengl) and that works much better. I promise my next game won't be a lagfest :D