Endless Assault

The graphics are fine, the music somewhat repetitive. There's nice enemy variety, both ground and air targets to contend with.

The big issue is the lack of challenge and excitement. You get along just fine spamming. In fact, there are so many tangos that there really is no other way around it. Having limitless ammo doesn't help either. Dodging is a matter of constantly moving around, no skill required.

In the end I zoned out, thinking about what to write here, and managed to die scoring 58000!

Juicyness though. The camera movement is smooth, while changing altitude is not. The explosions are bombastic, yet they break the ground lighting when spamming one position (on Ultra at least). Other particles, like hit sparks and missile trails (technically these exist, but are hardly visible) would have been much appreciated. Camera shake is missing too. Lastly some slow-mo might fit in somewhere, for instance when taking a hit.

Juicyness 5/10, (about'ish) average

@HuvaaKoodia thanks for the feedback, yeah totally agree about the lack of challenge in the current version, i did think about limiting ammo but that seemed to be going away from juiciness and I did not manage to fit in a better way of upping the challenge. Was not expecting the feedback to be needs more particles, i guess you really never can have enough. thanks for playing.

Nice job for this entry, for which the art & music remains the most memorable aspects, giving the game a cool atmosphere!

Overall impressions

I like the implementation of those various mechanics & controls, and at the same time felt they didn't combine together in a very cohesive gameplay:

• Missiles: Enemies are shot for the high score, more than to avoid getting hit (the difficulty stays reasonably low throughout the game, I stopped at 50.000 with still half my health)
• Bombs: Shot just for the high score, as leaving power couplings & turrets alone don't seem to affect me too much otherwise.
• Moving up/down: Only used to shoot some of the black enemies, i.e. for the high score.

With difficulty not really ramping, up the "high score" incentive, which is in the end what the game is mostly about, loses its interest as well. That's why it all feels a bit incomplete. (Note: that's actually another parallel we can make with my 1st Alakajam! entry, the difficulty did not ramp high enough leading to the same problem)

ANYWAY, that's not exactly what we're here for ;)

Juice

Juiciness-wise, I think some aspects are more successful than others. What I liked best was dropping bombs, which proved quite satisfying with those big explosions, appropriate SFX and huge score boosts when hitting a lot of targets.

Otherwise, the main suggestion I would make is with the immediacy and the visual contrasts: when we hit an enemy, I feel what's important is to have strong, positive feedback as soon as possible, both in the visuals & audio departments. That means that in the immediate frames after the impact, you should have an tight/impactful sound fire, plus clear visual feedback that attracts the eye, i.e. high contrast on a reasonable chunk of your screen. That's why flashes, big explosions & lots of particles work well: they attract the eye.

Here, with bomb drops the game mostly nails that, but the rest lacks a bit.

@Wan thanks for taking the time for the detailed feedback, yeah the balance and gameplay seems to be a bit of an issue for me, it was indeed a bit incomplete (as all my jam games) even with a month I still end up just doing it almost all a couple of days before the end. And i should have gone back and make the ship explosions bigger. I guess sometime more really is more. Well next jam must focus on gameplay and not get too distracted by the shiny toys of unity's bloom and post process stack.

Good job on the assets. To me, churning out a 3D-game is a daunting task so hats off to you! The music and sfx also meshed well with the graphics.

Changing altitude was a little odd. It wasn't very clear to me how much the altitude changed or how much it needed to change for me to hit the targets above.

I think the weapons should have had some cooldowns. It's not very juicy when you can just spam away. Some sort of power slider maybe, where less frequent shots do a bigger boom and more frequent ones make a higher pitched sound and are smaller?

Like others have said, the game felt a little too easy. Nevertheless, it was a solid entry. I managed to get to the end (get myself killed), and an end-game state is not always a given with jam games!

Nice game! It reminded me a bit of the C64 game Alleykat as well. Since the only metric in the Kajam is juiciness, I'll get right on it:

The title screen was nice, and could have been improved even further with with some additional visual effects, some music, and some kind of sound effect when pressing the button to start the game. The intro sequence when starting the game, where the camera pans past you was excellent, especially when combined with the music! And although the music was simple, I felt it was effective at providing an effective baseline mood for the chaotic battles. The graphics, especially the "glow" of the targets, and the clean stylistic rendering of the ground, worked really well.

The bombs had a nice feel to them. The missiles (and the resulting explosions) could have been a juicier, both in sound and the size of the explosions. Some "impact" effects, e.g. screen shake or similar, could have improved the effect even more. Considering that scoring was the main mechanic, the effects when the score changed were quite effective.

The amount of enemies, and the fact that you can use the weapons constantly, gave the game a nice chaotic "bullet hell" feel. The movement felt both intuitive and very smooth. The only exception was the height controls - it was hard to gauge how to adjust the height to match the large enemies, and I kept trying to "pull up" by turning the mouse wheel in the wrong direction.

The death animation did not feel "epic" enough, in comparison with the carnage that usually precededed it, although having the ship break into pieces was a nice touch (as was the smoke coming from the ship when almost running out of energy).

In conclusion: Part of the game felt very juicy (bombs, intro sequence, music, score-counter, swarms of enemies and moving enemy projectiles), whereas a few areas could benefit from a bit more "oomph" (especially the missiles and death sequence). A nice game, and it's even in 3D!

Engage strafing run!
Fire the missiles! Bombs away!
I'm hit! Going down!