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I liked it! While I'm not a fan of space-shmups at all, I thought it was very well presented.

The opening sequence was a nice touch. I also liked the tiny little "minimap" which surrounded the ship to display where enemies are.

There's one major issue for me though: difficulty. I struggled on the training mission (lvl 1), and even though I did win on third attempt, I felt it was more out of luck than anything. Perhaps this is what you were going for - maybe I'm just rubbish - but I think it'd put the very casual gamer off. I'm not a casual gamer myself, but I would assume that's the target audience. I thought the enemies were a little unfair: it seemed they took longer to kill then I myself did.

I did like the ship swapping though (when your current ship imploded). It's a fair risk to take mechanic wise, because I often found myself teleporting to a ship which was just about to be destroyed (and then was). I remember a similar mechanic in (I think it was) Battlefield 2 where friendlies within a certain distance could be highlighted and taken control of by the player. What worked for that was that there was a pause between the "morph" - this gave the player a little time to take in their new surroundings before continuing. If you could do something similar here, say when you die the game pauses as it pans over to the ship you're about to take control of, it'd be a great addition to the game, and a lot less disorientating!

I wasn't keen on the rocket-launching ships: they seemed a little "heavy", but of course greater firepower must come at a compromise. I just thought that in a melee situation, you'd keep your artillery at the sidelines.

I hope I've provided some useful insight!

I've also given it a try and second the difficulty.
However I do think that difficulty comes from the controls, the ship is flying wavelike patterns for me, even if I'm just pointing it in a straight line. That makes aiming next to impossible since it's a fixed mount in the nose of the ship. The shots go all over the place, this gets worse as you try to train the crosshair on the enemy, your ship will spin and turn and further spin the gun mount in random directions.
I didn't really get far in the game before I became frustrated with the wavemovement. Anyways, the polish is nice and it seemed interesting enough at first glance. Some polish and I could see it gather some interest.

Random note:
I do hate unskippable tutorials. Was it skippable? If it was, I missed how I was supposed to skip.

The difficulty has been a challenge to solve. I recently turned it up because I thought it was too low but I guess it's too high now. I'll also add variable difficulty in the options before it's released.

@Brayzen: I'll also definitively add a pause when you switch ships so the player can orient better. I didn't think about that as an issue but it's a really good idea. The rocket ships were a later change. I have some ideas to make them feel a little more high-octane without upsetting the game balance.

@dEnamed: I'll try making the aiming follow the mouse a bit more. The tutorial skip feature is something I've been meaning to add. For now all you can do is make the tutorial go faster by tapping SPACE.

Thanks for the help!

This is a little late, but...

I beat most of the levels with a score of 0.  I took the dart, flew away as far as possible, and let the remainder of my team decimate the opponent.  I won four to five levels in a row this way.

I tried this game out and I really like the graphics, sound and style. However, the controls were very unnatural. Trying to maneuver with just he mouse was frustrating and confusing. It would probably be benefit from allowing the player to use WASD to control the ship and use the mouse to aim. That might also help with the difficulty problem.

Otherwise I'd say it looks like you have a pretty good game here, nice work! :gentleman:

beastly, you've done a great job so far.

the good:

-The art and sound are fantastic. Very fitting. The style of the ships and the UI all fit together really well.

-Lots of variety. different ship types and weapon types are cool.

-Controls are simple but effective. As hectic as things are, you can't lose your bearings.

the bad:

- I agree with others on ship control being somewhat unwieldy. Aiming, especially with the smaller ships, should be more controllable. I see what you're trying to get at with the acceleration though, and I like that. I feel like it takes a bit too long to learn before things really start the ramp up in the game.

- Switching to ships (manually or automatically) feels really random and yes there's that problem with switching to ships that are dying or on the verge of dying. Perhaps an :if: condition for proximity/health would help to make the switching more manageable (or the pause option).

- The minimap overlay is a bit too muted for my tastes. I feel like it needs to pop a bit more to be useful. I also confused it with some sort of compass system that indicates where the enemies are in relation to you (which it sort of does), but the minimap description is more accurate. Still, the icons used on the minimap are really grainy and hard to see, making them more distracting them helpful sometimes.

In all though, I like it. Its a really good take on the whole Star Control/shipfighting thing. It reminds me a bit of Moromisato's transcendence, but more arena based. If you eventually implemented a kind of "Gratuitous Space Battles" type of customization option, it could be really fun to fool around with even if there's no story or progression.

The game has been updated. See first post for details.

You can also play it here:
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1314227801

I like it!  But to echo some earlier posts, the difficulty was a bit wonky.  The easy missions were really easy and the hard ones were insanely hard.  Several times I found myself getting killed in a ship and getting switched to a new ship just in time to get killed again.

I was excited to try the WASD controls, but they were tank style when I was hoping for dedicated Up/Down/Left/Right.

Fun bug: Trying to switch ships when you're the only one left results in death.

It's kinda cool but it's too hard to see other ships coming and they see you coming pretty easily. The radar is kinda hard to use and you can really not see far enough. I like the idea though, even though most of the time I get the feeling the AI is doing all the job!!

Tried the new controls out, here are my thoughts:

1. I was expecting up is up and down is down controls, over rotate and thrust. However once I realized which way was up and began to play the gameplay was fun.

2. Visibility is an issue, the game is wicked face paced :handjoystick: which is good, however the view window is quite small for that speed. How does the game look at zoomed out at a 2:1 or maybe even 4:1 ratio? This seems to be a key thing to get right with arena shooters. Too far out and movement is slow and sluggish, to far in and the action becomes overwhelming.

3. I really like the radar especially in the big battles, however the colors make it hard to see when there's a lot of action on screen, maybe stick it in a corner? It works as is though because I was only really using it when ships were off screen which seems to me what you'd want anyways.

4. Ship switching needs a slight tweak, it felt like there was a delay after swapping ships where my control systems weren't online yet or something. Switching needs to be immediate and fast otherwise I'd end up dying a lot. Or maybe the AI should keep controlling until the player inputs. The problem was I'd switch ships, die immediately, swich die switch die and then finally get safe, but only after I'd creamed half my team. Or maybe consider a half second of invulnerability or something? Not sure.


This game is so close to being awesome, don't stop!  :beer:

I pretty much agree with everything Monster King said.

One bit of advice to get more screen real-estate: create a vector pointing from the player ship to the mouse pointer, and center the camera on this vector's midpoint. It makes it much easier to see what you're headed into, at the expense of not being as aware what's behind you, but that's a pretty fun tradeoff anyways.

I implemented it in an unfinished game I made which is surprisingly like this one: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/253784/kreuzzug.html

I enjoyed this a lot even though I did not get very far... I will try again later when I have more than a touchpad.

And the music was fantastic  :) :handthumbsupR: