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[Jupitron]

Play!
http://bit.ly/ULTRAGJ

Defend yourself and make your HIGHSCORE!

Keep your pilot alive and beware of dangerous aliens!

Please check in game instructions.

Controls

Use ARROW KEYS to MOVE

Use Z to SHOOT

F - to FULLSCREEN

M - to MUTE

Made for #jam4life

Thanks to Quicksand!!!

Hope you enjoy!

[quisseh]

Hi Jupitron!

Very interesting concept. I don't think I've ever played a game in this genre that lets you play as both the ship and the pilot separately. I think this is worth exploring further.

What I liked...

The concept.

Ship movement and animations are excellent. Feels nice to control.

Enemy explosion animation is nice.

Stars/meteors flying by in the background are nice.

Movement during pilot sequence is smart.

At first it was difficult to understand the instruction screen, but now I like it. (Unfortunately it took a couple plays for me to understand what the instruction screen was talking about for the pilot sequence.) I like the sound effects that accompany the text as it pops onscreen.

What can be improved...

When the player first sees the title screen, all text is in Times New Roman and some other font. After a few seconds, your retro font loads and the text changes. It's a bit messy. Perhaps you should load the retro font first before displaying any text.

Not enough variation in the bullets fired at the player. There should be different sprites/movement patterns/animations for the bullets for each enemy.

Need more variation in the enemy ships themselves. Different sizes/movement patterns would be nice.

No pause button..?

During the pilot sequences, a larger air supply is a necessity. It took me a few plays just to get used to the pilot controls and figure out what I was supposed to be doing, and even still it is very difficult to catch enough aliens before my air supply runs out. Also, on a few occasions I spawned nowhere near any aliens so even if I flew perfectly I don't think I would be able to catch 3 of them. I would increase the air supply by at least 50%.

The image that appears when you're stabbing the aliens (I have no idea what it is) is extremely distracting.

Background music would be nice.

Bugs

Bumping into the left wall nudges the ship up a few pixels. Bumping into the right wall pushes the ship down a few pixels. Not a big deal but should be fixed.

When there is a lot of activity on screen, sound effects occasionally stop playing.

[Jondog]

Instruction screen is too slow and the noises feel kind of pointless

The first time playing I actually skipped the instruction screen so when the ship blew up I was very confused, the flashing text + animation saying stab(?) when you come into contact with an alien didn't help either.

The main gameplay is nice, but the playing field is way too big and the bright background and white stars too distracting.

The music is pretty nice as well.

[Tealkine]

Hey Man!
Really cool game, played it lots

Positives

The movement feels right, no slow acceleration and the ability to dodge and kill whilst moving fast is really cool

The game play is great and really enjoyable

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK !!!
 

Negatives 

The intro, fix the speed man..

No reload is pretty easy to abuse

OVERALL:

A great and enjoyable game!





Gomez?
 

[ryansumo]

I had some fun with this, mostly I liked the idea of the pilot being able to save himself if his ship is destroyed. 

The way your starfields move is very disorienting though.  I presume you want the ship to look like its moving forward but the way you have it now it looks like its standing still because you have the stars moving back and forth.  Just have them move in one direction!

[ActionGamemaster]

"What in the hell."

This is my 2-3 minutes of play in a nutshell.

I'm not sure if this is intentional, but the spaceship controls are very laggy. It reacts like 0.2 after I press something. It's not even that: After I press a key, like up, it doesn't let me cancel that movement until I release the button, so I can end up crashing into an enemy.
 In a shoot-em-up, controls are everything. If your shoot-em-up is a great game, but it has flawed controls, the whole game is ruined, because shmups are all about precision, and the player's skill. If the game itself doesn't let the player use his skill, then what is even the point of playing, the game is cheating. Touhou is hellishly hard by itself, but because you have a lot of lives and enemies are fun to kill and maneuver, you're fine with dying- you can just start over. Unless you broke your keyboard.

Also, the game's height is way higher than my screen, so I only 75% of the game. What is up with that?

As soon as you start charging into an enemy as a pilot, I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON.

What is this picture? Am I having sex with the alien? WHY is this so flashy it hurts my eyes? Is this the prequel to the Mass Effect series?

The fact that you have to press R to reset is unnecessary. Why not just Z? The Z button is not used in that "wanna try again" menu, and as far as I know, the R button is not used in the game.

Also, the first thing I thought when I got to the pilot part is, hmm, this looks like it's controlled similar to Asteroids. And in Asteroids, the UP button is used to blow some engines. So let me press it- nope, it's Z. Why use the Z button to go forward, when the other part of the game uses that button to SHOOT? Which is an action completely different from blowing some hydrogen into space to then proceed to fuck aliens (I'm serious, that flashing animation looks like a very poorly animated clip from a porn movie from the 80's. The 1880's.) I know that you said in the intro that you use Z to propel as the pilot, but, the less you have to rely on the player to read about your game, the better. The more you rely on common sense, or at least the controls of other games, the better.

I don't know if your game has stages or whatever, but give the pilot more air in the first stages, or the first moments of the game. As someone has said already, the player really needs time to get used to the controls, and considering how weird the controls are for the pilot, the player needs a lot of it. And I've got used to the pilot controls after a few deaths.

There's not enough time to even get the objective. No, seriously, I understand the controls, I understand how sex works, but I still don't have enough time to get the 3 energy bars!

Also, all the pixel drawings, including the whatever animation plays during alien "fights" look horrible. They totally contrast the overall art design of the game, and they look horrible by themselves. My suggestions are:
1. Don't use pixelated text.
2. Use different colors. I can't explain it properly, but, in Flash, you could type the RGB values for a color to get a proper looking color, or use a color from the default palette. You should avoid using any kind of "default palette" colors for things as big as your text. (unless it's white or black)
3. Use different software for any of your art. Are you using Construct 2? If you didn't know, C2 is a game making software that is like Game Maker, but it's based on HTML5. It has a very simple built-in drawing thingie for placeholder art, and these drawings look like they've been made there. I recommend using stuff like Photoshop CS5, or, if you can't afford it/you don't feel like exploring them and pirate the program(yarr), there's a free alternative called GIMP.

Overall, it's a good game idea, and I feel like I could enjoy this, but it's the controls, and the graphics, and all these details that don't let me enjoy this game properly. I'd like to see the rest of the game I couldn't see because of all the things I listed.

Oh and, I use a MacBook Air ''13 Mid 2011, said this just in case the screen and the controls are broken because of my computer and not because of the way the game is.