Escape From The Cosmic Abyss - Flappy Bird with some rouguelike elements

[vandalk]

Hello Everyone! My name is Daniel and I’m a brazillian illustrator and graphic designer.

I heard about godot engine back in the end of 2016, and it was this that brought me to the game developing world. Throughout 2017 I kept learning about programing, gamedev, and godot at a slow pace, whenever I could, between jobs and things like that. Later I got to know udemy and gamedev.tv because of this so I’m really excited about gamedev.tv’s godot course.

With what I learned about it on tutorials, the godot documentation and another course on udemy, I begun developing “Escape From the Cosmic Abyss”. I consider it to be a “portfolio” game as it’s a project I’m using both to learn and solidify programming skills, as well as create art for it, and hopefully add it to my portfolio to help me get a job either as programmer or as an artist.

You can play the game on itch.io, if you do play, give me your feedback! It’s always helpfull!

If you’re curious about game development, there’s also a devlog on itch!

And here are some gameplay gifs:

hybridstrategies

hybridstrategies

Hope you all like it!

[Yann_Burrett]

This is gorgeous! I love the use of color here, and really great gameplay elements

[GrossePistache]

Really good work ! I really like your art!

[DerTee]

This is really great work!
I mean it really shows that you were an artist to begin with
Visually this game is very well polished!
The overall art design and attention to detail is great! The menus look cool, well animated and all …

Now the game mechanics work, and I applaud you for choosing something simple, but that is an area you could improve, I think.
I’m too lazy to collect my thoughts thoroughly right now, maybe some other time, but here’s the short of it (might all be just my personal lack of skill ):

I’m having a little trouble getting into a flow. Canabalt for example does this a lot better.
The controls are quite hard and the speed of the level doesn’t really factor into it too much. My trouble is judging how long I have to press up to go where exactly. If you make that easier then you have more control over how difficult the game is at any point via the level speed.
The up-down controls are hard right from the start, there is no progression to it, not much chance to learn.

The audio just has a few missing pieces, like a laser sound etc, but you know that yourself. The music itself is great and works very well with the game!

Again: Great work, man! Keep it up!

[vandalk]

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

The game already tweaks the controls a bit, letting the player rise and fall faster as the speed increases, but maybe that’s not enough yet? I’ll try tweaking some of the values to make it more responsive!

Since you mentioned menu animations I’m assuming you played the latest version, which has the upgrade menus. Did you try changing your character’s initial speed and max speed? If you did, did it help you?
(You start with 0 upgrade points and you gain one every 30 tentacles, but you can actually redistribute the base points that are already assigned in any way you want!)

[DerTee]

Ok, so I just had another go at your game and … the controls actually felt fine
Sorry! I guess I was just a little tired and slow yesterday.

Yes, I did use the upgrade menu, but I wouldn’t quite know which value to tweak to change the basic flying behaviour. I increased the starting speed, which is probably the opposite of what I should have done. So no, the upgrade tweaks I made, did not help

Today I tried cheating the game mechanics by maxing out the laser duration, but i found that I just don’t use it that much because I tend to screw up the flying bit when I try to shoot the tentacles.

Anyway, I guess I’m not that good at this type of game, my highscore is at an embarassing 57:

Are you planning on tweaking the game mechanics more? What do you have in mind?
The game as it is, is a great little finished thing that is very presentable!

If you want to further improve it, here are some suggestions:

Add some particle effects and a sound to the laser hitting the tentacles. Right now it’s a bit of let-down to hit the tentacles with the laser, because I don’t feel like I actually destroy them, they just slide back into the wall.

You could play around with making both the boost and the laser stronger, I find myself not using them very much because I feel like they don’t provide enough of an advantage, but they do mess up my flying rythm.
For example you could make the laser bigger or cone shaped or something, so I can hit the tentacles a little easier.

[F-J-Valentin]

Nice! I got up to 17 points, but I’m really bad at flappy games so it probably isn’t too hard for most people. I personally think it would be more rewarding if upgrades were easier to get. The art really inspires me to improve my illustrator skills.