Last Stand

Fill the juice meter to fuel your last stand.  An asteroids like game with some juiced evolution...and paying the price of glory.

Escaping after a heist, your ship has lost all engines and thrusters.  This is your last stand.  How long can you hold out in this deadly asteroid belt while being hunted down by those you stole from.

Controls:

• left mouse button - laser
• right mouse button - missile
• mouse pointer for targeting

Missiles detonate at target location or on impact.  Warning: your ship will take damage from nearby missile explosions.

Shields Strength:   (I forgot to add this info in-game)

• missile blasts will destroy your ship when in range
• 5 to deflect large asteroid
• 3  to deflect medium
• 1 to deflect small, enemy laser fire

Prices Paid:

• 1 juice per second when recharging any shield
• juice drain for glorious last stand
• the ultimate price

Game moves through the phased fairly quickly to accommodate judging for game jam.  Depending on spawns, later phased may seem frantic at times.  I do understand this can make the game 'hard' (even I die trying to fill the juice bar), I just felt it was difficult to 'feel' the game the same way at a slower pace.  I'm sure with more time I could have tuned the variables (asteroid count, asteroid speed, enemy fire rate, enemy fire distance, etc) to keep that feel and drop the difficulty curve. 

I do regret not having continuous fire (when holding left mouse) for the main laser and making an improvement to the mouse crosshairs for visibility.  Looks like I may have introduced an issue on the missiles with some of the changes I made to missile speed;  they aren't always exploding at the target destination.  This can be improved by checking the distance from the ship.  Will plan to implement these changes after the jam is complete.  

There are many improvements and changes I have in mind...however, the jam rushes to it's deadline.  Some ideas are:

• lights integrated into the sprites, ship lighting etc.
• some better audio, mixed what I could for this, but ran short on time.  background music per stage, enemy sounds
• small details like muzzle flash, smoke trail type animations and effects
• planned on limited missiles (3) that need to recharged with juice like shields.  three could be rapidly fired, but then on cooldown to recharge
• improved diversity of asteroid and enemy explosions as the phases progress
• player movement around the game space, which could have provided chance to have weapon knockback and retro-rocket and drive engine animations
• would liked to have had intro pilot scene and maybe a replay of the final ship explosion at end

A missing credit line:

Thanks to Lyle Rains, Ed Logg, and Atari, Inc. for bringing us the original.

This has been my third game jam; all solo.