[LD44] Blood Money

This is fun! I like the idea of the health being the currency for powerups, but beyond a certain time, sacrificing health for a powerup doesn't matter. My best time is 1447.583 seconds, and at one point in that game I had over 700 health.

Well, this is a fun little game. Having somehow managed to stay alive for a bit over 20 minutes (1301.845 seconds) on my 4th run, I can safely say, it can get really crazy... perhaps a little too crazy for the game to handle. It got to a point at which I was shooting so many projectiles in such rapid succession, that the audio cut out completely, my shots appeared like two ship lengths away from my ship and the tracers were going more or less all over the place. Also, I am pretty sure, that a majority of the shots were no longer hitting anything, as I had a couple of moments, in which there was a ship inside the hailstorm of projectiles, but it showed there were no impacts. Sometimes, the game would catch itself and the enemies would be reduced to a debris field, but in the end, I was overwhelmed by about a dozen ships coming in from all around. Although, despite the sound cutting out completely for the latter part of the run, the game actually managed to remain in a playable state until the very end. Sure, it was running on like 10-15 fps by then, but that was very much still managable.

So, what can be said about the overall game? 

I personally really like the balance between health and power, that you created with the theme of this Ludum Dare, as it prevents you from becoming so overpowered, that you barely have to pay attention. The ship's responsiveness really helps, when navigating a newly created debris field to get to the powerup within and to maneuver around all the enemies, especially in the later levels. Might I also add, that these ship designs are absolutely great and I sincerely love the fact, that they are split up into a bunch of destructible segments, just gives you a much more interesting indicator as to how destroyed an enemy is than your standard health bars or sprites, that are in different states of disrepair. 

And after that wall of text, I would like to finish this comment off by congratulating you for managing to create this in just 12 hours from scratch. Well done!

https://www.funvideogames.biz/2019/07/part-2-of-my-big-post.html