Congratulations on your first game! It’s not easy, especially starting in raw Vulkan over an existing game engine. While I wouldn’t recommend that path, it is cool to see someone try it, and there is a nice RTS foundation here to work with.

I was not a fan of the control scheme, maybe a personal thing but the Shift and Ctrl modifiers weren’t really intuitive and I would constantly forget how to select mid-game. It was also hard to tell what jailbirds I had selected which didn’t help with that either. At the same time though, I also saw little reason to not select every jailbird at keep moving them in the first place. My second playthrough where I beat the game, I selected every jaibird I spawned and brute-forced towards Nerissa (after not realizing she was even there the first playthrough), never used the deselect. Compounding that was the slow camera speed, which made it really hard to keep track of everything in such a large map. I zoomed out the camera for most of the game to keep an eye on jailbirds deep in and jailbirds I just spawned, and it meant I was mostly looking at dots scurrying around.

On my first playthrough, I also noticed jailbirds stopped spawning at the base square at some point despite having points to spawn them. That effectively softlocked me, though I can’t pinpoint what was the cause of that sadly.

Again, congrats on making your first game in general though, hard to put something out there even in an incomplete state. Good work!

I like the jailbird and enemy art you used and the general idea of the game about leading your army into a time limited rescue mission.

I'm wondering why you went with this approach to make a game instead of using a game engine like Unity or Godot. Was the goal to learn Vulkan?

I had trouble knowing which of my jailbirds were selected. Sometimes random green circles appeared on top of them and on top of enemies, so I had no idea which ones were selected.

I managed to get my jailbird army to about one square below Nerissa's box before they fell to the enemy forces.

Some improvement suggestions:

- Camera movement is very slow, especially in such a large map. Please consider having a camera speed configuration setting in your future projects.

- To navigate around the map more quickly, it would be a good QOL improvement to let the camera jump to a place on the map when the player clicks on it.

- Add sounds and music to round up the game experience!

- For your next game project, consider using a established game engine that does a lot of the heavy lifting under the hood so that you can focus on the gameplay. 10k lines of code is a lot. If this game was implemented in Godot, the codebase probably would be around 1k lines or less and it would translate into more time for you to implement other game systems and do balancing/testing runs.

Good work!

I'm very much liking the core of this game. It definitely needs more work from here but I get where you were going. I love the idea of having a Jailbird legion, so hope we get more from this eventually.

Interesting premise and demo, though unfortunately it does feel quite unfinished. Camera movement feels slow, and the Jailbirds do not always feel very responsive. Despite that, the game definitely has potential.

I also found some rapidly changing black lines on the field, I wonder what is up with those?

Fun little game!

I like that the enemies are all birds, too

Seconding that a faster camera speed would help, and maybe the same for the jailbirds, I get we're fat little guys but its a tad bit too slow, I feel like.

Would also be cool to see some environment objects to need to navigate around, so its more than just "amass bird, shift click Rissa, and wait"

But its a good foundation, and it would be awesome to see some polish and more content added to flesh it out (also getting the timer working lol), good work!

It works pretty well on the gameplay part. Only it's hard to move the camera between the pack of jailbirds currently moving and the pack at spawn. Maybe needs a faster cam or teleport the cam. 

Hope the game grows well!

It reminds me of .io games, I think because of the simple background and the endless nature.  It's fun!  I didn't have any visuals for selected Jailbirds, but if I control-Click and then Shift-Clicked, they did move as directed.  And it's very amazing to do this in Vulkan as your first game.

I assume the lack of selection visuals is a bug, since they were popping up for other reasons.  So my recommendation would be to make the pan speed increase as you zoom out so you can look around the map more easily.

Insane that we got a game programmed in vulkan api for the jam. Honestly good job for even accomplishing it.

The game itself reminded me of World of Warships old aircraft carrier "mini-game" which I remember very fondly so bonus nostalgia points.

I didn't finish the game but I tried several strats, like consequently pushing through the center, pushing through two edges to get as many points as possible and pushing through one edge with all I can. Once I was close to Rissa but I ran out of time.

I liked art both for Jailbirds and enemies. The level design of the map was also nice, there were no clear opening to push through or cheeze the game somehow. Balance wise I think I would eventually win if played more and timed my attacks better. I also liked the option to select a lot of jailbird at once when they were close to the cursor (so I could spam spawn them and them select almost all with one or few clicks).

As for the feedback:

• I think that the selection of jailbirds is very heavily based on the camera position. I had to move the camera to be almost directly above the Jailbirds in order to select them. That wouldn't that big of a deal if not for the next point
• The camera movement is quite slow, regardless of zoom levels, which makes the battlefield hard to control. I would either give option to adjust camera speed or change camera speed based on the zoom level, e.g. the fastest when zoomed out to the max, and slowest when zoomed in to the max
• The outline of the selected jailbird could be a little more visible, like maybe yellow, now I think it is in red, which was visible in close zoom but not in very zoomed out camera
• If possible I would clear the battlefield from dead entities more often, sometimes I would mistake dead jailbird or enemies for still living enties and focus on them, especially in zoomed out camera.

With these points fixed I think it would already be a fine RTS game o7.

Is not opening here =(