asturk 2017-04-24 01:02
Hey man, just coming by to say that your game link to itch.io is not working for me here.
try to check if the game is really published there and not configured in draft mode, otherwise it will only show to you.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → liftoff
By remco
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 345 | 3.14 | 37 | |
| Fun | 305 | 3.08 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 159 | 3.45 | 37 | |
| Theme | 306 | 3.28 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 333 | 3.00 | 38 | |
| Audio | 302 | 2.75 | 35 | |
| Humor | 221 | 2.71 | 33 | |
| Mood | 212 | 3.26 | 36 |
Hey man, just coming by to say that your game link to itch.io is not working for me here.
try to check if the game is really published there and not configured in draft mode, otherwise it will only show to you.
@asturk Thanks ... looks like you've tried to access the secret link while I was busy changing my mind and having it publised :smile:
I've changed the (order of the) link(s).
Neat game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation [video series](https://youtu.be/MAnaf7kVN4I), if you’d like to take a look :)
Seems like a cool little sales game. I found it cute how no matter how horribly I landed, the tiny ship just always straightened itself out :3
A minor suggestion, it might be cool to have config file or simple menu for changing volumes of fx and music levels. At least on my computer the fx sounded 10x louder then the music, so I couldn't hear it very well.
@jupiter-hadley Thank you! :smile:
@wareification SFX being too harsh is defenitely something I need to work on in general. Adjustable options is always a nice goal to have in any case :slight_smile: (As for the ship righting itself; I was awfully smug with myself for having thought of that. It's not *just* there for 'cute' though; otherwise the player would have had to rectify the ship themselves!)
The idea for the game is super great, but the game is also very confusing to play. What I liked the best about this game, is that you tried something new and interesting.
The music and graphics in the game is okay, but they could differently have been better.
Overall this is a interesting LD game, and I would really like to see a polished version of this game.
Nice, I love space trading games. Maybe you could add a nice landing bonus or something or sudden price surges where you have to rush to a specific planet.
Really liked the gravity effects making movement seem erratic. The names on all the trade goods gave me a laugh. Maybe make the world a bigger so you can explore a bit more.
I like the general idea behind the game, and I think there's definitely potential there. I think it could be improved in a couple of areas though, namely the flying controls and the clarity around the economics system. The high thrust force on the spaceship and low friction (which kinda makes sense in space) means that quite often you go flying past planets for example, so perhaps adding some kind of gravity mechanic so that you lock on to the planet within a certain radius to make this a bit less frustrating. The economics system also seemed a bit random (unless I was missing something) meaning that the strategy was just buy something, and go to each planet until one of them wants it for more than you paid for it. Perhaps if each planet had a tendency to value certain goods more than others, it could make the game more engaging by allowing the player to form a strategy. This could be combined with the prices of goods fluctuating over time so that you are forced to evolve you strategy over time, or even make it so that the player selling a good to a planet makes the planet value that item less.
@jk5000 Thanks! What in particular did you find confusing?
@spinaljack , @bluecakewithcows Thanks for the suggestions! :smile:
@bumblepie Also a lot of good suggestions :grin: There *is* a very slight predictable component to how the goods/prices are calculated for each planet; each time you complete a new 'trip' (land on a planet that wasn't your current takeoff-point): Namely, the larger the radius (and therefore gravity-well!), the more chance there is for higher prices (both w.r.t. sell *and* buy) and vice versa (that is to say; small planets have slightly more chance for lower prices).
The game took me a little time to figure out what to do, but once I understand it get quite interesting.
My problem is mainly with the boost/control system, it feel... bugged? Idk it just feel random-ish to me. I kind of know to press space to apply booster force to my ship, but there's always other unknown forces apply on my ship that doesn't quite seem like planets' gravitation. Most of the time I see my ship thrown all the way to the end of the universe, slammed hard on God's barrier.
The trade system is cool but feel quite random, it would be nice to have "characteristics" of each planet so I could know what each planet might have to hope for.
@avavt Thank you! Hm... I looked at the code again, and I *think* the gravity calculation is about correct (maybe in fact just about the only thing that is physically correct :smile:). But I get what you are saying as well, in that it just *feels* a bit off. The issue is *maybe* that the distances in real-life are never this small. The planets *do* slightly prefer to have higher prices (both buy/sell) when they're larger (*and* more options I remember now), but I agree that the effect of that may be too small for true tactical play, since the range of choice is still quite large.
Hey remco:grin:
The art and soundtrack are decent. I love how you move between the planets! But it's a bit frustrating that you miss some planets on the swing by. Or you stop at ones you didn't wont to stop at. The trading system is fun and with a little more time it could be a great part of the game.
Overall a nice compo entry! :smile:
I enjoyed flying between planets! The trading system is cool, but I did have some problems with the inventory menu. It wasn't always obvious how much I could buy from a planet. It might be better if there were separate rows for buying/selling and the ship inventory. Overall really cool though!
I have now also rated your game.
Hey just coming by again to say that i played your game now! Really enjoyed your game, really interesting idea you have there, the sound is really well done and the physics in this game makes this really challenging too! Great job man, really enjoyed! =D
It was a nice game, but I think I was lucky to found 2 planets in the beginning that were very close to each other. So I stayed there back and forth for very long time and then quit the game when I was bored.
I guess I was lucky there, because sometimes it's hard to even get the ship going.
Overall... it's a nice trading game.
A very nice idea here! The trading works nicely, and flying between the planets, trying to figure out the best sales routes is cool. In the start it was slightly confusing, as at least on my machine the font was not the easiest to read, and it took me a moment to get oriented, but after that it worked out nicely. A smoother flight model or some tuning to the gravity might be beneficial; now it seems to be very easy to shoot out of any planets influence straight into the edges. Overall, a nice effort :)
Hurray, well done! Loved the sound effects and background music. So jealous, you have sound effects and background music :).
Graphics were good fun, was a bit confused about having 'infinite' fuel. Took me a while to realize it cost me Energon. Bob the sentient plant is my favourite, btw.
Impressed at the whole physics thing you have going on, with the planest having a gravitational pull, and all! Cool stuff!
@samurai-spark @asturk @g12345 Thanks! :smile:
@jk5000 Nice to know. I've copied your scores from my spreadsheet to the ratings as well :slight_smile:
@spaceman Also thanks! Hm yeah, it's not clear enough. You've got two cargo-holds, and the rest is 'for sale on :earth_africa:', but the different coloring for both catagoies is only barely visible, and also the holds turn to static when nothing's in there... I can understand the confusion :slight_smile:
@zebrainflames Thanks! Yes, the way I use the font could have been a little more carefull. It's actually a really nice font! (Not made by me.)
@jod Oh come on, you added an actual live guitar to your LD35 submission man, you don't get to complain :wink: Gravity's not too hard to implement actually! Number-crunching for missiles has been one of the earliest things computers got used for (for better or worse). Anyway, I'll let Bo know you admire him, it's not easy being green after all... also a plant :deciduous_tree:
Great little title! I loved that you tried to mix trading games with orbital physics, but I don't think it worked very well. I'd love to see what you could do given more time, because I think you're off to an awesome start!
Nifty trading game! The physics of flight took some getting used to but I got onto it after a bit. :) Some trades were very hard for a bad trader like me (buy 40, sell 5? sure! because I want that plant.) - a way of knowing where to go with a specific type of good would be nice. I like the planets' visuals, and that I could just ram my ship onto them to land, glad the automatic pilot is better at landing than I am at steering the damn rocket. :D
A 'goal' to reach for would also be cool, like a 200 ENERGON item that is just a big gold medal. (find the medal, and then enough E to buy it!)
The sounds & visuals matched well, got a retro feel going there. :)
This brings back memories of space trading games way back in the day. I liked the movement mechanic with the way the planets' gravity captures your ship, though I would perhaps prefer the thrust to be a little bit slower with a bit more control. Overall, nice job!
Nice little game! Just something very annoying... The audio of the roquet which are very loud. And it broke so hard the background music. It's funny to travel from planet to another to sell stuff. The concept is simple but work. Good job
@iron-leonem Thanks! What in particular did you think didn't work very well? Is it something specific you can point to, or has it to do with the interplay between physics-wrangling and trading, or just a general feeling of 'not-workingness'?
@joror Heyhey :smile: Thanks! I wonder how much of the 'getting used to it' can be worked out by tweaking the physics system, and how much of it is just inherent in using any physics at all. I think 'Bo the Sentient Plant' may be the top favorite for many people! :herb: Funny what a bit of graphics can do, huh? Seems I'm getting just a bit better at art. As for the ramming into planets... you do loose more 'health' the harder you slam into a planet -- or the 'farcefield'. But I'm pretty smug with myself for making that damage quite low and thinking of the 'auto-upright' feature. A goal is a great idea! :grin: W.r.t. art: Yeah, I had a lot of fun creating the graphics this time around (and playing around with BeepBox is always fun of course). Except for that dang table ... it still looks ugly :wink:
@smiling-cat-entertainment , @vivoubos Thanks! The issues you two've raised seem to be the main complaints. Thanks for confirming this again, it makes it very clear what the first priorities should be if I ever decide to continue with this :smile:
I do love space trading games, and the soundtrack for this one was very pleasant indeed. Unfortunately, even following your advice the best I could, I still ended up losing fuel at an alarming rate. I just can't figure out which planets to go to...
I saw a few people mentioning that the physics feel odd, and I definitely got that sense too, but from what I saw, I can't help but wonder if it was the foreground layer doing it? Sometimes it felt a lot like I was being carried by a stream, even when a planet was capturing me with its gravity. That might be something worth looking in to.
Congratulations on getting this done in the 48 hours, though! It looks like you had to work hard!
@rockhoppergames Thanks! I'm glad you like the music :smile:, I'm banging my head that I've allowed the SFX to ruin that part of the game for so many people :slight_frown:. When it comes to the fuel... you *might* just have gotten an unlucky 'galaxy', since so much of it is randomized, luck can play a big role! You're onto something with the foreground layer I think... I really wanted a parallax effect *somewhere*, but it's basically the last 'actual feature' I bolted on there and hadn't much time left to tweak the details. Thanks for noticing that, I think it might have slipped by otherwise :thumbsup: Lastly ... is the 'work hard' comment on the end a callback to the comment I wrote about your game? :wink:
Hahahaha, I wish I'd thought to make it a callback! It was actually because the help screen reminded me of the times I'd really struggled to get instructions into my games. I know it's impossible to tell, but I felt like you probably spent the 48 hours working hard to add features in!
There might be something you can do to stop the parallax feeling confusing, but I'm not sure what... Maybe experimenting with adjusting the speed, or applying effects to it around planets could turn something up?
I'll make sure to give it another go sometime (hopefully before the deadline) to see if I can find a better galaxy, or if I'm just not good at this game!
So I have a tactic now -- buy only if < 10, sell only if > 15 -- works nice :smile:
Reminds me of old days with Space Rangers game where you can trade too between planets (but it's turn-based, so has nothing common)
SFX sounds and orange screen need some love. Gameplay probably needs some long term progress system (new goods, higher prices, meteorites, floating scrap and etc.)
It was fun to play, thank you.
I did play it again, and it turns out my problem was I was forgetting how to use orbits. Once I remembered to boost protograde and retrograde, things started working better. I wonder how you could convey this concept to people who don't have KSP knowledge to rely on, though?
One thing that might help could be arrows showing which planets are pulling you in, and how strongly (length of the arrow being magnitude, like in wind maps), or maybe a trail of particles behind the ship so players have an easier time seeing how they're moving.
As a more advanced possibility, it may be possible to predict where the ship will be at a few points in the future (+.25s, +.5s, +.75s, and +1s, for example) and draw a curved arrow through them, so players can immediately tell when their burn is gonna take them away from their target. The maths and processing on that could be tricky though...
I definitely did have an easier time once I understood that, though!
@icxon Thanks! :slight_smile: Yeah, that's basically the same strategy that I settled into as well whenever I fire it up to see what someone is talking about. SFX (without taking the music into account) is *definitely* one of my weak points not just for this game, but in general. I should focus on it more next time! The orange screen is another one of the last-few-hours additions, and it shows! :grin:
@rockhoppergames Looks like you really got into it! :wink: I really appreciate the extra time you took! :rocket: While I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that someone *needs* KSP (or similar) experience to play this game, I can see what you're saying. It definitely wasn't the intention to make it hard to understand, after all! I think I underestimated how counterintuitive physics like these can be to the average user. 'Showing the trajectory' is one of the things that shot through my head (filed under 'awesome but less important than other things right now') during the weekend, but I quite like the arrow idea a lot as well! The maths for the trajectory might not be that difficult to code, as the planets are stationary and it's just a matter of doing a few (a lot of?) steps of ship simulation ahead of time -- minus the collissions even.
It's Elite! But smaller! :grinning:
This is a nice little trading game. I was a huge fan of DrugWars (or more specifically, it's clone: Dopewars) and with a little more development time, this could easily be turned into something as addictive as that!
If I had to be critical then I would say this:
* I didn't like the flying. It felt quite clunky to me and as others have mentioned the gravity didn't feel right. Even though you might have done it physically accurate - none of that matters if it doesn't feel good. * The sound effect when thrusting is a little too harsh * Everything is very small on my screen - is there a full screen option>?
@richard-michael-smith Thank you! :smile: Yup, the clunky feel / flying and the SFX had been mentioned many, many times now ... I know what I've got to improve at! :grinning: You *are* the first one to mention the small screen, I'd kept it that way so I wouldn't have to mess around with resizing windows / graphics, but I get that it could be annoying. I guess I could try to claim it fits the theme... :wink:
I liked the management of the design of the gui
I think something with inertia is wrong, it works too fast, too powerful, rocket became uncontrollable. I think I noticed the orbit mechanic, but it moved too fast and it was too easy to overshoot. It's one of the rare cases where maybe the game should slow down. At least accelerate not as fast.
Nice idea. And extra nice to see a non-unity game sometimes. How the ship is operated is my main concern. Tricky to land (but maybe I am just bad at this...).
Enjoyed this a bit, but once I found two close planets, it seemed there was no reason to go anywhere else, I kept bouncing between them for, uh, 67 trips, until I made 600 creds, and I retired =).
Ship controls were difficult, but that makes them a bit rewarding when I actually land on something, but I spent a lot of time on my first (very short) game hitting the edge of the map before running out of fuel.
I wished I had some indicator of what things might be worth ("is this expensive because I can sell it for a ton, or because I'm getting ripped off?") though I eventually just only bought things < 10 and that seemed to work fine.
@alexandr-rum Thank you! The secret is lots of layers with (partially) translucent pixels. Also picking a colour-palette. :smile:
@gama-croma , @urbanhelsing Thanks! :smile: You're not the only ones, lots of people have problems with the not-very-well-tuned physics...
@jimbly Wow... That's a lot of credz! When test-playing I usually stop when I've not even reached the 100 or so :sweat_smile: (I'm not sure if a chance for close planets are a bug or a feature... hehe.)
I like the way you have fast action going between planets with quick selling. This could make a nice arcade game - and if you made it multiplayer I think you'd be onto something. It's a shame you can't win this one - only lose. But the graphics and sound were cool and it's pretty complicated for just a jam so well done. Main problem is that flying the ship is really quite difficult!
Great game! I enjoy playing this trading games very much and yours was quite good. If you decide to continue working on this game later on I would recommend that you make upgrades available for your ship using the energons and to add bar for hull and damage to motivate the player to be more careful on landing. Good work :)
P.S If you would like to rate my game I would be so grateful. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/there-shall-be-light
@tommakesgames , @furiouswitch Thank you! :smile: I've rated both your games!
**TO EVERYONE:** *Those where the last two I was able to rate. I've got a lot of work to do outside LD! Thank you all so much for your feedback!* :grinning:
Another great work from you :) The graphics were cool, and the sound was great. The controls were a little bit hard for me, but I think it fits the gameplay. Overall, I really liked, and was made as a compo, which shows your hard work. Congratulations!
(Also, sorry for the sooo late response, I thank you so much for having played Planktos. Back then in LD 38, real life got in the way and I never managed to come back and vote and participate. Thank you for having enjoyed Planktos and taking the time to write us a comment :) )