indeximal 2017-05-01 08:32
Pretty fun for some minutes once I figured out that you can drag to create orbits, before that all my points just flew out of the screen.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Orbitunes
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 135 | 3.66 | 41 | |
| Fun | 151 | 3.50 | 40 | |
| Innovation | 12 | 4.25 | 41 | |
| Theme | 342 | 3.20 | 41 | |
| Graphics | 368 | 2.94 | 41 | |
| Audio | 7 | 4.35 | 41 | |
| Mood | 100 | 3.63 | 40 |
Pretty fun for some minutes once I figured out that you can drag to create orbits, before that all my points just flew out of the screen.
Interesting idea, simple, but a lot of variation possible. It's quite nice to "play" something without objectives, and just have a creative sketchpad - I was rather pleased with the tune I managed to make :-)
Planetary music, very intersting idea. Would be a fun tool to compose with during a future gamejam :D
Fun game, definitely didn't expect myself to play this long but it is kinda addicting!
Very addictive, had to pull myself away from it XD, nice
This was a nice change of pace, just throw some asteroids and create some tunes. No top score, no time limit - just chill.
Really liked this! Made some neat noises! You should totally improve on this :smile:
Original idea! Once I got the gist of it, it was pretty satisfying seeing my music galaxy taking shape and living on its own. I like this kind of experiences. I was about to to say: add a tutorial phase, but after all, figuring it out was part of the experience and gave more value to the final result. At first I was expecting to have parameters on the axes to change notes and sounds,in a korg style, but that would have been a mess.:D I'd love to play a version with more sounds. (played the "secret link" as well and I would make the background beat optional.) Well done!!
This was a neat idea. Always cool to see game-based stuff like this. I could almost see something like this working in some sort of augmented reality space.
It was a lot of fun just throwing asteroids around and seeing what took shape. Sometimes I needed to hit the clear button because it became a hot mess but when things worked out it sounded pretty amazing.
Sorry, I messed up. I put the review to a different game here. I'll play yours in a minute.
Very nice project. Quite experimental, but I enjoyed playing around with the different notes and their interaction.
One minor complaint would be the missing explanation how you are supposed to draw lines. My initial guess was to draw lines away from the center which does not work and makes the game feel broken. This might have been remedied by showing an example line at the beginning of the game, maybe with a little animation.
Once I understood how it worked it was fun to play around with the mechanics. Unfortunately it is really hard to get a real melody going since the sounds are dependent on the distance to the planet and so it becomes an uncontrollable bunch of orbs and notes affected by gravity. It was beautiful to look at for sure, so musical coherence may not have been your goal.
Anyway, good job on an innovative idea.
It would have been nice to be able to set the volume for an asteroid either before or after you launched it, seemed like the green ones would drown almost everyone else out. Fun to play around with though.
Interesting experiment, you can create nice soundscapes with it, but it lost its appeal quite quickly.
Maybe you should add some kind of goal like hitting a certain sequence of notes, like red red yellow and then the user has to shoot the asteroids in a manner that they crash in the correct sequence, e.g. selecting the orbits and speeds accordingly.
This was such a clever idea, and really lovely. The gameplay was almost therapeutic. Fantastic work, I love it :)
Very peaceful, beautifully done.
I always love music sequencers, I'm definitely interested in looking at your code to see how you did it!
@jow-cowman: Thanks, I really appreciate it! :) Be forewarned though, the code is very much "game jam" material. Lotsa sloppy shortcuts were taken to make it work...I plan to rewrite a lot of it in order to expand on it later.
Great, great little game to play around with, and extremely innovative!
Reminds me of something that could have been a part of Electroplankton! Nice work!
Very clever. This actually made me feel like I had some musical talent for a moment (which is definitely not the case). It would be nice if we could save our compositions in a future release.
This is a spectacularly fun toy to play with! It was satisfying trying to see how many little "riffs" I could get to sustain orbit at once. Fantastic job!
Really clever idea for a music game. It would be nice to have a bit more varience of notes, or maybe even have more than one planet? Oh the possibilities!
Neat idea, it was fun to play around with for a bit but it lacks substance. Nice entry though.
This was a very nice and relaxing entry! It was pleasant to spend some time "composing" variations of tunes - even though the basic elements are simple, the physics-driven repeating of the various notes worked really well for random experimentation. I had to try a few times to make the asteroids go into orbit, rather than shooting off into space, but when it finally "clicked" it felt more like a reward for experimentation, rather than an obstacle.
The graphics were simple and effective, the vibrant colors and movement plays really well together with the resulting music. Your entry is a great example of the fact that "toys" can be just as interesting to interact with as more goal-oriented games.
I read your post-mortem as well, to gain some insight on the technical implementation. It was a quite interesting read, especially the parts about the synchronization issues and the "music theory" foundation of the concepts. So thank you for sharing that!
>Star, floating in space >Orbited by singing rocks >Beautiful music
One of the most relaxing and interesting entries. I can't really say anything against it.
You didn't really follow the topic, but that is not a point in LD at all, the point is to make a game. And you created one.
Nice! It was a delight making a small tune... And slowly turning it into a mess of noise and colour (a fantastic mess).
It is very simplistic, but that's never a bad thing for LD entries, I could immediately start playing and experimenting with sounds as soon as I started.
Maybe add a way of removing selected notes from orbit? That way it would be easier to start to create better melodies.
It makes me really happy to find stuff like this.
It's a cool thing to mix orbital physics with creating music, and it works surprisingly well!
Very cool ideas, great game, good job (ps sorry for my bad english)
Very clever design! Although it's not a game yet, it's quite a fun sandbox to play with. It's just entertaining to spam balls at the center and see what happens. Great job!
Good game! It's fun to sling the planets around and listen to the result. I wish the play area was a little bigger so planets did not despawn as easily. Good job!
Very interesting experiment! I like how there are different kinds of asteroids with different sounds.
The gravity mechanic works well, but I wonder how the gravity actually affects the sounds coming out? Gravity was obviously important to maintain the music.
Some suggestions I have is allowing the 4 colors to be set at the same "interval". By interval, I mean send 1 asteroid per color, and give the user the option to send a "chain" of asteroids for any color. If reasonable, you may also want to add more colors (as in more sounds).
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I just played the post-LD version, and I must say that the sounds used are much better. The green ones remind me of Japan for some reason :)
@jishenaz The pitch of the sound is related to how close the asteroid is to the star. :) The closer it is, the higher the pitch. I definitely plan to add more note patterns in the future (perhaps even a custom-creator of some sort). I initially would have liked the player to be able to choose how many asteroids to shoot out (aka how fast the notes play), but some of the current sounds I have don't play nicely with being played in quick succession, something I hope to fix in the near future.
Thanks for the suggestions though, and of course thanks for playing! :)
It was hard to make something that sounded good, but after a lot of fiddling I managed to make a nice sample.
Kudos for the idea. I liked it very much.
Not much to say but nice work and nice idea. After two minutes of playing I had a nice little piece of music, evenso it sounded really random.
Good job!
Nice work on this! I'm a sucker for games that let me make music. I think you found a good way of having simple inputs that still gave the player a lot of control over the final result. The art did a great job of communicating what was going on and I think anything more complex probably would have made it feel cluttered.
I like the post-comp improvements as well - the improved timestep goes a long way and having underlying rhythm really helps hold everything together really well. (Welcome to the dark side of manipulating Unity's audio thread). Definitely interested to see where you take it from here. Good work!
An interesting idea, vastly different from anything I have played so far. I did get a crash, that was the only thing that stopped me playing. Good work!
Wow, so damn creative! Although I feel a little cheated that you predetermined the amount and rhythm of the asteroids. I mean it's still very cool and I made some nice tunes with it, but had you instead let us piece our tunes one asteroid at a time, we'd be able to do so much more. Something like hold to keep spawning and a launch rate dial is what I had in mind. Then idk if this would work, but maybe other things could impact the audio such as speed or distance from the star. But still, great work! Way to innovate the field of music generation!
This was great to play with my headphones on. Very cool concept! Well done, the game is polished and unique!