Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Small Planet
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 243 | 3.38 | 33 | |
| Fun | 193 | 3.35 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 380 | 2.83 | 33 | |
| Theme | 156 | 3.71 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 265 | 3.29 | 33 | |
| Audio | 342 | 2.48 | 33 | |
| Humor | 405 | 1.96 | 28 | |
| Mood | 375 | 2.81 | 29 |
nice work! I feel like the turn speed is is a little restrictive, but then again I had trouble aiming too. I liked how your engine cuts out when you leave the atmosphere, for realism. it would be neat if drag dropped off as your altitude increased. the only real problem for me is that the shooting sound effect can grate on the ears after a while, especially if you are wearing headphones. great job overall!
Thanks for the constructive comment :) Yeah, I was going to work on the shooting effect, but I ran out of time unfortunately. Should've at least made a volume option!
Nice game, i feel like it would be more fun if we had an option to play multiplayer on the same screen you know, i think i'found a glitch, if i stay on the planer, just turrning to shoot, the enemy never shoots me and i always can kill him, but still had fun, the shoot sound was kinda noisy and actually made me feel like i was playing like an atari or something. good job overall!
@diego-tavares Thanks for the feedback! The glitch you describe is a problem in AI code, in a stupid monkey patch to stop the AI from ramming into the ground and dragging along there. Didn't notice that one until I had already submitted the game. Multiplayer is definitely something to add next to the game, if I continue working on this.
Nice game. It's like BT Biplanes for old mobile phones!
Awesome game! It's simple and to the point. Had a lot of fun playing it. Love the retro feel!
Nice little game. Easy to grasp and tricky to get good at! I spent a lot of time avoiding the planet until I realized that colliding with it didn't harm the ship.
Very fun game, the sounds get a bit too much after a while. But i do like the controls and the planet's gravity. The only thing that I can think of that could do with changing is that you slow down too fast, even when close to the planet.
@rodancheg one inspiration was actually a shareware game called "Triplane turmoil" I played as a kid - would not be surprised if those two games are related somehow!
Nice game, it feels very polished and is pretty fun to play. You did a great job at the AI as it beat me twice (or I'm just bad idk). Very solid entry.
Nice little Spacewar clone! Love the 4v4 team deathmatch chaos.
Hey, nice small arcade game, with a cool old school atari game vibe.
I fell it’s quite tricky to aim, as the ship is turning very fast, and the fire rate is quite low (but well, maybe I should just git gud at it, don’t know). Making the plane controlled with the mouse could be a simple solution to make the game a bit easier to use.
Also, the vertical component of the level is too small imho: I was always afraid of hitting the ground as it stops you, and going too high makes you an easy target so it’s not a good idea to do that either. (maybe decreasing the size of the planet would solve the problem)
I think it could be interresting to add some mechanics to reward the player for using these two “dangerous zones”. Maybe a speed boost when you’re near the ground (something like “use the extra speed to escape a tough 3vs1 fight, but be carefull not hitting the ground doing so”). This would make the game more interresting and dynamic from my point of view: just imagine 3 ennemie planes chasing after you at highSpeed, could be quite exciting!
Lost almost every time when i played 4vs4 (seems I’m a terrible team mate…), but I could spend some time looking at some AI fights, it was quite hilarious sometimes ^ ^
Anyway, as others, it’s a quite solid game concept: it’s simple and fun, while being hard to master.
Nice physic based movement! The aiming was pretty hard for me. Liked the look of the earth. The 4v4 team deathmatch is awesome. And really nice AI.
Solid game. Good Job. (:
Nice gameplay. I would've expected to see gravity affacting the ships and projectiles movement a bit more. With some work this could be turned into a nice, small shooter for couch PCs.
Simple, yet effective. A nicely polished --given compo-time-- homage to [SpaceWar](http://spacewar.oversigma.com/) :smile:
An actual working (and even somewhat challenging for a fumble-fingers like me) AI is also a delight to see in a compo entry!
Glad the others recommended the 4-vs-4 play. While not as chaotic as I expected from the comments, it's a nice way to play. I understand the descision to lead-off with the 1-vs-1 play though; the easier for the whole of play to be grasped at once it is, the better for the player. Although it would've helped to paint the players team-mates in a *slightly* different color of blue (or red, it's nice to have options :slight_smile:) when in the 1+ vs modes. Well, the centering takes care of any confusion, but still...
Also, I think I accidentally got autofire 'working' (as in, I didn't need to click for the ship to fire any more) a couple of times. I'm not quite sure how to reproduce this, though. But it's a 'good bug' (as in, clould lead to more fun), so maybe leave it in? :grin:
@juan thanks a lot for the suggestions! I toyed around with the vertical size for a while and thought about having some mechanism to flying very close to the edge of the flyable area like speed boosts or pickups (maybe a repair thing?) or something, but didn't have time to implement anything interesting. I'll definitely try how having the aiming be done by mouse input affects the gameplay!
@Remco good point on the colors! I think the autofire might be due to how the raw input data is handled in Unity in a web gl game not hosted on your own machine (currently it just uses raw input data for firing).
@gagapete I had plans to add a more powerful weapon as an alternative choice for players, which would have had the drawback that its projectiles would be affected by gravity, making it harder to aim, in the end didn't have time for it. Could also test a bit different settings for gravity overall.
It's a great little game! Keeping flying and trying to aim at the enemies is pretty hard though. Eventually I figured out that the easiest thing to do seems to be to find the enemy, camp yourself on the surface of the planet and blow them to kingdom come. Somehow they don't seem to be able to properly aim at player bellow them.
Keep up the good work!
This is a great game for LD, small, extremely focused, and brilliantly polished. Graphics and audio are top notch. Controls are difficult to get a hang of, but fun when you do. AI doesn't seem too bad either. It also seems like a great idea that you can just add too, if you want to build this into a full game.
Only tiny improvement I could suggest is the ability to see the entire planet at the same time, so you can keep track of where all the other units are at a given time.
It was cute, i like the spin of luftrauser but with the center gravity. Only thing i immeditly missed was some sort of indicator where the enemy was. At times i just flew around waiting for bullets.
This actually has potential to be really nice standalone thing if you put in upgrades and more enemy types etc.
Good job :)
@cvetk0 That AI behaviour when the player is low on the ground happens because I added an ugly monkey patch late sunday evening that prevents the ai dragging along the ground, which they sometimes did before that :(
@blaster391 Like a mini map? I could definitely try that out.
Good job! It was a simple, yet effective game. I really liked how you added in the fact that he fighter jets couldn't escape the atmosphere, I thought it was a very nice touch. I also liked the fact that you could drop in a few extra NPCs on teams to make the game a little more interesting. The ability to change the number of respawns was also nice as well. The AI was very good for a game made in 48 hours and worked well for your purposes. It did have a little bit of trouble escaping the planet when it crashed into it (maybe you could make AI levels as well with some that are a little bit smarter and know how to escape the planet surface better or avoid higher altitudes) but other than that, it was great. :)
@ZebraInFlames a simple minimap with little coloured blips I feel could work really nicely :D
Being able to hit the planet with out losing health doesn't seem right for me, then again the game is damn hard even without it.
Good job! I liked the 1v1 battles versus the cpu, and it was addicting to try and beat the computer. I feel like the game should have been a bit easier (aiming was difficult, and using the mouse to aim your ship could have been more accurate), but the game was fun as is! Finally, I think landing on the Earth should maybe have your ship crash (the AI is really bad at shooting you while you're landed). I loved the game, but with a few tweaks and added depth, it could be fantastic. Great job!
Really good - one of the most addictive games for this LudumDare. If I understand you can increase ship speed when you are in altitude. With a background track (something frenetic) it could be more enjoyable. The IA is skilled. A solid game ++
Fun game. I agree that a minimap would benefit the gameplay a lot. The autofire was better than a manual fire in my opinion. The AI is really well made.
Great fun!
Reminds me a lot several games I used to play on my IBM 286 back in the day.
I also like how the thrusters stop working when you exit the atmosphere. Clever details like that should not be under appreciated.
The AI pilots are pretty good, but sometimes they fly exactly the same route on top of each other. I'd like to play this in local multiplayer against computer pilots (i'd prefer co-op, others might like deathmatch, i guess). Well done!
@zwrawr, @Chaseplays yeah, I think I'll try adding some collision damage as soon as I have some time to continue on this.
@Jordgubben One of the sources of inspiration for this was old shareware games I played back in the 90s on a 386 ;)
@Zorg I've been thinking of adding local multiplayer, or even trying out networked multiplayer, as we've already done a simple networked multiplayer game with Unity with a few friends, and the architecture of that is simple enough to port over here quickly. Would just need to do some refactoring on Small Planet, as the code is quite jam-like, i.e. written in a hurry without too much thought to _how_ it should be written :P
And everyone else - huge thanks for constructive and kind comments! Never expected to get so much feedback as I did, definitely makes me glad :)
I think I'll try to find some time to work on the suggested improvements and put a fresh version to itch.io, to see how this might turn out then.
Aww man those enemies are way to hard for me. Nice little game, but in my case the AI always wins. For me it is quite hard to hit them four times before being killed. A higher rate of fire, a slower AI, more healthpoints for me or some other methods to lower the difficulty would be needed, to let me win a round. Maybe you want to consider something like that as an optional setting for beginners?
Anyway it was fun and I played it more than once. Good work!
Very nice! Just needs music.
Wow, playing this is in a 1v1 fight gave me serious flashbacks to Star Control 2, one of the best games of all time (though admittedly, not specifically because of it's combat). It _is_ pretty difficult, though. I'd also suggest that, when you've died in a 2v2 or larger match, and are waiting for your team-mates to finish the match (or waiting to respawn), it'd be nice to be able to look around the map and see what's happening rather than having a fixed camera and hearing off-screen ships occasionally shoot each other.
Other than that, though, this was pretty fun. I think there's a lot of room to add cool additional mechanics, too.
I played this on Livestream Today at the request of the Developer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zCqO_O0iIo
Fantastically implemented AI, I was convinced for a second I was playing multiplayer. Well done on the implementation and I'd love to see more mechanics added for more versatile and expanded gameplay.
@philomory Thanks for the feedback, and another addition to the features for a post-compo version!
@OccultOne Thanks for the nice feedback, watched your video :) Also going to try your entry out!
Great little arcade shooter. I really liked the whole aesthetic, I think it feels really good. The only downside for me was that it became really easy when I realised I don't need to fly. I can just sit on the planet & wait for red to come to me and miss me.
I think some kind of objective like capture the flag or shoot enemy bases would really improve the gameplay. Good stuff though!
@highlyinteractive I agree with you - the original plan was to have a base for each team that you'd need to destroy to win, but unfortunately I only had time for implementing the deathmatch mode :)
Neat game. I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLywFLMDPJc