shashwat 2017-07-31 04:29
Very peaceful game and music. I like it.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Lost Cluster
By raymoclaus
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 561 | 2.83 | 20 | |
| Fun | 626 | 2.27 | 20 | |
| Innovation | 578 | 2.44 | 20 | |
| Theme | 474 | 3.22 | 20 | |
| Graphics | 409 | 3.00 | 20 | |
| Audio | 84 | 3.61 | 20 | |
| Mood | 93 | 3.61 | 20 |
Very peaceful game and music. I like it.
Very nice, but I think that steering is a little too stiff.
The mood of the game is awesome, very relaxing. Quite strange in the end, you are running out of power in the space but you still calm and relaxed :)
Awesome athmosphere and graphics. The controls can be challenging. This game sums up life pretty good: Navigate space until you die.
The exploration is nice but as the space is very big maybe some hints could have been a nice addition.
@MichaelTWG you're right, the huge space can feel a little daunting and the batteries are really far and few between. Something I was careful of was about how much information I was giving the player. If the player knew the location of all the batteries then they could essentially survive forever which I would see as a bad thing because a game needs exit points whether it is by winning/losing or some neutral event. I could have done something interesting though like point an arrow towards the battery that is the furthest away from your ship, it would give the player a direction if they're hopelessly lost but it would still be quite a task to survive on that information alone.
@Pfeyffer I agree, when I started making the controls I was working under the thought that pressing up to go up would be intuitive. It wasn't until later when testing did I realise that what it should have been was to press up to go forward and use left/right to steer. With that I could have avoided the use of shift to reverse because the "down" button is free'd up to use for that movement. I definitely learned something while developing this game.
I like the intention to make a relaxing space game. The game is pleasant , but as it is focus on exploration, I would like more various scenery and more fluid movement. Also, it is a little sad to encounter wall of asteroid when you explore, you should try to make an infinite world.
Not sure why everyone is saying it's peaceful, that was a depressing game (in a good way)! I felt more like the movie Gravity where you were just alone and losing hope. Even though unintentional, I liked that the controls were harder to use since most of us expected the thrust system. I would miss batteries more often and it'd just make the situation feel more desperate.
This is a really neat game! The music made it feel so calming and it built the mood of the game really well. I thought that movement felt really stiff and it got quite repetitive after a while. Still a really good game! Nice job!
Neat little game. Great job on the music and the atmosphere it builds. It does feel like you're drifting in space.
I'm not a fan of the control scheme, I'm very clumsy when using it, especially when I don't know which direction the ship rotates to orientate itself. It can be frustrating for the ship to get stuck unexpectedly because of the control scheme.
An improvement I would suggest is putting in a radar mechanic to find the batteries. Using the radar will send out a wave which generates an arrow on the edge of the screen to indicate the general direction of the batteries. But the catch is that using the radar would use battery so now the players have an interesting decision to make between locating the batteries at a cost or taking a risk wandering about without using the radar.
Keep up the good work.
Nice and atmospheric. I found the controls a bit odd at first; I was expecting forward for thrust and left and right for rotate anticlockwise and clockwise respectively. Also apart from the two very obvious batteries right at the start I only found one other battery in two entire play-throughs.
@zchen I definitely like the radar idea. It would very much compliment the theme and mechanics without disrupting the mood. I was aware of the potential to get stuck which is why I had a way to move in reverse but it doesn't excuse the sub-optimal control scheme.
@cakemonitor I intentionally made sure there was at least one battery right in front of you as a neat way to teach the objective of the game in case someone didn't read the instructions. The rest are not meant to be easy to find. The intrinsic reward of the game (or at least the part I wanted players to focus on) is the desperate search rather than the actual collection of batteries. If all you want out of the game is collecting batteries then you're just performing a menial task and I can't see that being very enjoyable. Even if you go through an entire play-through without finding a single hidden battery then you still experienced that struggle which is what the game is at its core. It's just supposed to make you feel something other than an excitement-high, but also avoiding boredom.
Nice work, I really like the ambiance. Good job.
It was a nice exploration game. The controls are mixed up when you bumped in a meteor (which doesn't kill you fortunately). Some batteries are also hard to find.
Simple but very relaxing and peaceful game. One thing though that brought this game down a bit is the controls. Normally you usually turn using the A and D keys in these top-down space ship games. Using the WASD keys to go straight in those directions did not feel good at all. The controls were not that bad after you got used to them but the still felt awkard to use. Other than that though I really liked the mood in the game and the music was almost a bit chilling. Very nice work there!
Nice graphics! I included it in my Ludum Dare 39 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwlGq7uM8W4