Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → The Cold Equations
By incobalt
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 190 | 3.56 | 27 | |
| Fun | 371 | 2.90 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 206 | 3.30 | 27 | |
| Theme | 43 | 4.16 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 213 | 3.48 | 27 | |
| Audio | 92 | 3.54 | 26 | |
| Mood | 18 | 4.18 | 27 |
DUDE! I nearly made my own adaptation of this!! I love this short story. I'm playing it now, I'll come back and rate + edit this when I'm done.
EDIT:
Loved it. The only feedback I have is for the buttons/UI in the cockpit. It would be nice if they had some kind of on-hover feedback or something so the player knows they can be interacted with. Otherwise, excellent work! I'm glad someone brought *The Cold Equations* to Ludum Dare :)
Loved the mood in this, even though it was incredibly sad. Especially the line about if she had been 30kg lighter (don't remember the exact weight), since that would have been an impossible condition for her to be in the first place. Gameplay worked fine, although I first didn't realize how to contact support and fired her into space without telling anybody in my first playthrough.
Wow, nice story. Great job :thumbsup: Almost missed out on the whole thing after my first playthrough where the first thing I did was to remove the other cargo, then wondering what to do I contacted eds and then the credits ran, and I was like :confused:. Glad I tried it again.
@jeplmr I wasn't going to do Ludum Dare this time, but I saw the theme, had **just** talked with a friend about this story on Thursday, and it just fit so well I had to do it! I'm glad someone who played it knew the story :) As for the hover lights, I could have done that. There was a point where I made the decision not to, consciously, and I probably should have done it. Would have taken ten minutes, I just didn't do it this time (I had this reasoning of the pilot wouldn't just run fingers over all the buttons to make them like up, but accessibility should always win out with something like this).
@firebug The short story is even more gut wrenching than my rendition. The 30 kg is the right number, and it's a guess, but I'm pretty sure that having only 22.1 kg of extra weight would make it possible with some speed throttling. Glad you enjoyed it!
@zanagi I knew that the immediate jettison was going to be a possibility (and I coded in a response that should suggest that something more was there), but I wanted it to be possible. The short story can't really explore those kind of gut reactions in the written form like we can with a game, so it was interesting to put in all the parts that didn't happen in the short story but certainly could have.
Very well done! The mood really works (and I have to go do something else right now to cheer me up!)
Well That was... depressing.
Really well done on the mood. Though I guess if people press the button sooner they would not get half of that, but this gamereally got into me.
@frank-gevaerts @hilvon Sorry that it brought you down, but I guess that emotional punch was just what I was trying to take from the original story.
Well done, I think you really nailed the mood. I had to play through and see some what outcomes were in there. Nice job!
Best dialogue I've seen all jam for sure, very emotional and good for multiple playthroughs. Wasn't sure of the point of the different speeds though, unless you were planning on implementing a scenario on the ground (which would've been awesome, but understandable considering the time constraints). Great game!
the mood is good, kinda dark a bit perhaps like EVENT[0] ... some kinda quiet soundscape would go along really well with this i think
@arkinrev Thanks! I think this is my moodiest entry yet.
@nkrim The time scale settings are honestly a debugging tool so I could get the time out endings (the game times out when you're forced to decelerate to .2 gravity). I left them in there, but there's no real reason to use them. In the short story, there's a period of waiting that happens where the girl can talk to her brother before he goes out of range, but I cut it due to time and complexity.
@velvetlobster You're right about the soundscape. I chose engine noise just to have some ambient sound in the background, but since I wasn't prepared to do Ludum Dare at all, I was really not prepared for making music.
Deep game! I included it in my compilation video series of games from the Ludum Dare, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/8gcHVPkzZQo
Nice story. Thanks for sharing!
Playing recent space sims made me a terrible person, I jettisoned her before really delving to deep in the story. It needs some fast conclusion for doing so as once jettisoned I just sorta sat around. The story seems interesting though and I might check out the source!
Very well done! Loved the story, adore the graphics!! Congrats!!
An interesting game with a kind of mechanics. I put a rating) Please rating and me, thanks in advance)
@etdofresh @christina-antoinette-neofotistou @awix Thanks for playing!
@mruniverse I should have put a message up when you jettison. That happens if you time out, so there's no reason it couldn't happen then too. I think I also want to make sure people turn around before they can jettison (something about protocol is to check that it won't harm the ship, or something). The short story is a very good one from the 50s. It has some annoying 50s style ideals that I tried to massage out in this version, but it's otherwise good writing. It will make you cry.
@jupiter-hadley Thanks for playing Jupi! You're doing the good work :)
Very nice work! interesting game!
Wow, I was gripped by the story the whole way through. Felt very hard to do "the thing". I tried another run afterwards playing with the display and trying to make it through without anybody dying in the void of space, but I guess it wouldn't be the cold equation otherwise. Amazing idea for the theme, and a great implementation, the ambience in the background added a lot to the immersion of what was going on. Glad I played this game, great job!
@arvejeitor Thanks for playing!
@captaindreamcast I hope that there isn't a way to get through without going through with it, but many of the numbers are guesses that seemed to work out. I managed to get up to 18:23 once by adjusting the speed, but I didn't have enough time to stress test it.
Very nicely done. The story, though drawn from an inspiration, is a great setting to choose for the theme. The game itself captured me and pulled me into the story quite well, and the way that I had to click through things like turning the chair around, and fiddling around with information panels that really weren't able to save me from the terrible choice, and then making me take the actions I took, well, it really worked very well. The moody ambient sounds was also very well done.
Nice job all around!
How solemn. What a tragic story. Don't want to provide any spoilers but the tone on this was very well executed.
@candlesan Thank you! I know it's a terribly sad story, but I had to pay homage this time around.
@pkenney There's something about giving people a bunch of functionality that seems like it should create a path to victory, but is instead useless. If I'd had more time, I'd probably have made even more things to fiddle with to impress the inevitability of the decision that much stronger.