FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD46 → AetherPath

AetherPath

By quichi

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4113.5453
Fun6663.1152
Innovation3963.4552
Theme6463.5453
Graphics3943.6253
Audio2623.4650
Humor8042.0641
Mood4653.2749

Comments

splicedev 2020-04-20 03:26

The game didn't run. The error said MSVCP140D.dll and VCRUNTIME140D.dll were missing.

garett-cooper 2020-04-20 03:43

I was able to get the game to run, but unfortunately I ran into a number of other issues. It was quite annoying that at lower resolutions the build menu covered up the resource count for Earth. I also couldn't seem to select my new ships after building them. It looks and sounds interesting, but it's difficult to recommend when I couldn't really sink my teeth into it because of the issues.

quichi 2020-04-20 03:49

@garett-cooper That's a good point about the resolution, something that I can look into in the future is perhaps scaling the UI to different sizes.

For the ships, after you build them they are stored in the planet. You have to deploy them in order for them to show up in game, which you can do by pressing the deploy button and then selecting the built ship on the bottom right corner. I didn't quite get time to make the UI more interactive so it's very unintuitive - hopefully this clears it up :)

Maybe I'll just make a controls 'cheatsheet' for now as a temporary measure :D

madbookstudios 2020-04-20 03:58

The UI is hard to use, as you've already stated, but the music and aesthetic of the game is awesome! Well done!

ilprinny 2020-04-20 04:26

Had fun and the concept is really good! I got into it for a bit, I have played space sims and games of this kind before so alot of things kind of came second nature to me. The UI is pretty unresponsive mainly because closing it is pretty easy.

The concept didn't hit me until I ran out of oxygen on the main planet and that is when things got kinda intense, I was panic building flag ships to carry as much people as possible. I did find one major exploit however, I was able to take earths negative Oxygen and give it to a ship, which kind of saved earth. I did have one bug really mess me up, I built a ship and flew it into earth bu accident, and I became impossible to select, A minor issue when I learned better control.

But holy cow I really liked the art, it made me thing of cartoons I used to love. The audio was in that right space for me. Great work!

darriasart 2020-04-20 04:32

didn't run

quichi 2020-04-20 04:35

@ilprinny I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

I hadn't really considered how making the UI close easily would affect the responsiveness - that's a really good point.

That's a pretty interesting exploit you found, I totally thought I had that case covered but apparently not!

The bug with the flying ships into earth/other planets is a nasty one, it was kind of in my head but I ran out of time so I couldn't put in a good fix. This is definitely a high priority issue for me (if I work on this game more in the future xD)

Thanks for playing and leaving such a detailed review :)

watswat5 2020-04-20 04:38

Missing a bunch of DLLs? Can't run.

quichi 2020-04-20 04:52

@splicedev @darriasart @watswat5 I uploaded a new build which I think should work now, it's called AetherPath_Release.zip on the itch page. I would appreciate it a lot if you guys could try it again and let me know if it works!

I was in too much of a rush so I think I submitted the debug build before, which only works if you have the visual studio debug libraries installed. I've just compiled it again in release mode to see if it'll help, if that still doesn't work I'll need to do some more digging to figure out what's going wrong.

Thanks for trying to play the game! :)

darriasart 2020-04-20 05:11

Nicely done, the aesthetic and complex functionality is impressive. I ultimately lost my ship clicking too far of and couldn't find it to get back

martintale 2020-04-20 05:28

I wish it was available on Mac for me to try :) Good luck to you either way ;)

quichi 2020-04-20 05:38

@darriasart Thank you! I was going to add a ship tracking feature but ultimately ran out of time, it's definitely annoying to keep track of ships :/

@martintale Unfortunately I am running with my own engine so I can't export it to webGL; I have the project setup to be able to compile for MacOs as well, I just don't have a Mac machine to compile it on so I'm not able to get a build running :(

thedashdude 2020-04-20 05:54

I like exploring galaxies in any game. Managing the ships was neat, but a little tedious. Maybe a time multiplier would be nice? Fun visuals.

gamegenesis 2020-04-20 09:55

The art is pretty amazing, and the music is very good as well, but I didn't really understand the main concept of the game, and there were no clear instructions or definite user feedback. With good instructions and user feedback, this could be an awesome game. Other than those two things, the rest of the game is very good.

chloeofarroyo 2020-04-20 11:00

I agree that a fast forward would be good, and some way to automate ships (i.e. set a list of commands to repeat, i.e. mining ship 1: go here, mine, return, drop off minerals, refuel, repeat) would be a massive QOL improvement.

Either way, this is the first game ive reviewed i want to sit down and play for fun later, good job! :D

quichi 2020-04-20 14:21

Thanks for the great feedback!

I agree that the pacing is a bit too slow, I didn't get enough time to actually playtest the game so the balance is quite off, that's definitely something I'm going to have to work on.

@chloeofarroyo That's very encouraging to hear, it almost makes me want to sit down and really polish up this game. Thanks! :)

p1x3lc0w 2020-04-20 15:23

Good Game Overall, the urgency to get everyone off the planet and alive definitely adds some fun to the traditional space game formula. The main hold-back for this game is definitely the UI. There is no visual feedback for selecting an action and the feedback for clicking on something is easy to miss (i thought mining wasn't working at all at first). Adding some visual feedback for UI interactions would help a lot i think. The other thing is that travel times can feel a bit slow, so either decreasing them or a fast-forward would have been nice too (although maybe out of the scope for a jam). I really liked the art-style and the parallax is a nice detail too. The music fits the game well too. Overall a very good game

tom-kun 2020-04-20 15:24

Fast forward absolutely would help to improve the game feel! Also a tutorial would be nice to have. I like the music and the idea. I was confused where the target planet were, but overall good job!

sigton 2020-04-20 17:42

With some polish and some sound effects this would be really damn cool!

antonis-koutsouradis 2020-04-20 17:44

Loved the aesthetic and the slowpace the game folows. Great job

holysparks 2020-04-20 20:48

Really hope you keep working on that, this is the flourishing seed of a really cool (and accessible) RTS/Management game.

hamzeh 2020-04-20 21:22

very impressive for a compo game, even as a stand alone game it's still very good although somethings feel rushed like the meodorite sprites and the UI lacks some feedback, other than that it's a great game!

ironygames 2020-04-20 21:29

Very ambitious for a compo game! I especially like that its RTS and you can mine/create/move all ships at once, really gives like a Warcraft feel.

As feedback, perhaps we could start with another ship to mine so we get a better direction of what to do.

quichi 2020-04-20 21:57

@tom-kun I agree that the target planet is confusing to find, I wasn't quite sure how to make that easier for the player. I wanted to focus on the exploration aspect at first so I didn't reveal the target planet at the beginning, but I feel like maybe that was a mistake... I'll definitely work on that more!

@p1x3lc0w @sigton @antonis-koutsouradis @holysparks @hamzeh Thanks for the encouraging words! :)

@ironygames That's a really good idea! I feel that would help a lot with getting the player started, I'm kicking myself a bit for not thinking of that xD

noucake 2020-04-21 00:40

It's was very hard in the begining :c Took me some time to understand how to mine for resources. But the soundtrack was realy chill 8^)

itskdog 2020-04-21 02:02

The style of the art looked good. I like the idea. Need some improvements with the UI, but some of it was good. Liked the little messages at the top of the screen. The button should be highlighted when you click on it.

sydream 2020-04-21 09:47

Loved the graphics and the audio. The concept is nice and the game run without issue on my PC, however the UI really brings it down a bit. Would have loved some instructions screen somewhere I'll give it another try later on as I've understood a couple of more points from the comments above. Which engine did you use to make it? Well done anyway in 48h it's a lot to do and you shipped a full game anyway.

corbak 2020-04-21 11:26

I find the graphic style quite nice, simple and plain but effective. I like the logs that stacks at the top of the creen, alhtough you can't click on crossed ones to see what happened, at least in my session. The amount of things to do is quite interesting and the interaction you have are nice :) I find the vessel movement a bit slow, especially for such a big map, but maybe I missed some stuff for sure. By the way there is a little bug when a ship is near a planet and if you click on the planet you can still hit the ship, i guess its just a hitbox thing to find :) Good job by the way!

quichi 2020-04-21 16:48

@noucake I'm glad you enjoyed the music! I was worried it was too simple because I didn't have enough time to put it together :)

@itskdog thanks! The little message icons were a last minute addition, I'm glad you liked them!

@sydream Yeah the game is definitely lacking in tutorial, I added the 'cheat sheet' as a band-aid fix since I was in a rush to make the game playable towards the end. It's built with my own engine written with SDL/OpenGL, you can check it out [here](https://github.com/ianw3214/Oasis) if you're interested! :)

@corbak Thanks! I definitely need to tune the balance a lot more, some of the settings for map generation and ship speed weren't very well tested because of time constraints.

fudgemcgroobs 2020-04-21 21:36

This is an awesome game! Had a lot of fun playing it, even with the slow pace. It makes it more tense, imo. Will definitely play it some more. Had an issue with ships that flew on top of the home planet. I couldn't select them anymore. Otherwise, GG!

sheetcode 2020-04-21 22:06

nice, that is complicated game. Great job to code this in 2 days. I have little problems with clicking on object. It is not super intuitive, but tutorial should fixed this. Great that you gave a "cheatsheet". I had it on the background and was much easier to understand the game. I see that was a lot of work in this 48hours. Great job

jason-woerner 2020-04-22 06:54

Really impressed with the depth of content for a jam game here. This is my favorite genre, so I am certainly biased, but I thought the mechanics were all pretty straightforward and the gameplay was fun. Obviously there are a lot of things missing that I'd like to see, like mouse-over tooltips and easier ship and planet selection. But UI work often takes more time than the game systems themselves, and, again, there was a LOT of content here, so I understand why you wouldn't have gotten to them. Very, very impressive - I spent a long time playing this ;)

magzh 2020-04-23 07:34

I liked the general idea behind it, a real time strategy game where you are playing against the clock is a unique approach to this genre and this was a good implementation of this idea.

There are a few things that could've been polished a bit more though. Strategy games require precise and quick ways to control your units. Most of the buttons could've been delegated to keyboard shortcuts. An easy way to show which buttons could've been by showing the button on the icon, eg: having an 'm' in the icon for mining and make it the shortcut for that. The ship movement controls could've been transferred to mouse right click, as it is clunky to click on move command and then click again on the map where you want it to go.

I liked the notification system, but it also could've been simplified to decrease the number of clicks required to go through it. Right now you need to click on the notification and then click again to dismiss it. What could've been done instead is to make notification appear when you hover your mouse over the notification, and then clicking on it dismisses it. This way you would half the amount of clicks needed.

Overall, this was an impressive game to be made in just 48 hours and if you had some more time to polish the controls it would've been a great enjoyable game to play.

buumiii 2020-04-23 10:21

Really impressive and complex game! I would love to have a little more turtorial as i was klicking me through all the things and wasnt sure in the beginning what exaclty i had to do as your game has much of options (firstly i wasnt sure what i needed first) But overall great game and impressive you did it in such short time (i read it in the comments) so really big respect for that!!

vivoubos 2020-04-24 08:20

WoW, just WoW, in48h! congratulation, at first, it look hard, but the game is quit easy!

The music is excelent! very good job!

taddl 2020-04-24 17:08

Ambitious project for a jam, I like the graphics and the general idea.

Though I think the game would have really benefitted from context controls (right click into space -> move, right click on asteroid -> mine) Another big part would be either increasing game speed or giving the ability to control game speed. The first time the nearest asteroids were pretty far away so I just sat there for a minute or two and watched the ship move.

Still impressive what you managed to do in the time.

fydar 2020-04-24 23:26

Loved it :)

It was generally quite intuitive, but perhaps it needed a bit more UI feedback. Perhaps a cursor that changes state when about to perform actions like move, e.t.c.

mantou 2020-04-25 13:05

I'm vary like this type of game. Nice work!

I can't click the ship in this case.

QQ截图20200425205946.png

javasaurus 2020-04-26 08:41

Great attempt , well done. From experience I've learned that making this type of game in 48 hours is a Herculean task (I one made a mini RTS in compo), so I fully appreciate what you've made here ! :) Sure there are some bugs, but I'll let those slide easily. The one thing is balancing... a travelling ship takes ages to get somewhere and it seems when I alt tab the game comes to a halt, so I'm stuck watching it happen for 5 minutes or something. That kind of breaks the flow of the game... EITHER WAY, thank you for making this !

candlesan 2020-04-27 05:38

Liked: - Mood and music - Art is great! Love the parallax on space as well as the quality of having a consistent art style for the ships an dplanets - UI icons are great and also have their own consistent style - Objectives feel like a 4x space sim

Suggestions - Pace of game is a bit on the slow side - UI for transferring goods is a bit cumbersome.

lyrdl 2020-05-02 10:42

I can't believe you made this in 48 hrs! Super impressive, there's so much to it. And an awesome sounds track. The pacing is very slow however, takes a long time to get anywhere. Turns out putting all the oxygen in my first ship makes people die on earth :( Awesome game!

zenris 2020-05-03 08:49

Like this game, I would play it more, but there a few problems.

When ships are over other object sometime you cannot click the ship and other time you cannot click the object. The game also need some feedback when you click buttons, a sound or just a tint of the button. It feel like nothing happens. Might also be good idea to have a windows with all your ships, so you can quickly click on them an pan to them. Would make it easier to keep track.

Am not a big fan of the art style, but it works well enough.