FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD47 → Asteroid Catcher

Asteroid Catcher

By jcourt

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall13743.0522
Fun14752.6021
Innovation4863.6222
Theme6973.7222
Graphics13472.8222
Humor2.0015

Comments

cwazywierdo 2020-10-06 23:35

The theme implementation was pretty unique, which was cool. I don't know if I'm just bad, but I could not 'play' the game at all. It was impossible for me to collect any asteroids.

lenophie 2020-10-06 23:37

Nice concept! It's a neat idea but the game lacks feedback and ingame helpers to feel really fun. When starting a normal game, I felt overwhelmed by the number of asteroids in the very first seconds and many crashed on Earth without me able to do anything. Since we're dealing with orbitation physics that are not that intuitive, it'd help a lot to have a visualisation of the objects' orbits so we can see them change in real time while we interact with them! Nice job still!

bellringerquinn 2020-10-06 23:40

I like the artwork. Clicking on the asteroids is rather difficult. For a while, I didn't realize I had to click on the asteroids at all and couldn't figure out why nothing was happening. I think this is a neat idea, but is really hard to learn to play.

anant-ahuja 2020-10-07 00:01

Cool physics and nice music. The tutorial text is really really small though. Also noticed you used Godot to make this, nice!

necauqua 2020-10-07 14:30

Your theme interpretation was the best 'orbit' one I've yet seen, well done

And tip of the hat for the web version of the game :)

oddsocks 2020-10-07 14:33

Nice take on the theme. I struggled to click on the asteroids, but got the hang of it after a while. Music was great, and who doesn't like a good physics based game. Wicked LD entry... congrats :raised_hands:

stracker 2020-10-07 16:53

Interesting concept and take on the loop theme. The music was nice ! Good on you to implement a tutorial as well.

In practice manipulating the asteroids is too hard though, most of my points came from just smashing UFOs in the center, I think the game would flow better with an orbit reference or ruler of some kind. The art is also a bit too simple, can't say it's a strong point.

jcourt 2020-10-08 05:03

@cwazywierdo, @lenophie, and @stracker (and I assume anyone else who's played it): Yeah, the game definitely ended up being *way* harder and *way* less intuitive than I intended. For me at least, most of the fun of it comes from the fact that you don't have the orbits drawn or anything, and you just have to eyeball it, although that clearly makes it really hard to actually figure out how to adjust the orbits, if you haven't done it before or played KSP way too much.

I originally planned on making a few little videos that be part of the tutorial, and would have the orbits actually drawn, to try and show how they actually behave. Do you think something like this (but higher quality and more accurate) would be helpful? Asteroid Catcher Explanation Test 10001-0250.gif

m-trigo 2020-10-08 19:19

That's a very nice concept, but like others have mentioned, the balance is a little bit too swewed on the side of hard. I do think showing the orbits would be helpful.

A couple of other things I'd like to suggest are: - Labeling the values on the bottom of the UI - I don't think you can back out of the tutorial

It's a creative idea leveraging the theme. Good job!

essarrgee 2020-10-08 23:54

The game seems fun if you know what to do, but unfortunately I don't. I think most of the people above summarized it well. It might be a little difficult for most unknowing players to get into it. In terms of UX, I feel like a menu button would be nice to pause and/or back out of the current game to the main menu would be nice, in case the user might want to select a different mode. Currently, you have to wait until the timer runs out to get back. Very creative interpretation of the theme though! The game might be more fun, and a little addicting too, if there were some more adjustments to accessibility.

spawncampgames 2020-10-09 22:28

Took me a minute to figure it out.. Cool concept but I think it could use a restart button. If it has one I didn't figure it out, sorry. Good Stuff, tho

nikolai-shkurkin 2020-10-13 04:12

Everything was way too tiny for my laptop display. Zooming in thankfully made the text bigger so I could read it, but most of the asteroids were way too tiny for me to be able to click on them to attract/deflect. Giving a huge field of view makes sense or else we wouldn't be able to see what is coming, but you could increase the clickable area of the asteroids to help circumvent the tiny size. I think otherwise the orbiting mechanics of this is really interesting and fun, assuming I can click on stuff :smile: