teenythanos 2021-04-27 04:37
Aaah, it gave me Galaga and Asteroids vibes and all sorts of fun nostalgic feels! SO fun!!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Black Horizon
By mhanapole
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 837 | 3.55 | 28 | |
| Fun | 870 | 3.38 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 1056 | 3.10 | 27 | |
| Theme | 1622 | 2.94 | 28 | |
| Humor | 1363 | 2.00 | 24 | |
| Mood | 797 | 3.57 | 28 |
Aaah, it gave me Galaga and Asteroids vibes and all sorts of fun nostalgic feels! SO fun!!
The gameplay and controls were smooth just the game lagged a lot in the WebGL version and it was impossible to control the player when it lands on the planets. But I also liked the terrain of the planets.
I liked the graphics, couldnt make it move except if i used the fuel, and never found any fuel to keep on moving, i dont know if it was the idea
The music is very atmospheric. When I landed in the web version however it just lagged too much and I couldn't explore the planet.
Very cool. Shockingly large. Had a kinda Raft-like vibe.
It looked pretty expansive. Impressive amount of area to explore, although there's not a whole lot to find, at least not that I was able to find. Once I landed on the planet, I just started picking up random items without knowing what to do with them. Some indication of how to get _off_ the planet again would also be helpful. I wasn't ever able to figure that one out.
Nice! Very cool to see you made all this in a jam! Lots of content and different modalities of gameplay. Well done
Very cool! I liked the music and the explosion animation! I also liked the environment and being able to pick things up. Having the lightning change based on where you are was a good touch!
Though I wish there was sound effects when you shot and thrusted your ship, an indicator on where my ship was on the planet so I could get back to it, and a little bit more lenience on fuel because planets are so far away, this was a good experience!
Good job!
nice Game, good job!
It was very easy to lose track of my ship when on foot, especially on the forest planet. I got sucked in by the black hole, but I'm assuming if I come back with better shot upgrades I can maybe destroy it in time?
Yeah, I saved the galaxy!
Immagine.png
In the beginning I was a bit disoriented... the first time I landed on a planet was like "ok cool... but what I have to do?". I died once from falling and once from lack of oxigen (I think... I wasn't paying attention to that indicator). On my third attempt I've seen the landing module for the first time (dunno why I hadn't seen it before) and when I came back to leave the planet I was surprised seeing the upgrade interface! There where 3 upgrades that I felt a bit useless:
- O2 tank dimension: since you can eat apples everywhere and they fill up your oxigen I didn't feel this useful (even if I upgraded it a couple of times); - O2 tank replenish: same as above; - Laser speed: Well, just upgrade the fire rate XD
I've been impressed by the different biomes, you put a lot of things together to create this game in just a weekend, well done.
Explored a plannet loaded up on wood and a few sheets of metal and worked out how to refuel and head back into space. Wondered what the other 'plannet' looking nav marker was and flew straight into... the black hole.
Clearly a lot more to explore here, liked the multiple bioms on the surface, as that O2 was consumed faster away from the trees.
Resource distribution was a little un-even, spent a long time with only 2 bits of wood wandering around looking then stumbled on loads of it - perhaps it was a different biome but I didn't pick up on visual cues of that was the case.
An indicator in space for how far something is would help - on the other hand... it would remove the tention of wondering if you will get there with the fuel you have.
Impressive for the time available, well done.
I tried to play this a couple of times. I gave up on beating your game. It's a real shame this feels so unfinished. I had trouble finding the theme in this, but I don't doubt you played by the rules. If you had started early, it wouldn't be this ambitious mess. The art styles of the planets and the space part don't fit at all, and the planets feel like they were quickly slapped together in Unity. I won't hold that against you, it's not your fault I can recognise the terrain and character controller, and it's not your fault Unity makes this easy.
I died in many ways. I ran out of fuel, I fell off a mountain, I ran out of oxygen. The planets were too big, and although the terrain was interesting in the large, it was boring in the small scale. The game also felt very laggy in WebGL. Some of that could probably be remedied by marking geometry as static and baking the lighting. If there is ever a place where your game needs dynamic lighting, I haven't found it.
I'd like to see a video, or a text walkthrough of this game, or *a balanced, more focused post-compo version* - not necessarily because I think this game can or should be turned into a proper commercial release, but because I am dying to know what this was supposed to be.
I think this could have been such an extraordinary entry if you would have given the player some more objectives like: * Collect wood, apples and tinfoil to update your ship and be able to destroy the black hole * There is a fancy crystal on planet A, try to find it * There is a snow ruin on planet B
In its current form it got way to depressing for me. It takes a while to understand the mechanics but every death means to start all over again (additionally the game is pretty slow, which isn’t a problem but gets annoying when it is so easy to die in the game). I quitted like after the third death by falling of the way to the snow ruin, which is a shame because there is so much surprising content in this game (even day-night shifts!) It is still a great entry, I just think it has so much more potential!
Thanks everyone for playing my game and leaving awesome feedback! I wanted to take some time to respond to some of your feedback here.
@anshul-k @tengusheath Sorry that you guys experienced lag, performance wasn't really something I was paying that much attention to, but I should have and I'll be sure to keep that in mind when I make games like this for future jams.
@alexdart The idea was that you used your fuel to reach one of the planets, on which you could find resources that could refuel your ship!
@edward-dassmesser I agree - I think I didn't do a great job of explaining what you were supposed to be doing on the different planets. As for getting off of the planet, you could do that by returning to your ship where you landed (which I also should have indicated better!)
@polkoii I did have sound effects for shooting and thrusting, although they didn't seem to work in the WebGL version :(. Having an indicator of where your ship is on the planet is a great idea! I decided to have the fuel level be so low so that players would want to upgrade it after collecting resources, but it definitely could use a buff.
@sestren Yeah, I probably should have added some sort of indicator of how to get back to the ship!
@viperux I don't think I ever mentioned to players that you could actually eat the apples to replenish O2, which is one of the reasons those O2 upgrades exist (I'm happy that you stumbled across that feature though!). Also I wanted those upgrades to be more efficient than just eating apples, but I can still see why those particular upgrades weren't really useful. As for the shot speed, yeah, you're right, upgrading fire rate is much better. I guess I just wanted to give lots of options and included a bunch of the easily tweakable numbers as upgrades, but could have put more thought into upgrades that would be more useful.
@james-macgill I agree that the resource distribution could use some additional tweaking. Indicating how far planets is a really good idea!
@blubberquark The original idea was that you would be travelling to planets that are deeper and deeper into space, until you reach your final destination (the black hole) but, like you mentioned, I was a bit too ambitious and didn't have the time to create multiple planets to get this concept across. I struggled a bit with the artwork - I created all of the 2D artwork and largely relied on asset packs and the terrain system to build the 3D worlds, which resulted in a bit of a conflicting style. I'm also pretty new to using the terrain system, which is why the terrains aren't super polished, but I learned a lot in the process! I agree with the planets being boring in the small scale - I didn't really flesh out the planet exploration gameplay and wish I had spent more time making the exploration more fun and interesting. I wasn't focused much on performance, but multiple people have mentioned lag and I probably should have been more concerned with it. I originally wanted to have a proper day-night cycle on the planets, which I would've made use of dynamic lighting for. I uploaded a full playthrough if you're interested here (also now linked on itch) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xF6G3GHjoHr7OwHlkFtIBYSFjcMhKdNI/view?usp=sharing. Thanks for playing and leaving lots of feedback!
@oadt I think that's a great point - giving some indication of what to do and giving players clear goals would make the gameplay much more focused. I can also see how restarting upon death is frustrating and I probably should've included some checkpoints.