thunder 2021-10-04 22:09
Love it. I really like the art. The controls are difficult and take a bit to get used to, but that just adds to the charm of the game.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Orbital Cascade
By polymathld
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 463 | 3.72 | 44 | |
| Fun | 653 | 3.51 | 44 | |
| Innovation | 829 | 3.23 | 44 | |
| Theme | 812 | 3.47 | 44 | |
| Graphics | 352 | 4.03 | 44 | |
| Audio | 703 | 3.20 | 43 | |
| Mood | 719 | 3.45 | 43 |
Love it. I really like the art. The controls are difficult and take a bit to get used to, but that just adds to the charm of the game.
Very fun trying to control the ship, and I love the inclusion of a upgrade system between levels, as well as the items that appear during gameplay. Provides a good balance of risk and reward. Art is really nice too
Nice game. It´s a bit hard to understand at first.
Beat the game with $4143 as my best. Very difficult to keep the status meter from dropping all the way, but it was a lot of fun getting better at flying the ship. I think that allowing you to use tractor beam even with full cargo would have been nice, because I often found myself unable to stop asteroids from making it through when I was in the middle of unloading oh-so-slowly.
Fun back and forth. Maneuvering was quite easier than expected since you can rotate with the mouse.
I like the core loop of grabbing debris and dropping it into the atmosphere! I did find the movement to be a bit difficult to control, making the directions local to a point was led me to flying in the wrong direction often.
Your game is very nice and fun to play! I loved the maneuvering of the ship as it's quite hard and challeging. Sound effects are pretty cool and visuals follow. Only minor inconvenience was the cursor disappearing or glitching, but was, as I said, only a minor inconvenience. Good job, mate!
Wow awesome graphic! Great job 👍 And i really have fun to play this game) Thank you)
I will be laconic. Nicely. :heart_eyes:
An interesting concept executed really well! I love the pixel art, very clean looking. I'm personally not a fan of thruster movement but it makes sense in context. Great job!
Well designed game with a solid arena gameplay. Strong polish and fun experience overall. Went from being a drunk spaceship pilot to an expert garbage collector quite fast and it felt nice. I found that the take on the theme was a bit light though.
@thunder @oliver-richmeier @the-fazzo @boxedmeatrevolution @nillard @cottontshirtz @abuelitajoe @alina-baybulatova @joerenglish @bluecalx
Thank you all for the kind and constructive feedback! I've been working my way through the list and I'll try to play all your games (if you participated in the jam) before the end of the period.
@abuelitajoe sorry to hear about your cursor glitching, I haven't been able to recreate it yet but I'll keep trying.
Good job on the subject of jam!
Really nice visuals! Love DITHERING!!!
Nice, coherent little game. I had trouble wrapping my head around the controls though. When the mouse is directly below the ship, left and right are effectively inverted, so I have to consciously tell myself to do the opposite of what I mean to do.
Like the stylized game visual.
Awesome!!! Love the art. The dithering for the atmosphere gives it a really nice feel.
And the game play is cool too. A lot of games (mine included) lack clarity in terms of objective and game play. But not yours. A concise and challenging experience. :)
One regret maybe, is that the front of the ship is not very different from the back. So remembering which side you are facing is unnecessarily tough (it's tough enough to have to change referential and press up to go down,...). But that's my opinion.
Great going.
I died like 10 times before I understood how to control the ship haha! But the hard controls really made the game fun, nice work!
Gj guys, liked the graphs!
Excellent concept, really nice art and mood. Really fun - I'll probably come back and play again!
Wow, cool first LD game bro! Love this graphics!
Hard to play. Didn't rly get how to control :)
That was fun! A bit hard to control but the gameplay is enjoyable. Graphics are very nice and usage of the theme is super creative. Great work :thumbsup:
Ahhhh! The controls are definitely unstable, and I'm loving the challenge of it. XD
Love the art and the concept for this game. Definitely outside the box!
Very good game! I would probably make the "sucking" work automatically as I held down lmb all the time anyways.
Excellent game, very entertaining, the art is very good although perhaps some music would have been good for it. Very good work.
I loved the art and the work you did here! It took me a bit to read the typography, and I think the ship's movement mechanics could be improved, I found it uncomfortable to handle it with the mouse without knowing where it would go. Also it seems to me that the planet earth takes up too much space on the screen, but the truth is, excellent work! I would like to see it with more advances!
Heya! I think this was a really interesting premise, and I really appreciated the intro sequence explaining the gameplay. I was completely rubbish at this one, so I didn't get very far. Maybe if the first level was considerably shorter, or if the gameplay was more forgiving overall, I think I would have been more invested to continue trying. I think mechanically, the game is built well, and looks pretty good, too. Personally I'm not a fan of the dither over the earth but it serves its purpose in the UX. A little more sound outside of the noise of the engines / etc would have gone a long way, too. I loved the use of particles, though.
Thanks for the game! best of luck in the jam.
A really good entry. I assume the control scheme would be a common cause of frustration for most people. However for me I actually enjoyed it after a minute or so of playing, but that might just be because I'm used to thruster-style physics games.
The one bit of feedback I can give is that the difficulty ramping could have been improved. I think in a game with upgrades where you put in the effort to produce that content, you want basically every player to have the opportunity to buy at least one upgrade on their first try for a game jam. It can be very difficult to gauge the difficulty when you've practiced for a while (I've had the same problem with my game).
Overall I really liked it and had a great time playing.
@legiongrifst @peterfiftyfour @turncoda @fishtaod @bernard-bumblebutt @vsi @gamezero @antrimplato @raysi @gus-the-shark @rdcooper @barrier @pancho @emaigualmc2-art @adamcyounis @leuthil
Thank you so much for all the positive feedback and constructive criticism! It seems like the most common problem people have had is that the controls can be difficult, although some people also enjoyed the challenge. I think for a post-LD release I may switch the control scheme and try to make it more intuitive, without entirely losing the feeling of being able to master the ship's controls (I do like the thruster-based movement a lot and I think the game would be worse overall if there was no challenge there).
I also think that a more gradual difficulty curve and more frequent, shorter levels are great ideas.
Much gratitude for everyone who took the time to play the game! Been busy yesterday and today, but I will get to playing more of your games as soon as I can.
Great game. A nice tribute to Asteroids, Lunar Lander and all of the kind.
Controls are hard, but that's totally assumed in this sort of game.
The GUI is quite messy. Writing "status" next to a bar graph does not help. The status of what ?
I took some time to realize the status is the health of the Earth. I suppose it decreases when a satellite escape from the screen and crashes on the Earth, and it regenerates with the time. But I'm not even sure it works like that. It seems to randomly increase and decrease.
Also, if it works like this, what about burning satellites which you can't destroy ? Do they make the status decrease ? If yes, it's rather unfair.
The spaceship health bar is shown on several little ship. It looks like you have several "discrete" lives. But in fact it is a continuous health bar splitted in 5 "mini-health bar". That's quite uncommon. And the visual difference between an empty mini-health bar and a full one is not strong enough. It's hard to quickly take account of your whole current health, whereas it's the most important thing in the GUI !
As some other people did, I played the whole game with the mouse button pressed, so this feature is useless. Do an automatic metal collect, or add the necessity to aim a satellite with your mouse.
I like the initial radio communication, to set a plot and to explain how to play. Just one thing : you choosed silver as the metal collected from satellites, to express it is valuable and to justify the fact that the player is paid for that. But then the player beams all this precious silver to the earth to have it destroyed in the atmosphere. What a spoil ! It would have been more consistent to tell that the player collects scraps, destroys them, and then the human on earth are so happy with it they instantly pay the player.
Apart from these little drawbacks, the graphics are really cool, the sound is good enough and it's really fun to play. It gives this incentive of "just one last play to see if I can get more upgrades".
Congrats !
@Recher Thanks for the feedback, that's some awesome constructive criticism!
You're right that "status" is confusing. I couldn't figure out a better term. The thematic idea was supposed to be that it represents the amount of backup you have left from other trash collectors ahead of you, which is why it gradually regenerates over time, but I didn't explain that well within the game; it's always a battle between clarity and overwhelming the player with an info dump.
The burning satellites do not deplete the status bar, FYI, but that's another thing I didn't manage to explain well. They're supposed to already be burning up; I wanted to include a feature where they broke up when they got close to the end of the screen so it'd be self-explanatory, but I ran out of time.
These are all definitely great things for me to consider should I continue development on this, so thanks a bunch. I think I'm leaning toward having left click be "move forward" and let the debris be auto-collected, as you suggested.
I think you've already received a lot of the feedback I wanted to give, but I will add on that I think it may be nice to have the UI be over the Earth. It was a bit annoying to have debris or the ship going under the UI. Overall it was a great looking game with an interesting idea.