Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Whoa! It's like a space game or something!
By circle
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 477 | 3.12 | 34 | |
| Fun | 405 | 3.12 | 34 | |
| Innovation | 461 | 2.95 | 34 | |
| Theme | 589 | 2.60 | 34 | |
| Graphics | 365 | 3.28 | 35 | |
| Humor | 343 | 2.62 | 34 | |
| Mood | 401 | 3.03 | 33 |
I think the game does not work in firefox. I have successfully played with Chrome :)
I like the spaceship travel between planets and having to use the map. Sometimes I have pressed "m" when I wanted to open the map :smile:
Nice job!
Quite a bit of things to do for a compo game! Nice work!
@jesusnoseq Oh man I knew I was forgetting something! Haha, I completely forgot to bind a key for the map! And yea, it doesn't work in firefox, they don't use the same rendering system as chrome, I really appreciate you taking the time to switch browsers to try it. Thanks for that! Also, your game NumberCatch is super interesting, especially with the little leaderboard.
I waited for about 2 full minutes before giving up. :cry: I love the art and graphics though, high marks for that. I'm curious, why did you opt out of audio for ratings? It was quite good.
@david-york Hey have you tried closing the tab and reopening? That works for some people, don't know why though. If I had more time I could have fixed this issue, I guess that's what I get for focusing so much on stuffing as many features in as possible.
To answer your question, I used an ai music generation program, aiva, as well as the sfx generator sfxr for the sound, so it didn't really feel right to me, taking the easy way out, to be judged for audio.
I flew around, I bought, I sold, I harvested, I blew up pirates! The controls for flight are neat, and momentum while shooting is very interesting. I did wish maybe for a goal for all the buying + selling? But it was fun anyhow.
Music + SFX were pleasing, and the visual appearance was nice!
@asmadigames Yea I threw out a lot of ideas for things to do with all your money. All of them felt kind of, forgive my pun, cheap. I instead opted to just let the game be more open, than to add something in that didn't add anything to the overall feeling of the game, and just felt like it broke away from the gameplay.
I died because I ran out of money, so 10/10 for realism lol
@ekeller217 You either die a hero in a flaming explosion fighting space pirates, or live long enough to run out of money paying for gas. . . It's a metaphor for something I swear.
Your itch page is down :(
@eboatwright Wait is it!?!?! Okay I'm gonna try and see what's up.
@circle when you click play the page goes blank and emits this error to the console Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set properties of null (setting 'imageSmoothingEnabled') at script.js:11:33
@eboatwright Hey so I just checked it on another computer and it worked fine, are you using google chrome? I don't believe it works on any other browsers. Should probably say that in description actually. Gonna go change that. And yea imageSmoothingEnabled requires a modern version of google chrome as well. Thanks for the heads up.
I am impressed by how much you have done in such a short amount of time. Love these kind of strategy exploration game and I can see myself investing a lot of time on it. If you don't mind a few feedback: I find myself keep forgetting how to navigate the GUI or the meaning of each icon. A suggestion would be to display a description when the player hover the mouse over said icon. I think some polishing of the GUI could bring the game up a notch. The other minor suggestion is the key mappings. I am aware that you make it possible to remap the key, but the default Enter key is a little far from the rest of the buttons, maybe consider using the space bar as the default conformation button instead? I hope you don't take my comment too harshly, I really enjoyed the game.
@circle Alrighty!
@pke1029 You could be a little harsher if you want actually! You gave some really solid advice! Yea, my opinion on mouse over providing a description is the same. Honestly, I've played games without going through the tutorial and just using the mouseover text for info on how to play. I think that would have been a greatly beneficial addition. Lessons learned I suppose.
And yea, that's a good point about the enter key as well. Space is probably more natural.
And also, by the way, thanks for taking the time to play! I really liked Runic Moon, it's got some of the most appealing art and music I've seen so far in this jam. Really good work on that one.
Always like playing space exploration games.
I can tell this game was made by a dreamer cause its so imaginative and wonderful, a short game but deep in lore and worldbuilding. Like others have said, the GUI and game itself are not intuitive but the core gameplay loop of going to different planets and fighting monsters along the way is itself engaging, and even though I didn't know what I was buying or harvesting half the time, I still had fun doing it. By the way, if I inherited the ship from my grandpa whats he doing giving me advice at the start of the game?
Good job on this, it was really fun! It really felt like exploring space <3
it took me a while to figure out how this works. The graphics and Music fit the gameplay very well. A fun little adventure
@austin-sierra Whoa! Way to be asking the big important questions! Why is your grandpa talking to you at the beginning? Is it because I'd already drawn his portrait before scrapping the story? Maybe! There's a little sentence you missed in the title screen that says your grandpa left you some post it notes through out the ship. Really though I just felt stupid for spending time drawing this cool science fiction old dude only to realize that "oh god I'll need to draw at least two more portraits and then I still have to finish the enemy ai" but I still wanted to put him in the game regardless.
And yea, lessons learned I suppose. I put in more information about what everything is and why here than my last game jam game, but it looks like I still have a long way to go. Your grandpa does mention, very briefly, what all the resources are.
I think just adding mouse over text would make a huge difference. I'm going to start including that in all my games.
Also. Thank you so much for playing a lot and for leaving a big comment!!! So cool of you! You said such nice things to me. Me! I'm just some random piece of garbage! Jokes aside, really appreciate your comment.
@circle yes tooltips are a user's best friend. I used this tutorial to figure out how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_qk7egZ8_c . If you don't feel like watching i have some old code i could possibly share also
That's a lot of depth for such a short time! It gave me flashbacks to an old black and white space trading game I played as a child. I liked the humor, sound effects, and space combat. Trading was a bit difficult because of fuel and money not being shown on the mining and selling screens.
@austin-sierra Whoa! That's so cool of you! That being said, I already have done a mouse over system in another game I've been working on, I just didn't want to start with anything but the absolute essentials for this jam. Thus I would have had to program it again, and it does take about twenty minutes or so. Of course, if I hadn't bothered to draw grandpa, maybe I would have had that time and energy! haha.
Also, I do appreciate the unity tutorial, but I actually make my games in javascipt, using the 2d context canvas element and the webgl context canvas element, with a little help from PIXI js. While its not too different from working in Unity, there are a number of quirks that make tutorials less interchangeable. Still really appreciate you taking the time to share, as well as linking a video. That's like super cool of you.
Since you went through the trouble, I figure I may as well share a little advice regarding enemy ai and pathfinding. I'll go into the Pellets page and share that there.
@inert-aesthetic Yea that's actually a really good point about the fuel and money. Should totally be visible there. Do you remember anything else about the old black and white space trading game? I'd love to check it out, maybe learn a thing or three.
Firefox totally bombed with game. Chrome worked fine. Browsers be like that.
The game needs a lot of polish, but there are some neat bones underneath.
One thing that surprised me was using the warp gate, harvesting from the star, and then setting that sent me from $300 to over $69000. As nice as this is, it seems like values need tweaking.
@emberushi Haha, no that's intentional. The thing is, the game doesn't really have anything for you to spend money on except for fuel. Extra money does only one thing, and that's increase the difficulty. You'll notice that if you go through the warp gate as well, there's a new type of enemy that spawns, it's much stronger and if you have a lot of money more will spawn. If you try and go to this area early on, before your stats have increased much, it's easy to get killed off.
Also, I believe you're one of the only people to actually bother with going to the other area! Thanks! That made me really happy!
Also also, yes the game needs a lot of polish. Lessons learned, next jam I'm going to focus more on creating a good experience, and less on packing in features.
Also also also, wowowwowwowow. Your game looks so good! The arts incredibly pretty! I'm gonna go rate it now, but wow. Really impressive stuff. You should definitely update it more! It's so cool!
chrome_pGenL8JTiD.png
I somehow busted the money and was getting ridiculous amount of money haha. I really enjoyed the presentation and how big the world felt. Really well done. I wonder what was your inspiration for how the UI was designed? It felt quite 90s but in a good way
@zantze Hahaha, you've got so much money and max stats too. Maybe retire? And yea, the ui could obviously use more work, but I've always been a fan of super low saturation for the user interface. On inspiration, I probably am influenced most by old snes era jrpgs.
On that subject as well, normally these days I'd probably add lots of animation to the ui as well, I simply lacked time. My favorite thing to do for ui is to give it a kind of liquid/solid look, like this test button I just made. testButton.gif
complex.png
Well, that was a complex game! The first time i saw the interface and a intro dialogue, I was perplexed about the scope here! I traveld to all planets/satellites/moon and get everything, but I couldnt buy anything beside materials in water based planets. Am I missing something here? The first time I played the return action didnt work (enter), i needed to refresh my browser (and i dont know why it worked only on Edge, my firefox didnt show the first screen). Beside that, it was fun playing it and gathering resources. The last thing i did was go to out of screen, maybe searching for a new galaxy, and due to movement i couldnt return (that was risky and i knew it haha). I liked the sprites. And, i'm curious. Which engine did you use? And finally, congratulations! Nice game :) :)
@welliton Wow, thank you so much for bothering to visit everything. That's really cool of you. And no you're not missing anything, I couldn't find the time to add in a proper goal or objective to the game, so instead the main objective is to just continue existing. I, of course, did manage to come up with and implement some ideas, and if you look in the game code you may find some artifacts of that, such as when I implemented a system to spend money on buying things like a house or castle, all of which provided flavor text. I removed this feature because I felt it cheapened the overall experience.
The reason it works on edge and not fire fox is because edge is built on chromium, which is kinda like a bare bones version of google chrome. The game only works on browsers running chromium for a lot of reasons that I can't really go into here.
On the subject of engine, well I guess you could say I built a custom engine for it when the jam started? I programmed everything in javascript, and used the canvas element to render everything. I also included the open source PIXI js library, as it gives easy access to the webgl context, but a graphics library is not a game engine. I also used the regular 2d context where it was easier to do so, for example the planets are running on their own separate offscreen canvases, with a cycling image being rendered onto a circular gradient only where the gradient is already rendered. The game also employs DOM manipulation to efficiently render most of the text.
Finally, thank you very much for the congratulations! I really appreciate you taking the time to play so much of my game, and then further taking time to post such an in depth comment. It's really nice of you, and I appreciate it.
First off - WOW, you crammed a lot into that game, in a small time - Very well done. I'll try to break things down below, there's quite a lot to comment on.
First off controls- Took me a short while to get used to. Initially I didn't like the mechanic about not being able to move while shooting, but overtime I came to enjoy it, as it was.. well different, from the usual topdown space shooter mechanics. The whole idea of trading and/or mining resources- I'm a sucker for those- So I was hooked even before starting. There are obviously a lot more that can be done to the current system, but suffice it to say, I loved it. Once I got the hang of it, I Basically just moved back and forth between the starter planet (Sorry forgot the name :-( ) and the sun. Mining and selling, while killing off the odd pirate now and then. That was easy money. Now eventually when I felt brave and rich enough, I ventured beyond the portal (Of course with my hold loaded with various goods). I was.. slighlt surprised by the increase in pirates, but luckily I had already skilled up a bit in the 'safer zone', so I managed to dodge/survive, and even skill up quite a lot. Once I hit the 50.000 mark you suggested, I decided to press on, for just a little while longer, and ended the game with over 150.000. I may go back and beat that score, as it is sadly, a bit too easy to make a profit- But again I fully understand that balancing economics (And the AI, and other stuff in your game) is nigh impossible in just 48 hours.
As for the graphics- I loved your artstile for the planets, it was really great, and had a nice mood to it.
I would love to see what this game could evolve into, and would be a good candidate to have some story implemented into it as well, if one wanted to do that.
Anyways- I throughtly enjoyed playing this - So far this is probably the game I enjoyed the most this Ludum Dare, so Thanks a lot for sharing the game, and keep up the good work :-)
Nice, vast universe you have here! I enjoyed the graphics and the good tunes. I'm unsure how your ship upgrades, as it seems to just happen. And as far as game feedback goes, I think it would be nice to hear or see when any action is done. Like hearing the trade happen etc.
Appreciated the control customization and that you address them in the tutorial. The tutorial was ok for the first time, but the amount of text gets tedious when you come back and try the game again. The text was slightly too small for my taste and could use some background to help readability.
Overall it seems you got a lot going on here and that's impressive. Good job!
@mekuri Hey, I'm really happy you enjoyed it so much! It's really nice to hear such high praise! And yea, the balancing is rather easy, I suppose I was afraid of making it too hard, no one but my testers beat my previous ludum dare game, and it took them about an hour and half of playing to figure things out. As for the games future, I have some big plans for it. My number one priority is to make the changes suggested here, mostly towards fixing the user interface and quality of life improvements. After that, I'd like to make graphical updates to everything, increase detail and variety of planets, stars, enemy ships, and what have you. Next I'll focus on increasing the scale of the game, adding more solar systems to explore and more things to do. After that I'll refine the economy system, I love complex economics simulators in games. There's also a few nice to have features I may include, such as modular ship design and a branching side quest system. I've done similar stuff before, it's not actually too much work, maybe a day or two for the systems, plus a few hours here and there for content. I'm starting to ramble I think. . . I'll cut this short. Anyways, after all that's done, then I'll add in a story. I suppose I went the long way around to explain all that? Oh well.
@coderaurus Yea, I was wondering about that as well, the sound feedback that is. Now that it's post jam and I'm thinking more clearly, you're completely right. I should have had some kind of click sound or something for everything.
That's really good advice about the tutorial. I'm thinking an opt out button as well some way to more deeply engage the player would be nice changes to the current system. It tries to explain everything in the game all at once, it's a bit much.
Thanks for playing! I really appreciate your feedback!
I finally got to play your game and despite a few bugs I really enjoyed it!
I'm amazed by the amount content, different gameplay mechanics, art and music you were able to produce in such a short time! The main gameplay loop is really well done, it's just fun to fly around and shoot space pirates.
It's hard to complain about this game because there's so much in it for a compo, but I'm going point at a few problems a ran into: * the tutorial was a bit too long, maybe giving info partially could work better; * I couldn't run it on Firefox, but it's ok; * when I accidentally press tab I can't move anymore. this is the biggest issue I had and it kind of prevented me from progressing far in the game
Anyway, a really impressive job!
I recorded my playthrough. Here's a link in case you'd like to see it https://youtu.be/aJkdjOKW03M
@caudatecoder Wowowwowow! Thank you so much for streaming yourself playing! It was so cool to see another human in real time playing! Also, yea you found a new bug! The game does in fact stop letting you put input when you press tab! That's going on the list! Another bug that no one seemed to find yet? If you press the planetconfirmbutton-defualt-e while not near a planet, it'll still bring up a harvestable planet interface! You can't get any resources from it, cause it's blank, but kinda funny.
And yea, that's a really good point at the end there, about a downloadable version. Any future version I were to make would probably get packaged with electron js or something anyway, it wouldn't be too hard. Lessons learned.
Yea the tutorial is a bit long, especially after you've already seen it.
Thank you so much for taking the time to play, I saw you had some trouble getting started, seeing you continue to get it working made me really happy. I really appreciate you going through the trouble. And not only that, you even recorded yourself! This is incredible and it means so much to me. By the way, I just wanted to say one more time that your game Keep The Power is an absolute delight and still sitting in my mind. It's that surprise at the end that really hits you, I loved it.
Thank you so much though. Seeing someone play like this really does make a huge difference.
Wow, that's a lot of content there, especially for a compo game! However, the game end quite early as the "harvest" button does not work for me :tired_face:. But still, good job!
So much content, its impressive. The game is fun and even if, at first, the control feels a bit difficult to manage, I got used to it :smile: Really cool, great job !
Game didn't run for some reason and I only saw a blank gray screen!
That's quite a bit of content for the compo! I'm not cut out for space work, and it took me a bit to get into it. I accidentally spent almost all of my fuel harvesting the first time. I didn't realize that the harvest click registered. Still, awesome amount of depth for such a short time. Awesome job!