rohanmoon 2023-01-09 06:45
5/5 Seriously impressive. I love the sound design, just lovely. Your artwork is lovely too. Incredible achievement to get this done for compo, and generally speaking just a really great piece of work. Fantastic!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Ether Warp
By celtican
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 15 | 4.16 | 23 | |
| Fun | 28 | 4.02 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 135 | 3.45 | 23 | |
| Theme | 50 | 4.19 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 27 | 4.23 | 23 | |
| Audio | 17 | 4.09 | 23 | |
| Humor | 247 | 2.13 | 21 | |
| Mood | 125 | 3.47 | 23 |
5/5 Seriously impressive. I love the sound design, just lovely. Your artwork is lovely too. Incredible achievement to get this done for compo, and generally speaking just a really great piece of work. Fantastic!
this is so well done! i'm impressed by the amount of polish. the art is super cool (like wowow even the menu is so detailed). i'm really bad at controlling games like these, and it was slightly harder to play with a trackpad — seems to be made for the mouse — but it was still pretty fun. good job! very impressive, indeed.
Very impressive, extremely polished, lovely to look at, fun to play and interesting gameplay twist. 5/5!
Oh gosh I already have ratings and comments :open_mouth: c'mon guys, at least give me time to decorate the page with gifs first!
@rohanmoon Thank you! This was the first game that I made OST for, I've only recently started to experiment with making music in the last few weeks. It turned out pretty well though! It took me a LONG time to make it sound okay. I was really struggling with creating a melody for the song—which is not normally a struggle for me—but then I realized that the song I was making was too slow. I bumped up the BPM from 80 to 120, put in a more intricate melody, and made sure to still put some empty parts into the song (still a space game after all) and then it finally felt "right." Fun to make for sure!
@ty Oh gosh, I didn't even consider the trackpad. I did a lot of playtesting with my girlfriend to try to make the controls feel good and the difficulty balanced, but there were definitely some things I could have still improved. I don't even know how I would have solved the trackpad problem if I had thought about it—maybe just offering alternate buttons to shoot/harvest would have been a step in the right direction. I learn something new every time!
@aruspice Thanks! I was overpreparing myself for running out of time, so one of the things I triaged early on was the art style. I didn't have time to texture things or add pretty colors, so I literally just drew outlines for things and colored it in-engine. It worked out really well though: it both looks decent AND it took minimal time to make!
Did anyone manage to buy the FTL upgrade? Hint: the FTL Overdriver is always available for purchase when you reach a certain threshold of money :eyes:
Ok yeah, this is a way better implementation of the theme than my game. Music's great. Graphics are simple, yet cohesive, cohesive, and look pretty good. I do have 2 complaints though. The rotation feels very slippery. I'd find myself trying to make small adjustments, and end up running into asteroids pretty frequently, and then when I hit them, my facing direction gets reversed (not just my momentum), and I end up crashing again. The other is that my money doesn't seem to carry over from one sector to the next, so if I need repairs, I lose all the minerals I gained, even if I were say like 500 away from an upgrade, that's all gone. Other than those two gripes, it's pretty solid. I look forward to seeing it more polished. This is pretty impressive for a Compo entry.
@deepfreeze Thanks you! Your complaints are super valid of course. It's interesting creating controls for a space game since the controls should be both slippery (due to no gravity in space) and also tight (because that's how players like it). I started with overly slippery controls at first, but eventually realized that it was only hurting the game, then I made the controls much tighter. I probably could have made them tighter still. I still really hate bumping into asteroids: I whipped up a quick solution when I really should have dedicated more time to that. Alas, but lessons learned!
Losing your leftover money between warps was an intentional design, the idea is to encourage the player to explore more of the sector and try to quickly harvest crystals before too many pirates arrive. But I think I didn't communicate that to the player well enough; maybe adding a bit of text in the warp gate that says "You lose excess money when warping to a new sector" would have sufficed. Or maybe it was a bad design in general.
Thank you for your feedback!
This game was really fun to play. The music was really good and the sound effect when you collect the ether crystals was quite satisfying. I noticed this a bit late but I love how the look of your harvester ship changes when you get a certain number of upgrades. When it comes to the upgrades getting the one that makes it so that you don't take any damage from asteroids was a game changer(I don't remember the name of the upgrade). The other thing I noticed which I thought was pretty cool was that to destroy other ships instead of shooting them you can also make them run into an asteroid. Also FTL Overdriver go brrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Great game, i really love the minimalistic, drawn artstyle and the movement mechanics in space. I feel like its way too easy tho and i played quite a bit and couldn't find a victory condition. The Ai also ran straight into planets multiple times. For the time of the jam its still great what you put together, those are just details to improve for release. Still really enjoyed playing it, good job :thumbsup:
Great game. This is really fun to play. I love the idea of the same substance being your fuel and material to sell. The minimalistic graphics looks great, the sound effects are perfect and the music fits nicely. Flying around is really fun, especially after you get FTL and asteroid protection and you can go flying around like a madman.
I want more ! At the end I was really too powerfull, so I just stopped (2 secondes of beam = 600k for buying 3 upgrades at 5k :laughing: ) It was adictive, I think it can be a really good base to do a complete game !
Catching up on replies, I'm *super* late...
@paconedved Thanks! The ship appearance change is actually an upgrade: the upgrade does nothing except change the cosmetics of the ship :joy: And FINALLY someone mentioned the FTL Overdriver upgrade! I had the idea for the FTL upgrade pretty early on in development, and I soon realized that it was so fun to upgrade and the idea of "removing your max speed" was so interesting that I decided it would be the endgame condition. Super fun. By the way, I loved your team's interpretation of the theme! Awesome game on your end.
@zluca Yeah, the "victory condition" is not really obvious since most other games literally just say "You Won!" In this case, the FTL Overdriver is the victory condition, but I think I really should have emphasized that the FTL Overdriver is the end of the game. After the climax story beat, end the game as quickly as you can, y'know? Looking back, I think I should have changed the FTL Overdriver's description to "Removes your maximum speed and wins you the game." Also yes, the AI sucks horribly, I haven't yet done non-grid pathfinding and I didn't want to spend too much time researching how to do that during the compo, alas! Instead I triaged by only spawning them when there was a clear path between their spawn point and the player (which helped, but didn't solve the problem). Thanks for playing!
@flying-dog-fish Yeah, the crystals being both money and fuel was an interesting idea. I think I could have experimented with it more, though. An idea I had that I feared too much to implement was the cost of certain actions getting more expensive as you upgrade your ship. Another idea that I had that I didn't implement was losing crystals whenever you take damage (imagine Sonic rings). But the ideas are just what-ifs for now. Thank you!
@loiclegrosfrere The idea of a game where you start weak and end strong has been something that I've been experimenting with in several games for a hot minute. I think it started when I played [Vampire Survivors](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors/) last year. The whole concept is really interesting, and I think it has the potential to spawn a new genre, just like Cookie Clicker did. It's really really satisfying! But I have to tweak the idea a bit before I'll make a game that's ready for liftoff :thinking: Wish me luck, and thanks!
Wow, I really loved that, *great job!!* I keep seeing Compo submissions that beat out Jam submissions, and I think I found another one (:laughing:)! It looks, sounds and *feels GREAT,* even though the idea isn't too complicated, it lends itself to a super chill, super fun to play game; I think this would do really well as a bigger game, but I'll leave that for you to decide (:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:). I don't actually have any negative points on this one, surprisingly enough -- wonderfully done, I thoroughly loved every bit of it! :clap: :clap: :clap:
(only thing I'd say, the game is *reaally* easy; and while that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's a note to be taken anyways :wave:)
The design of this was great! I liked the addition of the rogue-lite progression. I could see this project being a great starting point for a fully developed project.
I really like this game! The graphics and the audio are great! My only issues are very minor. First is that I have a little trouble with the rotation speed maybe tweaking the angular drag? Second is that when you collide with an asteroid your bounce is a little odd. I dont know the fix for this one if your already using a physics material other then mirroring your velocity over the normal of the collision Unity can be a little weird with circle bouncing against each other. Regardless super cool game I really enjoyed this one!
Great game. Well done!! Makes you feel very powerful after a while. [etherwarp.png](///raw/9d8/z/56d7b.png)
Hi! Delighted to share that Ether Warp is featured on the GitHub Blog in our [Ludum Dare 52 wrap up post](https://github.blog/2023-02-03-ludum-dare-52-staff-picks/).