Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Comet Cowboy
By jonathan-alderson, thetobias and joejeffcock
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 479 | 3.39 | 21 | |
| Fun | 431 | 3.34 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 240 | 3.55 | 21 | |
| Theme | 764 | 2.73 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 536 | 3.31 | 21 | |
| Audio | 266 | 3.44 | 21 | |
| Humor | 616 | 2.25 | 20 | |
| Mood | 307 | 3.60 | 21 |
Great music and vibe! Smashing into the rocks and minerals was satisfying. One piece of criticism would be to have more visual feedback as to what the player is supposed to do during the level. I forgot about what each mineral did to the player and it wasn't clear to me at first that I needed to hold my breath when I drifted away.
Has a grappling hook, so gets good ratings from me. I don't make the rules
Love the music and vibe. I would have loved a tutorial built in because it was pretty hard to get the hang of at first but know that a tutorial would have been hard to accomplish in the time frame. Overall, great job!
It took me a while to understand the mechanics, but once I did, it turned out to be really fun to just swing around and smash glowy rocks that make a super satisfying sound when you hit them. I would love to play a more polished version of this with actual objectives that need to be completed before moving to a new level. The small planets also reminded me of Outer Wilds which is a big plus for me since it's one of my favorite games ever. Great job guys!
It seems to be a common thread with game jam games. After playing it for 3 days straight, it's hard to see what users will find hard to understand. Thanks for the comments.
So nice to see someone also made a game about grappling hooks in space :) Very nice aesthetic, and I also impressed that you made planetary gravitation, it seems to work rather smooth! Although I didn't really get the goals that game wanted me to achieve, flying around comets was nice.
Pros: - A E S T H E T I C ✧.* graphics - Responsive controls - Creative gameplay - Leaderboards (HOW?)
Cons: - Sometimes I get stuck in space - Difficult to get at the beginning - Need a mouse to play - Dead last in the leaderboards
Ok, love grappling hook games and this is really nice/chill. I'm definitely going to play some more of this tonight.
I do have one piece of minor feedback -- I ran into a small issue where I had some minor gimbal locking on the player controller. I think you may have been doing Vector3 player rotation instead of Quaternion rotation. This usually doesn't matter much but it can cause some minor inconveniences in games with multidirectional gravity. Honestly not a very big deal at all though :)
Excellent game!
Also, where can I listen to more "space jazz" :)
@daniel-alhadeff Thanks for the feedback! Nah we did use quaternions, but we didn't have time to use them amazingly effectively .The issues come from the first person character only actually having 4 degrees of freedom (Move on 3 axis, while you can look up and down, you can only really rotate on 1 axis), which is (mostly) intuitive but it's navigating a "world" that demands 6 degrees. In this situation, throttling of rotation is a given, but unfortunately we didn't have time to make the throttling that sophisticated/invisible despite having some theories on how to do it. Would be fun to develop further though.
The space jazz is currently a Comet Cowboy exclusive. I "recently" started uploading music to this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@diaryofanamateurpianist9656 But the backlog is pretty immense haha, you'll probably have to sit through some regular jazz, electro-funk, modern classical and chip tune music before I get round to the Comet Cowboy OST
Very fun game! Has to be the most of I've played this game jam. Easy to get going and fun to get speed and upgrades. Sometimes I would miss a shot and would just float out into space. Would have liked to either be able to reset or maybe have a way of slowly getting back in that case. Running around on the ground, it was easy to get stuck at times, even if that is not the main focus of the game. Nice graphics and nice concept! Well done
Cool concept! I find it a bit hard to aim shots, but that could just be because of all of the 3D rotation.
Fun game. The smash sound was very satisfying. I struggled to hit the rocks a lot of the time. The very limited amount of grapples makes it tricky to get the hang of. All my attempts ended up flying off into space with none left. The game could use an introductory level without those restrictions to get used to flying around. I also encountered that gimbal lock issue mentioned above a few times which was annoying. The gravity suddenly spinning you around was a bit disorientating.
Very fun! Didn't work on Firefox, but I got it running on Chrome. The visuals of the glowy rocks orbiting around were very neat looking.
The mechanics are epic! If there's a game released with this gameplay style, I would love to play. The graphics were simple, but enough for this short game jam. The music was relaxing and created the mood for the game. Nice job!