kylethecoder 2023-05-01 11:35
Another interesting little Godot game! Well done!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Orbital Delivery
By b4ux1t3
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 323 | 3.10 | 22 | |
| Fun | 327 | 2.90 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 173 | 3.42 | 22 | |
| Theme | 289 | 3.55 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 373 | 2.57 | 22 | |
| Humor | 262 | 2.52 | 19 | |
| Mood | 372 | 2.36 | 20 |
Another interesting little Godot game! Well done!
@kylethecoder Thanks for giving it a try! Had a blast figuring out how to use Godot, even if it was a bit stressful.
Understood - if you ever have questions, feel free to ping me anywhere! (BackAt50ft or KyleTheCoder is usually my name.)
It took me a bit of time to get used to the controls at first, but once I unlocked the solar system, the game became a lot more fun. I even discovered a secret technique of spamming space to deliver as many packages as possible :laughing: ! All in all, it's a cool entry, and I enjoyed playing it.
@clemall Yeah, the controls were supposed to be the star of the show, but I ended up burning waaaay too much time on "orbital mechanics" and the firing mechanism and had to let them languish.
Glad you found the _SPACE_ bar! <3
Nice take on the theme. It was fun once I figured out how to get a positive score.
Great gravity simulation. I liked seeing the planets pull the helium packs. The earth orbit practice mode was a nice way to see this mechanic before going solar system.
The controls took some time to figure out. The text on this LD page was instrumental (yay puns - you started it). It was really hard to see the two sliders. I had to spam spacebar to get enough deliveries, so a press-and-hold auto-shoot would have been nice.
Love reading that you tried Godot for this. I'm stuck on Unity for a while, but I'm watching that one closely.
@pincushion the controls are the single biggest disappointment in my eyes. I had plans for a fully-rendered control board, complete with seven-segment readouts. I'm going to post-jam that on stream, I think. As I said in other comments, I just burned through too much time on the "orbital mechanics". I'm glad that time wasn't wasted, though, as most folks seem to like the gravity sim!
I'm glad you had some fun!
Nice work on the orbitals physics. Once I found out there was no limit on the launch button I spent less time delivering and more fun watching making my own asteroid fields 😛
@cinterre I'm very glad you're enjoying the physics!
My two big goals were to make the physics _fun_ and to make a cool in-game control panel for everything. I didn't accomplish the latter, but I'm pretty pleased with the results from the former!
Nice game, i'm now an active member of U.T.A.F. Cool mecanics and i thing the game can be upgrade with more little features easily because of you have solid foundation. Special point for the planet design i really like. Thank you, I enjoyed my first job day! ;)
i enjoyed this game so much, physics are so cool! good job ^^
Really nice concept, and lots of fun, love orbital mechanics! great job
Fun game, fun mechanics. Not sure what the end goal is, other than increasing the score as much as possible. Maybe some sub-goals would be nice?
@elisagonda, @dylanbrowne Thanks for giving it a try! The physics are certainly my favorite part.
@snesgaard I need to draw better attention to the time in the bottom left, and to the fact that the delivery targets have a quota. Small targets need 5 deliveries to get a bonus, large and medium ones need 10. If you don't deliver the full quota, you get a penalty. Unfortunately, I just plain ran out of time before I could implement any of the feedback that would make that obvious!
In any case, I'm glad you had fun!
I was mesmerized by the shapes wasted Helium-3 made while flying into outer space :)
Messed with my cognition. Tech stuff, wished for some planetary tunes to evolve.
I don't know how to tell you this. I ended up with less points at the end than I started with, and I started with 0!
This is why I am a game dev, media person and bartender and not a ... uh.. orbit specialist? I will stick to earth related tasks :sweat_smile:
Seems like you must have gone through much math before arriving at something seemingly realistic, which is impressive when you are working all by yourself within a very short timeframe! Bravo!
@langotriel I spent _waaaaay_ too long trying to get the math right for the orbits, and then threw a lot of it out when I made the earth stationary. (That was a. . .hard lesson). I wish I'd spent more time on balance and less on the orbits, but at least it makes some pretty patterns now and then!
Thanks for playing, and for dropping by the stream!
I'm giving you some points in humor because your description is actually funny
The game, is not very playable honestly. I've just understood after a while that the red thing was the actual target (and not the earth) and that I had to use the orbit of the earth to hit that. It is too slow overall and miss some visual effects that could make this look more dynamic. Also, the fact that the Moon moves, sometimes makes it be in a position where it is harder to even get into the earth orbit, and that is a bit frustrating. This makes it even harder to predict what it will going to happen, making it way too hard to master, making you feel more like u are just throwing them at random just hoping to it the target.
When u get to the solar system, things seems to get even more slower and therefore even less exciting. I've also felt like it was more random, just pressing space. I'm also not sure if spamming it instead of trying to be precise punish you, which I would sort of expect to give u am incentive to play well.
Maybe it should have been more like a fixed thing with like rocks in between the target, so the orbit was actually needed to curve the trajectory and avoid hitting the rocks! With the chance of being able to throw the package from all around the moon. Or you could make it more interesting on the simulation side, having a cool orbit setup that makes the package spins a lot in cool ways on the screen.
You could possibly add that the arrow keys make the sliders go up and down so you don't need the mouse? Besides that, when I pressed the "switch to solar system" toggle, with space u keep toggling it, but this just solves if u click anywhere.
@toccio94 You hit all the major points that I wanted to include, but just didn't have the time to!
I've been post jamming the game on stream, and the major thing I've been focusing on is engagement. Scores popping up when you get points, demonstrating to the player that each target has a delivery quota (Right?! that isn't even mentioned in the text), and trying to make the gravity less "realistic" and more "intuitive and fun".
The game grew a lot during the jam, but most of that growth was "inward".
I ended up chopping out an "energy" system where you had to build up your helium reserves over time, which, itself, was a departure from my original plan of launching _one_ delivery at a time, with huge penalties if you missed.
I removed the concept of obstacles (meteors, satellites, etc.) because I found that they made it really, really hard to score any points at all, but I took them out at a point in time that I was going to _just_ have the earth and moon! Adding them back in for the full system view would probably have helped.
I downsized a lot (including the music and sound effects T_T) simply because I spent too much time trying to make the shooting feel right, when that wasn't even the point of the game to begin with! And if I had decided to just stick with my original plan, with just the earth and moon (and mars making a couple passes), I feel like I could have made things a lot more polished.
Anyway, thank you for the honest and _good_ feedback. I had a blast making this game, but it wasn't without its headaches, and the fact that someone played it enough to form such thorough and nuanced opinions makes me just as happy as the folks who play it and just enjoy making pretty spirals.
I'm especially glad that my writing made you, at the very least, chuckle inwardly. :D
___
Side note: That freaking toggle switch is my least favorite part of this whole endeavor. What sort of _game_ UI actually has a _sticky focus_ on controls?! This isn't the web! I really like Godot's UI framework, but they make some, er, questionable choices in some cases.
This makes really happy ahah
I think u are right, maybe you should have sticked to a smaller system (earth+moon+mars) and focused on finding a way to make that funny and challenging. In the end though, what matters is making it and then going for the next game or jam, and having fun =)