Galactic Traffic Controller

random-ideation-studios 2023-05-02 05:41

Good game!

By the way, I fixed my game's link and it is working so pls check it out

bmacintosh 2023-05-02 05:53

I got fired. I like the idea, though! Playing it did make me feel like I was directly space traffic. More refinement and quality of life in the UI would go a long way, such as indicating which pad bar was cargo and which was fuel, and seeing which ground crews were busy without waiting a second for them to blink. There were two bugs that had a negative impact on the gameplay: trying to assign a ship to a pad when there are no ships of that size opens an uncloseable black window over that pad, and sometimes tapping a key would cause that action to occur multiple times (such as scrolling two positions instead of one).

ponygirlluna 2023-05-02 05:57

I have to admit that it took me a couple minutes to understand how the systems were supposed to *really* work and the text was a little difficult to read quickly. But once I got started, I really liked pretending to be a pad controller. I've gotta say that was something I wasn't expecting out of this jam and it's right up my alley as an aviation/space enthusiast.

I think my biggest issue is that I spent most of my time waiting on ground crews to finish so I could land more ships instead of actually landing ships. Perhaps it was rng being rng, but most of my queue was large ships, so the pads were always full and the crews always busy.

linkway 2023-05-02 21:06

A little complex, but very cool idea. Well done

1tater-no-tots 2023-05-03 06:30

Cool idea! I liked the fast pace it seems to install in the player from the get go, the queue filling up is innately stressful. Occasionally one of the screens on the middle console would black out. I think I could still assign ships to spots, just couldn't see where.

twobitadder 2023-05-04 20:05

It took me a minute to understand what I was looking at and then I read your instructions, lol. It took me a little bit after that to really get the whole system but once I did I found it a really neat idea! I liked the kinds of decisions it created, as once I understood the goal a little better I made it a priority to unload large ships and then work on whoever was left after that. I did also notice that I got a *lot* of large ships, I'm not sure if that is a design decision or if just a bit of RNG, as PonyGirlLuna mentioned. Still though, I really liked the idea of flipping between different screens and the kind of UX that created - it always is fun when it feels a little more chaotic like that.

One thing I would say is that it might be easier to read the state of the crews if you used a color/symbol change instead of alternating a "BUSY" title - it was a little hard for me to tell at a glance which crews were and were not available for assignment. There were also situations where it seemed I would get multiple keypress registers within a frame, making selecting an object sometimes involve scrolling past it once or twice before I stopped on it, and selecting a pad with no available ships provided just a black screen, that sometimes could only be rectified by a ship of that size coming into port so I could select it.

That being said, I would love to see more of this concept! I found it very satisfying and would absolutely play a fuller version of this game with more ideas, like emergency crews for accidental fuel fires or an interstellar customs mechanic or something. Great work! :)

jacobingalls 2023-05-06 01:25

The ship callouts were cool.

I agree with the other folks that it was hard to know what to do at first. I'm not sure if this is a bug, but I could only ever dock large ships. Even though all three of the medium docks were empty and there was a medium ship on the arrival/incoming screen.