Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Orbital Operations
By bmacintosh
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 162 | 3.60 | 30 | |
| Fun | 224 | 3.30 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 74 | 3.85 | 30 | |
| Theme | 142 | 3.83 | 29 | |
| Graphics | 200 | 3.41 | 30 | |
| Humor | 2 | |||
| Mood | 55 | 3.85 | 29 |
I love the idea of a space flight control operator game, and the vibes of the game are neat. I feel like I either missed something or the games pacing is too slow. I know its a space game, but I found the time between ships departing to be too long and I only ever saw two ships, not sure when more were supposed to appear? Either way, i liked the concept and execution, possibly some bugs / lack of explanation that made it hard to enjoy.
Nice game. Played at a gentle pace but I could see it could be tweaked to make it much harder/faster. The controls and asking for "intentions" fed nicely into the traffic control feel. Reading the messages could be difficult as they could disappear quickly and I found I had to repeated ask for intentions as I did not have time to read the response.
Very relaxing to play (the game and the music!)
I'm with @harmadillo, I could see a challenging sped-up version of this being fun too!
Nice idea, good fit for the theme. I'm vaguely familiar with the terms but some things were hard to understand. I often had intentions overwritten just as i asked for them. Perhaps a player initiated intention should stay for a little while before the next message.
Great concept, quite some gameplay complexity achieved with minimal means, very cool. I think the interaction/responsewould benefit from a better UI. As others have said, the pacing is a bit slow. For me only two departing spacecraft ever appeared, too. Maybe a bug with game progress? Anyway, good entry!
This usually isn't my cup of tea but it was surprisingly fun. I really gradually became more complex in a very nice learning curve. The mood is great with the music is a well. Nice job!
Concept and the mechanics of the game were very interesting. I really enjoyed directing different ships to take off, switching altitude, and land. I found reading the messages difficult because the numbers are written out as words. I like the way all the messages coming in gives it a "frantic" vibe feeling, like a true air traffic controller. At the same time, it seems that having the early messages disappear rather than just scrolling upward makes it feel less like a simulation and more like I'm fighting the game UI. Love the audio and visual style too!
I like the idea of the game, though I'm not sure if it was just a bug or the WebGL version on itch has a fault - no more ships spawned after the second one departed XD. Love the feel and atmosphere though, great work!
I like the flight-control mechanism, nice job! It took me a little bit to figure out what to do and only two ships came out.
I haven't been able to reproduce no ships spawning after the second, but I made some speculative fixes to try to avoid it. If you see it, please let me know what build you're playing and what you did.
@bmacintosh I've tried both the web version and the zip, and neither seem to spawn more than 2 ships (I loaded up the zip while waiting on the web version to see if it was different between the two). It's unfortunate, because I can see the point where this gets really exiting.
@matt-blake I added some logging to the itch.io version to try to track down the problem. Would you be able to try it again and, if the problem still occurs, copy the text from the browser console and share it with me?
I had the same issue, here's my browser log: https://pastebin.com/Y2YZjK59
@mao Thank you! I got a friend to reproduce the issue and I think it may be a tutorialization issue. You have to move ships to the correct ring and then also give them departure clearance, and then give the second ship takeoff clearance to proceed. Does that line up with what you saw?
Very cool game. As others have mentioned, something like a chat history would be very nice in a future version. Similarly some hint of the future trajectory when mousing over different instructions so avoiding collisions is a bit less guess work. Arrivals coming in retrograde also seems to make some collisions very hard to avoid.
Super interesting idea, very good execution! It became super difficult quickly with more ships around. The music fit the atmosphere of the game and the theme definitely came across. Great job!
Really great idea. It's super challenging once there are more ships and you have to really think about your next move. Good job!
Very challenging! Mood is on point. I didn't get far before I started racking up violations but it was cool to push the buttons and tell the ships where to go XD
Great game, with an extremely interesting gameplay (complex and deep). Really felt the theme not only with the space on the three rings, but also with the space in the dialogue box :D
Nice idea for a game and incredible ambiance, unfortunately only two ships spawned for me.
Awesome little game. I liked the idea, and the build up. The mood, music and graphics all work together very well. And the difficulty ramps up progressively. It might be a bit too difficult though. Very nice entry overall ! GG.
Really awesome game! I got hooked instantly and spent way too much time playing it.
So far I've managed to get to 49 ships dispatched. But every time I lose I just want to try it again. :D The idea is pretty simple, but it's a good one, and it's executed really well. Basically, the only thing I didn't like is the radio messages limit. Because of it, I found myself asking the same ship several times where did they want to go, because when they answered another ship started talking and the message I wanted to see got lost in the chatter. I think putting the destinations on the ships on the map would probably make it a bit too cluttered, but maybe having them as icons in the radio interface on the right (visible only on selected ship) would work well?
Another thing you might want to add is some map marker for incoming ships, like maybe putting a circle with an arrow to mark where the ship will enter orbit and in which direction. In the meantime, just adding the direction they're coming in in the message would be great.
The game looks nice. There's not a lot of graphics here, but what's there looks good. The planet looks cool, the orbits are well marked. The interface looks good and is responsive. Everything looks clear, and visual clarity is pretty important in a game like this. I liked the small flickering animation on ships changing course, it's a small thing, but adds a lot to the immersion. :)
Also, a small issue. I don't know if you went for Compo instead of a Jam by accident, but in the Compo external assets (other than fonts) aren't allowed, even if you disable rating in that category. I don't know if there's much point to disabling the music at this point, but it's something you might want to remember for the next time. :)
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@lcstark thanks for the very thorough feedback! The game's design definitely has a tension with how helpful the UI is; there are a lot of UI features that could be added, but might also make the game a lot easier. There are some things you pointed out that probably could use some more communication. Indicating the incoming ships in particular is a good idea, though, to give you the information you need to react to them in time.
You're totally right about the music - I intended to do the Compo and had checked the rules beforehand, but must have got crossed up with the Jam rules somehow. Thanks for correcting me. I'll put up a musicless version and identify the current one as non-compo or extra somehow.
Tried three times but couldn't get past just getting two ships departed, then nothing more happened. Also the ships sometimes become super slow and it takes them forever to get to their destination. Like, one pixel per second slow! Would have loved to try more parts of the game