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Space Rover
Space Rover
By harmadillo
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 270 | 2.77 | 22 | |
| Fun | 269 | 2.52 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 180 | 3.22 | 22 | |
| Theme | 166 | 3.57 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 253 | 2.85 | 22 | |
| Audio | 233 | 1.85 | 19 | |
| Humor | 197 | 1.96 | 17 | |
| Mood | 271 | 2.44 | 19 | |
Comments
liam
2026-04-20 14:39
Interesting take on the theme, nicely done, appreciated that you had two game modes in there! I think I had some audio glitches in mine (music disappeared etc) but could be Firefox. Enjoyed figuring out how to compensate for the delay or try to complete a mission with as few sets of instructions.
Manual mode could be cool if the signal delay fluctuated and both modes: that since there is a delay, if there was something realtime that you had to deal with it would make it a lot more challenging. Thought it was cool that you started off in a sort of testing lab and then went off planet! Thanks for making!
I have the impression that there are two ideas in one, with these two modes of movement, too bad I would have pushed the automatic one a little more. Congratulations for your participation
Very cool, I remember back in the 90s they had a little robot that you could input commands like this, im sure people brought one to my school or something like that. I got to the level called untested and after pressing restat it kept sending the robot out straight away so i couldnt input any commands.
@liam The audio was added last so i may not be Firefox. I had planned to make the delay on the manual mode increase when you got to moon/mars levels.
@tasakasama I experimented with the 2 control modes and since they both worked I left them both in. I would be interest to know which mode most people prefer.
@steveofstevesgames I titled the last 2 levels "untested" because didn't really get around to testing them :).
liam
2026-04-22 19:20
@harmadillo I think I preferred the commands mode, I think that had the most potential for some quirky game mechanics and I enjoyed it more setting myself challenges.
cogcomp
2026-04-22 20:38
Cool idea. This is only the second "pre-record the commands" kind of game I've encountered so far and this was definitely the better of the them. The list of commands is easy to understand and I naturally got a better idea of how far you could go in different time periods during the game. Well done on a interesting game!
wizard
2026-04-24 20:22
Very easy to pick up and understand, would have been nice to know roughly how far the rover would travel at certain speeds, instead of having to trial and error it as much but other than that really cool and interesting game.
Reminds me of Logos the Turtle. I felt manual mode was a bit more approachable then automatic mode (the complicated UI scared me off lol). Responsiveness of the bot was unclear when in manual mode. It was hard to gauge how long I should hold down for rotation and movement.
It's impressive that you were able to implement two separate game modes for the compo! Both modes present interesting challenges to overcome, but they're held back somewhat by the level design, which is pretty basic. Still, there's a good foundation here!
pegasys
2026-04-27 18:59
I think this game is held back a little bit by the controls, it's a little awkward not being able to edit the instructions and the rotations feel like they should be relative rather than absolute. Nevertheless the instruction system is pretty cool and it brings back fond memories of those little programming robots you could direct in a similar way to this. Great job!
fifut
2026-04-27 19:31
The game accurately captures the latency involved in controlling a rover on another planet, where you have to issue commands in advance and wait for the results to come back.
Well done :thumbsup:
zirrrus
2026-04-28 18:36
Neat! I expected the rotation to be relative not absolute... took me a second to figure out that the game wasn't buggy :)
@zirrrus That was not intentional. It was intended to be relative rotation. I mostly tested on the first 2 levels where it does't make a difference. I have updated the instructions on the itch.io page and now it is a feature(not a bug).
jimbly
2026-04-28 19:51
Neat game. I also expected relative rotation and that confused me =). I sometimes hit "reset" and the UI for entering commands didn't appear for quite a while. I enjoyed queuing up the commands, I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was a "author whole set of commands, then watch it go" kind of thing instead of doing a few (or, just 1, when I was lazy), watching it, and then continuing from where it was. It was fun when I had to keep track in my head where I thought the rover would be (and then amusing to see how far off my estimates were :laughing:). I made it through all the levels in command mode, only did one in manual mode and it just seemed frustrating =).
Isn't positive rotation anti-clockwise usually?
Thanks for the entry! It feels like you could make a compelling puzzle game by putting everything on a grid
It's an interesting concept, but the rotation confused me, I expected a relative rotation haha, also the speed didn't make sense to me when I can just use Fast every time (maybe it could use distance instead of speed?). Overall it's very fun, good job!
Nice work. It would be interesting to add in energy guage... power is important and you could score against energy use.
This game reminded me of my time piloting underwater robots and trying to make autonomous navigation programs for land robots. Really captured the tricky parts and the overall feeling. I think it provides a solid base for a larger game about piloting space rovers. I imagine it could be fun to have some more planning tools (e.g. onscreen ruler & protractor), but also obstacles/failure conditions to make planning more important. Thanks for sharing your game!