Ground control to major Tomashevsky by kdrnic
This is a game about a soviet cosmonaut that loses contact with the Motherland. The story was greatly inspired by Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A space odyssey" and the related song by David Bowie "Space Oddity". My objective was to create something with a very immersive atmosphere, clearly going for the "Mood" score.
Edit 28/04: "Fixed" the game by adding "Press D to skip dialog" and repeating the instructions below the game's canvas, so that people don't think they are stuck when they can't pass through the dialog.
Edit 28/04 #2: I just discovered it isn't playable in Firefox! Please use Chrome while I try to solve this bug.
Edit 28/04 #3: I solved the Firefox bug. You can now play it on Firefox.
Edit 29/04: My free host at 000webhost.com is blocked by AT&T. The great prophet Jiggawatt had warned us of the evils of businessman foolgarbage. Therefore I uploaded the game in another free host, and changed the entry's link. I hope this host will be more successful than the last.
Edit 29/04 #2: Reverted to previous hosting due to bit.ly's businessman foolgarbage thinking all freely hosted sites are evil.
Edit 29/04 #3: Now hosting the game with Google Drive. Hosting is hell.
Edit 02/05: Check out the post-partum (not post-mortem for my game will live on) at http://gameprogrammersnotebook.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-games-ground-control-to-major.html
Edit 28/04: "Fixed" the game by adding "Press D to skip dialog" and repeating the instructions below the game's canvas, so that people don't think they are stuck when they can't pass through the dialog.
Edit 28/04 #2: I just discovered it isn't playable in Firefox! Please use Chrome while I try to solve this bug.
Edit 28/04 #3: I solved the Firefox bug. You can now play it on Firefox.
Edit 29/04: My free host at 000webhost.com is blocked by AT&T. The great prophet Jiggawatt had warned us of the evils of businessman foolgarbage. Therefore I uploaded the game in another free host, and changed the entry's link. I hope this host will be more successful than the last.
Edit 29/04 #2: Reverted to previous hosting due to bit.ly's businessman foolgarbage thinking all freely hosted sites are evil.
Edit 29/04 #3: Now hosting the game with Google Drive. Hosting is hell.
Edit 02/05: Check out the post-partum (not post-mortem for my game will live on) at http://gameprogrammersnotebook.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-games-ground-control-to-major.html
| Web | http://bit.ly/1hPhwAX |
| Post-partum (not post-mortem as my game will live on) | http://gameprogrammersnotebook.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-games-ground-control-to-major.html |
| New web link | http://tiresome-story.surge.sh/game.html |
| Source | http://gpngames.site40.net/LD29/ |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=11663 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 77% | 2 |
| Overall | 2.89 | 837 |
| Audio | 2.79 | 548 |
| Fun | 2.57 | 935 |
| Graphics | 2.65 | 879 |
| Humor | 2.61 | 431 |
| Innovation | 2.55 | 941 |
| Mood | 3.03 | 514 |
| Theme | 3.26 | 559 |
Also, the wall to the left of the lander is a bit awkward. But oh well, its 48 hours, what are you going to do?
I think this game had good level design, and as I said, I enjoyed the gummy worm enemies.
controls felt clunky, it wasn't obvious that falling too far or touching the worms would kill me. also sometimes i couldn't see where i had to jump.
There's not a lot of contrast to the text most of the time. It's all readable, but too similar colors makes it harder to read than necessary.
Mouse only menus and keyboard only ingame controls makes the menus and game feel like they're from different games. Failing is more disruptive and punishing than it could be too, when you have to keep switching back and forth between inputs. (It's usually best to use the same control method for both menus and ingame, though you have to be careful to avoid accidental menu activation if it pops up when the player presses jump or something when you do that.)
At one place I was jumping while going down a slope (where it says "to further investigate..") and died from the fall. Restoring from the last checkpoint restored me to a point in the air, still falling to my death. Had to restart the game and not do that again to continue..
The light doesn't really illuminate things, and if you have both the light and can use the jackhammer, the action button toggles both at once. Would be better with a dedicated key for each, i think.
Controls overall felt a bit floaty.
The ending was also a bit sudden. I mean, there's the cube and all the knowledge pouring in (nice scene btw), but i kinda expected to get to play as supercosmonaut for a bit, or maybe explore somewhere completely different for a bit. Instead there's just a screen telling you what happened, and that's it. Show, don't tell! (I guess you ran out of time?)
Sorry if this sounds overly negative! Don't take it too hard though, i think you just need a little practice. Keep making games =)
I liked the speech effects.
Every part of graphics was great on it's own but some didn't fit too well together. In my opinion it's better to have lower quality of graphics on specific parts of the game, if it means the overall graphics is more uniform.
The worm puzzle took me a few tries until I figured it out and was very good!
Music could add quite a lot, if you could compose something that would even sound semi-Russian, the game would have benefited enormously.
Well done!
Also, i found it a bit hard with the instantaneous death upon the smallest mistake. The landing part might need some kind of indication for the speed and distance to the surface (just zooming out a bit more might actually help).
It was a bit annoying to play the whole game with the keyboard but having to switch to the mouse after every death. A reset-key on the keyboard might help, especially when you die so often.
Besides that, cool game, and an interesting start of a story (a bit Arthur C. Clarke style, reminded me a lot of 2001). Especially the radio voice over was cool.
USSR develops incredible propulsion technology to get to Neptune, but uses leftover sandwich bags for the space suits.