Star Rover by FacticiusVir

[raw]
made by FacticiusVir for LD27 (COMPO)
Welcome to Star Rover!

In this game, you control a crew of robots piloting a ship through space, boldly going where most people have the sense not to. However, communication with the ship is limited, so you can only send instructions in short bursts - about ten seconds worth at a time.

There's a tutorial to introduce you to the controls, in which you'll help a single robot manage a simple engineering problem. Select the robot to see its program listing, and the instructions you can add. Click instructions on the right to add them sequentially to the listing at the bottom, and right-click items in the listing to remove them.

Press the Begin Turn button at the top to send the program and see what happens!

Once you've got the hang of the tutorial, try a generated game - a new ship, crew and mission is created for you to try and survive each time. Remember that, when you have multiple robots to control, you can give them all their own list of instructions, and they'll perform them simultaneously.

== IF THE GAME CRASHES ON STARTUP ==

Sadly, .NET apps don't have a graceful failure if the framework isn't installed, so if you're getting a crash, it's almost certainly this. I'll see about writing a native wrapper, but all that'll give you is a graceful failure ;-)

This game is written in C#/XNA, so it requires .NET 4.5 (http://bit.ly/ZYrRgq) & XNA 4.0 Refresh (http://bit.ly/11PKzer). I'll port it to Monogame in the next day or two so folks on Mac & Linux can play.

Ratings

Coolness 54% 3
Overall 3.19 418
Audio 3.19 209
Fun 2.79 666
Graphics 2.89 551
Humor 2.29 508
Innovation 3.46 231
Mood 2.74 544
Theme 3.32 406

Feedback

Infernal
26. Aug 2013 路 02:38 UTC
crashes when I try to run it.
Croze
26. Aug 2013 路 02:38 UTC
Very good idea and well put out there
jwolf
26. Aug 2013 路 02:43 UTC
Sorry, I could not run your entry, so I won't rate it just yet. Once it mentioned a bunch of files that were dumped into some temp directories, but after editing them I couldn't make much sense of them. Not sure if this helps at all, but the paths look something like:

\AppData\Local\Temp\WERC259.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml
\AppData\Local\Temp\WERD98C.tmp.appcompat.txt
\AppData\Local\Temp\WERD9CB.tmp.mdmp
馃帳 FacticiusVir
26. Aug 2013 路 02:43 UTC
Infernal: Apologies for asking the obvious, but have you got .NET 4.5 & XNA 4.0 installed?
Feysoura
26. Aug 2013 路 04:32 UTC
crashed and couldn't play it! Sorry!
shohs
26. Aug 2013 路 04:35 UTC
I enjoyed this. It's a nice little turn-based game. I liked the robot voices (they sort of reminded me of Starcraft). I did find that the generated games sometimes screwed you over, like getting a 5-second disaster halfway through a turn. Otherwise, good job!
nintendoeats
26. Aug 2013 路 19:56 UTC
Very cool idea. It's like the classic "turtle" program but with a goal! I also really like the graphics and sound. Those voice-overs are excellent.

I couldn't win though. I'm not really sure what I was doing wrong :(
rustybroomhandle
27. Aug 2013 路 09:54 UTC
Crashed as soon as I opened it also. I do have XNA 4.0 and .net 4.5 installed. Running on Win 7 64-bit.
doonay21
27. Aug 2013 路 10:08 UTC
This one has some soul and mood. Good job!
timtipgames
27. Aug 2013 路 10:08 UTC
I really like this game. I'd like to play this game with more robots, more consoles and a more complicated ship system - say, consoles that have to be used in a certain order or during a certain time step. I had a lot of fun playing this!
bitserum
27. Aug 2013 路 10:10 UTC
it looks like a good start to something bigger, but it got old quickly. nice mood overall.
馃帳 FacticiusVir
27. Aug 2013 路 10:26 UTC
@RustyBrromHandle: Curses - will have to see if I can replicate it.
Alexander Ponomariov
27. Aug 2013 路 11:11 UTC
Simply graphics, but have some nice mood, well done!
ezolotko
29. Aug 2013 路 13:07 UTC
Great idea, please make this entry into something more.
ashdnazg
29. Aug 2013 路 13:30 UTC
It's well executed, but I didn't find it too challenging.
It's felt mostly luck dependent.
JD557
31. Aug 2013 路 18:48 UTC
I liked the concept, although it seems to have some problems on my resolution (1366x768).

Also, is there any way to delete a command before starting the turn?
馃帳 FacticiusVir
01. Sep 2013 路 22:25 UTC
You can right-click items in a program to delete them.