Planet Earth Is Blue by Adhesion

[raw]
made by Adhesion for LD22 (COMPO)
NOTE!!! This needs XNA 3.0 to run. Meaning, NOT 3.1 or 4.0. (The different versions can coexist just fine, I in fact have all three installed myself.) See the XNA runtime link above for the download. If you're having issues getting it to run, you might want to try the installer, which will automatically install any needed dependencies.

Soundtrack here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10018382/Planet%20Earth%20Is%20Blue%20OST.zip

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"This is ground control... your circuit's dead, there's something wrong..."
On a routine mission, you stumble into a strange portal and find yourself
-alone-
in a parallel dimension.
Search for the space eggs to survive and find your way home.
Good luck !

Controls
--------
WSAD / Left Stick: Move
Left/Right / Right Stick: Rotate
Space / Right Trigger: Shoot
Left Control / Left Trigger: Bomb (recharges, you can see when it is available again when the ship icon at the top left is lit up)

Reqs
----
Note, if it crashes on startup it's most likely just missing a dependency.

XNA Framework 3.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=22588)
--note: newer XNA versions don't seem to be backwards compatible, so if you only have 4.0 installed, you'll need to get 3.0
.NET Framework 3.5 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=21)
DirectX 9.0c (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=35) (but you probably already have that)

Ratings

Coolness 100% 1
Overall 2.97 215
Audio 3.78 10
Community 3.08 119
Fun 3.00 118
Graphics 2.94 239
Humor 1.65 412
Innovation 2.03 504
Mood 2.19 400
Theme 2.36 453

Feedback

revilossor
19. Dec 2011 路 16:43 UTC
Liked this, felt a little unfinished though. Didnt really do much shmupping (until the boss), was more efficient to just speed collect everything, didnt understand when i was losing health. Awesome music though.
namrog84
19. Dec 2011 路 22:50 UTC
Had some issues for a while with dependencies issues. I thought I had both of them already installed, but I finally got game to launch.

To be honest, I hated the controls. It made me really dizzy really fast.
should have had WASD as standard move around, and then maybe mouse and have it auto rotate in that direction or shoot in that direction or something. It just didn't feel right to me.

yay sounds. When I appeared, to fight guys it seemed like there were 50-100 guys and I couldnt really do much to them. seemed overwhelmed? maybe on a joypad, it would have been better as you noted left stick, id assume it supports controller.

It is a decent entry though. Good music/sounds. decent art, though the sizing felt slightly small. Hard to hit targets.
Keep it up! keep polishing it!
Dax
23. Dec 2011 路 03:25 UTC
A fun game!
During all the stages, I was rushing to the eggs, bombing the middle.
I almost died at the boss after I killed it because of the little aliens.
Dax
23. Dec 2011 路 15:48 UTC
Also, why did you use XNA 3.0?
馃帳 Adhesion
23. Dec 2011 路 19:47 UTC
No good reason :) An old project I'm still working on started on XNA 3.0, and by the time I realized I should've upgraded for LD, it was a bit late for that (ie, about a week ago)
Benjamin
23. Dec 2011 路 22:53 UTC
nice game, I played through the boss but it was a bit too long to reach him, maybe 3-5 eggs for each level would make te game more casual. I Like the soundtrack and your timelapse rock, it make me want to try the notepad thing next time. That's a lot of content for 48h congratulation !
SparkCloud
26. Dec 2011 路 22:20 UTC
Couldn't run; Windows error box popped up.
馃帳 Adhesion
26. Dec 2011 路 22:43 UTC
@SparkCloud: do you have the XNA and .NET frameworks installed? Note that you need to have the exact version (3.0 for XNA and 3.5 for .NET) - newer versions can coexist with older ones but aren't backwards compatible, as far as know.
OddOneOut
31. Dec 2011 路 02:15 UTC
Fun game and awesome soundtrack! The core gameplay was quite good but I felt constantly a bit underpowered. Thanks for the controller support, I think it's really overlooked but really awesome when I see it implemented. You also got Space Oddity stuck in my head with just a title and one sentence :D
caranha
03. Jan 2012 路 04:49 UTC
Couldn't run or install it for some reason :-(
馃帳 Adhesion
04. Jan 2012 路 01:00 UTC
@caranha: check my previous post about XNA versions (you probably just need to get 3.0 exactly). Also, I just added an installer that might help with any dependency issues.
AyCe
05. Jan 2012 路 00:23 UTC
Nice game! Attacking was a bit useless but OK :) Somehow I lost the whole game at the boss battle. Anyway, nice graphics and audio!
Kitch
05. Jan 2012 路 00:44 UTC
I think if I had a controller, I could have enjoyed this more, but the keyboard controls just didn't do it for me. (But I'm not quite sure there is a good keyboard control scheme for a dual stick that doesn't involve the mouse)
zairon
05. Jan 2012 路 01:19 UTC
I liked the game a lot although the difficulty using the controls (using keyboard) made the game too hard for me. It was a bit too hard to tell when you were being hit, so I was doing great and then I would get overwhelmed. Maybe a shield around the ship that flashes when you take damage rather than the ship having hps? Still, one of the better games I have rated.
Raptor85
08. Jan 2012 路 02:44 UTC
would love to test but XNA3 and up currently do not run under WINE
Zuieni
08. Jan 2012 路 03:26 UTC
Really nice game! The audio rocks. I played the first level serious but after that I just rushed through all the levels and collected the eggs until the boss that was kinda easy. But still a cool game!
DDRKirby(ISQ)
08. Jan 2012 路 06:13 UTC
Some glaring balance issues, as mentioned, but really not bad overall. You should mention that the bomb is rechargable and not a one-time use thing.

I don't know if I agree with your control/perspective scheme, but it worked fine, with the exception of how you handled stage boundaries, which I found to be extremely disorienting.

Parallax backgrounds were a great touch ;)
Kelly Thomas
08. Jan 2012 路 06:41 UTC
they really travel in packs don't they
Dan C
08. Jan 2012 路 17:14 UTC
This is great!

It's too grindy for me, though. Killing the aliens was frustrating because they are so small and take so many hits. In the end I found that I had so much health I could just go straight into the middle of a swarm of aliens and take the eggs without worrying too much about getting hit.

The music is great, as are the background graphics.

Extra community star for linking to Album-a-Day. I didn't know about that and will give it a go some time!
wbobeirne
08. Jan 2012 路 19:33 UTC
A classic feel game with sweet music, but the actual gameplay felt really unpolished. The control scheme wasn't very fitting to the gameplay, and enemy AI just had them clustering around objectives. Your shots felt weak, so I just ended up charging in and bombing the enemies, which didn't work when the clusters got to large.

Great work though, especially on the music.
nickd3000
08. Jan 2012 路 22:43 UTC
gonna skip this as it requires xna to be installed :)
Malactus
09. Jan 2012 路 03:55 UTC
Fun game, a tad bit disorienting perhaps with the camera rotating with the ship, but the audio was very good and the graphics were good.

The enemies however didn't seem to be much of a threat until the final boss, as they shot widely and just look randomly at directions. Could just directly run straight into a group of enemies, blast a bomb while picking up an egg. The Pea shooter seemed to be not as useful as the bomb.
Veralos
09. Jan 2012 路 07:30 UTC
The gameplay was fun, but not very balanced. Shooting enemies wasn't worthwile since you could just as easily run in and grab the egg without defeating any of them. The graphics and audio are great. I liked the soundtrack. I used an Xbox 360 controller, which worked suprisingly well, and my final score was 32350.
defiantburrito
09. Jan 2012 路 08:05 UTC
Pretty good. The spinning made me dizzy at first, but I got used to it. It felt a little tedious and un-fun to fight the enemies, so most of the game was kind of boring. I liked the boss at the end, though! The music was nice.
Mstrp2ez
09. Jan 2012 路 08:55 UTC
I really liked it! The graphics are good, the audio is great and it's easy to move about. What i didn't like is the time it takes to clear out all of the enemies. No upgrades (as far as i could find) made it take ages to clear a really big swarm of monsters. But then i found that you could just ignore all of the monsters and fly right over them onto each egg. This way you could get to the final level in about 1 minute, and not having fired a single bullet until then. But balance is hard to do in 48h. Great work on your entry!
rawbits
09. Jan 2012 路 23:52 UTC
I was like aaah it isn't fit in the theme and suddenly a twist in the end. :)

You can try out the controls on the main screen. This is very good!

Nice music, good graphics. You've made a really nice shooter.
demonpants
10. Jan 2012 路 00:35 UTC
Any chance for an OSX / Unix version?
馃帳 Adhesion
10. Jan 2012 路 16:27 UTC
Thanks for the all the comments everybody! Kind of funny that in my first LD, my main problem was not playing my game enough :)
The horrendous balance became pretty obvious after I finished, so that's the first thing I would fix. I was also planning on having weapon/life/bomb pickups - the latter would hopefully limit the case of being able to ignore enemies and just pick up the eggs (which give you health).

Not sure what to do about the control scheme on keyboard. Mouselook akin to an FPS? Locked camera with mouse-based ship rotation? I'm not sure how well the latter would work since it would end up being a totally different paradigm to the gamepad controls, which I think work pretty well. I was actually originally going to make a straight-up vertical shooter but I thought the free-roam with camera lock-on would be more interesting.

@DDRKirby(ISQ): Thanks for pointing out the bomb thing, it was a bit of an afterthought in development so I didn't think of documenting it. Added.

@demonpants: Doubtful since it depends on XNA. You could try Monogame (http://monogame.codeplex.com/) but I don't know how well it works.