LudumData

Hi Pluto! by nekoballs

[raw]
made by nekoballs for LD 38 (COMPO)

Your second best friend (after the moon...) Pluto, has been feeling down lately cause NASA told him he ain't a planet no more :( But there are rumours they will change their mind and classify Pluto as a planet once again! Go pay your old friend a visit and bring him these great news!

Instructions

Earth will follow your mouse horizontally. Hit the astroids to make Earth jump up until you reach Pluto. Hit glowing comets to create checkpoints. If you fall down you will die and respawn at the last checkpoint. There's always a path upwards. Pluto is about 1750 units up (feel free to stop earlier, its a long way up...). - Mouse: Move Earth horizontally
- Space: Pause - M: Mute sound

Links

If the WebGL build lags, try changing browser or download the standalone version. All builds are 32-bit. - WebGL: https://e4lime.itch.io/hi-pluto (Seems to work best in Chrome) - Windows: https://e4lime.itch.io/hi-pluto - Mac: https://e4lime.itch.io/hi-pluto (untested) - Linux: https://e4lime.itch.io/hi-pluto (untested) - Source: https://github.com/e4lime/ludum-dare-38-hi-pluto

Screenshots

hi-pluto<em>01.png hi-pluto</em>02.png

Gameplay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKpjr7k8pFg

Timelapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7fGj-1U4rE

Tools Used

  • Engine: Unity 5.6
  • Graphics: Blender, Krita, Paint
  • Audio: sfxr
  • Programming: DOTween

Changelog

  • 1.1
    • Fixed bug that caused the level generator to stop after respawn.
  • 1.2
    • GUI properly scales on big screens.
    • Fixed Pluto being stretched and moved him down.
  • 1.3
    • Game works properly on 4:3 screens
    • Fixed Pluto not always getting triggered
    • Added a Quit game button for the windows build
  • 1.4
    • Changed quality settings for the WebGL build to reduce lag
    • Increased time between Fixed Timesteps to reduce lag and fixed the some of the jittering this caused
    • Fixed a bug that caused the game to start during the intro screen and during pause
    • Fixed memory leak
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/hi-pluto

Ratings

Overall 388th 3.042⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 264th 3.167⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 338th 2.958⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Theme 157th 3.708⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 303th 3.125⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Audio 324th 2.652⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 157th 3⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 338th 2.909⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Given 34🗳️ 33🗨️

Feedback

Bill Wheatley
03. May 2017 · 10:48 UTC
Very neat game, thanks for sharing. I found it pretty hard and the respawn system didn't seem to work as the docs indicated, or maybe I was not groking it properly.
Alex Hart
06. May 2017 · 20:47 UTC
Nice, took me like 4 tries to figure it out, but then I got to 30.
Jimbly
06. May 2017 · 20:49 UTC
Neat, and decently hard! I think I made it up to altitude of 300 before giving up. Sometimes I would hit an asteroid *after* I heard the death sound (when it was at the bottom of my screen), and the next restart I'd start jumping upwards. Not sure if that was a bug of feature ;). Plays nicely for me in Chrome.
kleinzach
06. May 2017 · 21:21 UTC
Solid entry. Controls felt good once I got a hang of it. Your use of the theme is quite silly, and I like it! I ended up quitting after a while when it just got a little too repetitive, so I would recommend adding some more mechanics to mix it up, perhaps different types of things to bounce off of.
Reactor-Scram
07. May 2017 · 03:06 UTC
I like it! It was fun and easy to understand. The sounds were okay but not great. Maybe with some animations or particles it would be more fun to watch. I died around 340 and quit there.
starspell
07. May 2017 · 03:10 UTC
There's some nice little bit of polish in this game. In particular I like the background, camera motion and the random sets of sounds, they really help keep the audio fresh. The game could use more though, its a pretty basic game whose mechanics have been done quite a few times before. Next time you might want to take two well used concepts from different games and attempt to fuse them together. You often get pretty interesting results that way!
MiggyG
07. May 2017 · 03:18 UTC
Fun to play! The difficulty was just enough that I kept coming back. Nice work! I never did get to see my friend tho :(
madmaw
07. May 2017 · 04:44 UTC
I found it a bit challenging until I started pausing whenever I got in trouble :D.
PietPtr
07. May 2017 · 12:37 UTC
It is basically Doodle Jump with unlimited horizontal speed, I liked playing it :)
Pandakipu
07. May 2017 · 13:18 UTC
Nice game, really fun to play, nice job.
mhaton
07. May 2017 · 16:07 UTC
Simple and effective :) Good fun! I found once I muted the slightly ear-piercing sound effects and stuck on some relaxing piano music it was actually incredibly relaxing to play. Good job!
maartene
07. May 2017 · 17:18 UTC
Nice game! First truly new mechanic I've seen this LD. It's a bit like a puzzle game with a lot of risk/reward: which jump do I try and take? "Ah, just missed it, bummer", "I got it! Neat!".
clegamecoop
07. May 2017 · 18:25 UTC
Very interesting approach. Unfortunately, I had a really hard time getting started on most tries. Also, I think some attempts felt like there wasn't a viable path. Graphics & SFX were very cool, though! Good job!
quadtree
08. May 2017 · 07:33 UTC
Nice job, graphics sound and such seemed to go together well. I did find it fairly hard, I'm not sure if I'm just not good at this genre or what. I did notice that sometimes the random placement of rocks made it almost inevitable that I'd fall, because there just wasn't another "rung" on the ladder I could get to quickly enough.
Shamps
08. May 2017 · 20:32 UTC
I didn't understand at first what I was supposed to do - I intuitively thought I was meant to avoid the asteroids (I've watched too many natural disaster movies, clearly). But once I understood the asteroids were there to help me, I really enjoyed this game! It involves just enough skill to be able to keep bouncing without it becoming to difficult, and the procedurally generated asteroids keep it from becoming repetitive. I really like the idea of other planets coming into view as you progress - this keeps it from becoming dull. The game could do with some engaging SFX and maybe some music (it's too quiet at the mo). I love the wackiness of the idea too - not seen anything like this before :)
Jaenis
09. May 2017 · 05:45 UTC
That was hard :) Great concept anyhow, just wished that it would have started a bit simpler "level". Now if you miss one asteroid it is almost guaranteed game over, and with my reaction speed... well :)
mwcz
10. May 2017 · 16:34 UTC
Hello! I really like your timelaps of you creating the game that's pretty cool, and shows how much work went into making this game. I found the controls hard to figure out and didn't get very far. Good humor though poor pluto!
Thinkofname
11. May 2017 · 13:01 UTC
I ended up getting to impossible situations often making it impossible to continue.

Graphics are great though. I feel like there should be more feedback when jumping off the rocks instead of them just disappearing, it would improve the feel of the game a bit.
blaster391
11. May 2017 · 15:20 UTC
Very addictive game! Never found myself in an unwinnable situation and alway felt like just having one more go. I like that even when you lose, you don't lose much altitude so you still feel like you are progressing. Ended up with a high score of around 350, and made it to around the altitude of 1000.
Lars DK
13. May 2017 · 00:06 UTC
Hey! Great game. I made it all the way to Pluto!

Things I really liked:
1. Fast, frantic gameplay - lots of fun to play!
2. Save points worked well - gave a sense of progress
3. Cool graphical touches - planets spinning, nice background etc

Things to work on:
1. Music would have been awesome
2. Mouse control is tough on webgl ... provide options
3. Asteroids should ideally scale for difficulty - more early on, closer to the earth - then universally harder later
LeviDSmith
13. May 2017 · 08:58 UTC
I had fun playing this, but it seemed to become monotonous after a while. I got to 1000 altitude and then had to quit. I'm assuming that it is possible to eventually reach Pluto. Sometimes I felt that the placement of the asteroids were random, and if there is a break in asteroids then it's impossible to continue. The yellow asteroids were a nice touch by allowing the player to continue.
Wati888
15. May 2017 · 17:20 UTC
Great entry. Really look great, and nice functionality. Also, really matches the theme as well!
obidubi
17. May 2017 · 09:17 UTC
Very cool game! It was a little hard at first (especially with my small track pad) but I was able to soon get the hang of it and I could get a fairly high altitude. The graphics were very good and the sound effects made the game more interesting. Your game reminded me of the game doodle jump, which is a game where you jump platforms in the same way and they disappear after they leave the bottom of the screen (Your asteroids did as well, which meant that despite my efforts to move to the last location I could remember of an asteroid I passed, it wasn't there anymore). One improvement you could make to your game would be to make the asteroids spawn closer together at the beginning so that it is easier to get started when playing your game. Another problem I found was that even though I moved the mouse across an asteroid, if I was too fast it wouldn't register my collision with the asteroid (My assumption as to why this happens is that you decided to place the earth wherever the mouse was on the screen, which is great, but the mouse doesn't move smoothly across the screen. It jumps far across the screen when you drag it really fast, which means that the same thing happens to the earth in your game and it never actually collides with the asteroid, but instead just jumps to the other side of it. A good way to fix this might be moving the earth at a very high velocity towards the mouse position on the screen so that it actually meets the asteroid at some point in time and Unity can register the collision. It worked for me as long as it wasn't anything above 1000 units per second in a game I made in Unity). Overall, this is a very well done entry and I am curious to see what might be added in the future! :)