Overall, I think this is a really nice game for 48 hours, especially the graphics and audio. The gameplay could have been a bit better.

I really liked the sound effects and I quite liked the music! The graphics were great, as well. I liked the particles a lot. The font also fit well.

The controls are okay, but it can still be hard to get to the rotating planets correctly, especially as you seemed to continually drift towards the edge.

The game is quite hard! I think maybe too hard, even, but I'm not a good gamer. The first planets you visit could have had a lower amount of guardians, or you could have had a number of lives.

I think the jam theme could have been used a bit better. There were worlds, but they weren't especially small.

Minor points:
- The tutorial was a bit long and with a lot of text. It did look nice, but I would've preferred something in-game.
- It was a bit hard to see yourself on the minimap (I was playing windowed, if that matters).
- I had to click through the intro each time. Quite short, but with such a hard game I'd prefer a quicker restart.
- I really liked the death explosion!

A cool idea and well designed to boot. The audiovisuals are pleasing too.

The controls could be simplified a bit. There is never a situation where I want to fly over a planet without landing. This is to say, having to press E to land is both unnecessary and error prone. Taking off needs a separate key though.

The tutorial is indeed long'ish, but well written and funny enough to make it bearable.

Good work! All hail the :sunny: :dog:

@florian-van-strien
All of yours are valid complaints, some of which I was aware of but couldn't quite fix due to the time constraints while others were just me being dumb, but difficulty part was intentional! I playtested it a lot and changed things around until I thought it was challenging enough, but I agree that it may be frustrating.
My interpretation of the theme was the idea of the universe contracting, making the world smaller every second, but I guess it's kind of a stretch.
Anyway, huge thanks for the feedback!

@huvaakoodia
Wow, I actually think it would be MUCH better if the player ship would land automatically. Great suggestion, thanks.

Promote the fuck out of this. This is a really rad entry, the intro is cool and sets up the game well (really liked the transition to title, though that got annoying after restarting a few times), the game design is pretty good but could probably use a bit of balancing so it felt less down to luck (though maybe thats intentional). The music fit the urgency of the mission too. The graphics overall were very nice and coherent. In general while balance wasnt great, the polish put into this made it a joy to play.
This is a great compo entry, hope you're proud.

I enjoyed this - it's really polished and the concept is original!

The gameplay is good and to take it further, I would adjust it to rely less on luck. Dodging the police requires skill, but being able to collect enough people in time is very dependent on where you spawn. Besides that, I was a bit confused if there was any use in rotating the ship with the mouse - I don't think so, so in the end I just used the keyboard.

The graphics + music are really nice, especially the explosion + bullet effects. Good work!

For a compo this is pretty good. Gameplay could have some more deep and variation, but it was overall a good little bit of fun.

I loved this. The game was fun, and the writing was hilarious. "Fig. 6: The cosmic manifestation of the SUN GOD". Loved the timing of SUN GOD in the intro.

My criticisms: sometimes it felt like a bad random draw that starts you too far from PLANETS made the game unwinnable (but might have been me just being lousy at it). The MINIMAP could have made it more obvious which blip was the player. The color distinction between space and NOTHINGNESS could have been more obvious.

None of that really takes away from it though.

The gameplay was very original. I originally thought "whoa, the GALACTIC POLICE are super unfair", but it was because I was bad at the game. They're balanced very well for the "get in and get the hell out" gameplay. Great great job.

Loved the graphical style, looked awesome! The tutorial was a little too much of a wall of text for me, I ended up skipping through it and then not really understanding how to play! (My own fault I know...) I would have liked to have seen some tutorialisation in the game, and I think you could have made it auto-land on planets when you're near them rather than having to press E; additionally some kind of graphical fx to indicate you're invulnerable while landed on a planet would have helped too. Great entry overall, well done!

The intro and the whole game was very good. I especially enjoyed the music which was quite catchy. The game worked smoothly and the tutorial pages were very useful.

Great sound and graphics, nice general weirdness. Pretty hard, though. Two things: can you list the controls somewhere on the page? Also, is there any relevance to the direction you're pointing?

Great soundtrack to a great game :) For my taste the game was a bit too hard initially, but the execution of the game was done really well, i enjoyed what i played :) also very useful tutorial, one thing that might have been good tho, is to signal the player when he should press E, i read the tutorial but i kind of overlooked the point that i can drive into the planets which caused some confusion^^ Also once your on a planet you kind of have nothing to do for a few seconds, that down time could have maybe been shorter :)
Overall a really good entry for the compo :)

@zarkonnen
Yeah, you're right, I should have listed the controls here right from the beginning. Done, thanks! And no, there's really no practical usage for rotating the ship and in retrospect I guess it wasn't such a rational idea. Could've just made the ship rotate to where it's headed.

@davidthelazar
@t-mw
You are both very much correct about the game being hugely luck-dependent. I wanted to implement a kind of randomness manipulator for planet starting positions that would make sure it's not too unfair (which is not that hard to do, I know), but ended up not having enough time to do it. :(

Pretty awesome game! I love the music (though the volume up/down of it got to me a bit). Really nice-feeling controls. It's really just solid. Other than the randomness that sometimes makes it unfair, it's super good. My god is the sun.

This is a great entry, very polished. The music and visuals are great, very juicy. I like the explosion effect very much. Good job overall.

I'm very impressed that this is a compo entry, after playing I expected this to be a jam entry, had to double check.

The game is a bit too luck based. I think you can't win the game if you are unlucky with the planet spawns. There is no reason for the planets to be randomly placed, as this game is so short and has no replay value (as soon as you win).

The tutorial is much to wordy for my taste. It's not a complicated game and walls of text are the worst method to communicate how it's played. A single screen with instructions would suffice and work much better.

Wow, great compo entry. That death effect is really great. Is that just a particle system? I did feel it was little hard to parse the numbers of people I had because the game was so fast paced and there is so many zeros in 40 million. Maybe just a filling up bar to indicate how many I needed until I had collected enough would have been easier for me.

One of the games that execute minimalistic graphics correctly! The atmosphere is well set. It's way too hard for me, but I still think of it as a great game.

@flukeshot
Yeah, it's just a particle system with particles leaving trails and some noise added into the movement to make it look cooler and more sporadic! I honestly stumbled upon that combination randomly while I was trying to achieve a different looking explosion altogether, haha.

Extremely well done art and sound design. Quickly grasping how many more people are needed was indeed quite difficult, however watching the numbers climb was fun too so maybe try a compromise like a bar filling up with the number above. I have to say, I couldn't finish the game, mostly because the starting position has to be perfect to have the time to visit a few planets and collect enough people. Awesome entry!!

Amazing entry! The music is gourgeours and the graphic is minimalistic but very powerful! I liked very much this game, I would play more if there was more difficulty levels! Good job! :)

A gorgeous visual experience. Really enjoyed the particles in the game. How did you do the death animation? Was it with a noise-based particle system? I also think the color choices were really great - yellow sun on top of the purplish background, with red particles shooting at you. Some nitpicks: the landing/takeoff was a little confusing for me to grasp, and took a few runs to understand how it worked; and I really wish there was more I could do, but the sense of helplessness may have been intentional given the setting. Overall, I really enjoyed the game. Great entry!

Great game!
The overall experience was really nice, with a fine tuning! Having gravitation as an opponent was interesting too.
I was at first frustrated by the randomness of the planets' spawn positions but by earning skills I could counterbalance unlucky moments.

I loved the music and sound design (special mention to the menu start sound). Funny FXs too!

Since you can rotate but with no impact, perhaps you could add a weapon that would help to explode obstacles? Or just rotate in the direction of the ship's velocity...

I beat the game eventually, but it felt like luck, based on where the planets were positioned. I think it would need some more work to feel like a fair game. But the concept is really cool, racing against the shrinking universe and trying to judge which planets you can get enough followers from before they disappear. The music was pretty cool and the visuals were effective. Nice work overall!

This is awesome. It looks so good! The shining feature is probably the visuals, the gameplay is not quite as nice, but still pretty fun! It's quite difficult, and seems like maybe you just have to get lucky? Altogether good game.

Awesome entry! Good visuals and sound and all of that in 48 hours, really good. :)

As mentioned in many comments now the gameplay could be improved, but I still had quite some fun playing. Great job.

I really really loved the intro. The animated text transitioning to the title with bold, bright color change and the slightly discordant chord were just perfect. Beautiful particle and camera shake effects as well. Otherwise I agree with the other commenters here with respect to the gameplay.

A very nice idea, well executed!

The graphics and music was excellent in setting the mood. I found it a bit hard to read the numbers during the action, though. As has been mentioned above, perhaps it could be supplemented with a "progress bar", to be able to decode the amounts involved (and the distance to the goal) at a glance.

Both the tutorial and the introduction text was very funny and entertaining to read. Especially the dramatic introduction of the true hero of our tale, THE SUN GOD! It is always nice to have some backstory giving some context to the game, and it was a great setup for the gameplay itself.

A very impressive game, especially for a Compo game!

>The world is shrinking!
>It's time to PLEASE the SUN GOD!
>COME WITH ME, brave citizens!

For the eternal life! Really like the idea - reminds me the game "Sunburn!". Nice art and music! Overall 5 stars!

This game was a blast, I was smiling the whole way through! There were a few minor issues with spawning in empty space with no way to reach the goal in time, but that certainly wasn't a deal breaker. Allowing players to restart at any time would help there, though I could imagine that being exploited. Also the music might be improved by either allowing it to continue, or timing it to end cleanly shortly after the universe is devoured. Those are just my two cents.

All in all, I really enjoyed this game.

I loved this so much! The graphics were great (I loved the particle effects that your ship makes when it explodes), and the music was quick and fitting. The story was amusing, and the gameplay was fun! I beat it, and felt an immense sense of satisfaction at the end. The controls felt accurate, and I loved this!

I only have 1 major complaint: First of all, sometimes traveling felt slow, and if you didn't spawn near planets you had almost no hope. Perhaps having "shift" as a "dash" button, it would make everything faster and more fun.

Great job, and thanks! I loved this!

This is a fantastic entry! Unique take on the theme, and well-balanced such that it takes a couple tries to beat without being overly difficult. The visuals are also great, and I especially loved the transition from intro to title screen.

Some criticisms:
- the RNG at initialization can be a bit annoying when all the planets are above and to the right of you
- the bullet trails disappear all at once rather than fading out from tail to head
- having an in-game tutorial is a nice touch, but I feel like this one was a little bit too in-depth. One which simply explained the premise, controls, the fact that there are hazards would be enough without specifically outlining the different hazards, ui elements, etc.

Another thing that might have been interesting is if the win screen was either a bit more varied (to reward the player for having beat the game) or less varied and almost identical to the lose screen (to highlight how silly the win condition of having flung yourself and millions of others into the sun is).

Cool entry with a lot of stuff going on. The sound effects and music was generally very nice but the sound effect when the text is being presented in the beginning is quite annoying. It was a very hard game as you needed to avoid obstacles whilst traversing through space and landing on planets. I wish that the convincing process was faster because I landed on a planet and because it took so long to convince that planet to follow my spaceship I was stuck in nothingness and died as I left the planet. Overall great job though!

Its a good game, its fun and the graphics are really good! Maybe the tutorial have so much text and it was a bit hard to see yourself on the minimap. But i like the idea and the game a lot ^^

Fun game and liked your take on the theme, different from other interpretations I've seen so far.

Liked the humour in the game with the story and thought the graphics and music worked really well in setting a fast panic mode. Some of the best music I've heard so far this Ludum Dare. Would be nice if there had been more variety in the endings depending on how you went but overall a great polished entry.

That's a nice mood! For me, it's pretty hard do handle.

Loved the artwork and music!

Great work!

Nice artwork, cool particle fx. It could have been helpful if you added some background(stars?) for sensing the direction.

Pretty cool game otherwise, good job :D

Very fine entry. Although hard as F. At least for me ;)

Very well made graphics, one and only thing I'd add - stars or stardust (or anything in background), like @iamteekay suggested, would greatly help in sensing direction.

Difficulty is where you excel - for now, I am yet to finish the game. Maybe it would need a smudge of balancing, because it feels a bit random for now, at times I get almost to 40m easily, while at other plays I barely get a few thousand.

Visually it's really nice, and the overall polish, including the well-made intro and tutorial is very refreshing.

Leaving my rating for You. Cheers!