Almost Home by willvasco
You're on your back from a long journey in space. You're running low on resources, and you don't have enough power to get all the way home. Luckily, there are some space-batteries littered about, and with their help you can make it home safe.
Controls: W to go forward, Mouse to look around, Left-Mouse-Button to orbit around ship
Fair Warning: Loading takes a minute
This is my first Ludum Dare entry and I think it went well. If I had more time I would definitely looking into addressing the load-time issue, and make a more efficient method of restarting the game/dying but I was on a time crunch. I started at 2:00 pm on Saturday so all in all it took 55 hours from start to finish. The only things that are not mine are some of the particle textures, the skybox and the music, which was made by god-among-men Kevin Macleod of course.
Edit Fixed loading problems and made death/win actually mean something and not crash the game. Also increased pickup collection radius and fixed a couple other small bugs.
Programs Used:
-Unity
-Blender
-Inkscape
-Asset Forge
-Bosca Ceoil
| Windows | https://willgraygames.itch.io/almost-home |
| macOS | https://willgraygames.itch.io/almost-home |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/almost-home |
Ratings
| Overall | 262th | 3.6⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 313th | 3.316⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 491th | 2.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 38th | 4.211⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 148th | 4.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 124th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 65th | 4.05⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
I'm not sure if I "won" or not, I got right up to the planet and it looked large and the screen faded to black and then the game stopped responding :( Nice little experience though!
The crash happens just after the game fades to black BTW, whether you win or lose, it happened to me every time I played it through.
Other than that it was a great game, great mood, well done.
Everything on the audio visual front is spot on. The mood was just what I wanted. The graphics and audio were simple but worked together so well to create that mood.
The mechanic of drifting through space just felt so good, and the amount of drag felt just right and intuitive. I love how the game suggests a slow pace through its mechanics and rewards you for that.
My only complaints are some tiny mechanical nitpicks. For something with this degree of freedom in movement, I would recommend using Quaternions for the rotations. At the very top and bottom of the arcs things get a little goofy. There is not up in space, so might as well use unrestricted rotation!
The HUD in the top right showing you how much fuel you have left just felt unnecesary and only served to obstruct the view. To more fit the mood, I would have the indicator as part of the ship so the player can spend more time seeing the sights.
The last thing is that I would like to have a little more indication of my heading. As it is now, I keep missing fuel cells by just a little bit, and just wind up unable to aim for another.
Overall, Excellent entry!
As an experience this game is certainly nice. Very calm mood, good job of making it feel like vast space. The ship wasn't that easy to maneuver, which is completely fine, but to hit the fuel tanks you needed to be very precise, which made picking them up harder than maybe it should have been. Maybe a little bit of "magnetic pull" or bigger hitboxes would have helped. The fuel meter should have been maybe with a more futuristic font, but that's just nitpicking.
As I said, fantastic atmosphere, very calming and well crafted space experience.
Anyway, excellent little project, beautiful art and music. Keep up the great work!! :)
There is a big problem though, for someone like me who highly values consistency and believability. There is no air resistance in space! The inertia of the spaceship should keep it moving forever and ever (until colliding with something that is). I totally get why you did it as otherwise people would just fly directly for the planet (which is what I tried the first chance I had), but I don't agree with drag being the best choice to force players to go through the asteroid belt.
One modification is all that it takes. Exchange fuel for oxygen. Now we have a resource which ticks down on its own and works as a handy limitation to the planet problem. Try accelerating for the planet and you'll simply run out of air before getting there.
Another possibility, which is what I'd go for, is to have both fuel and oxygen. The clever bit here is having separate canisters for both. This way you need to make a real choice every time when targeting a nearby canister: do I need O2 or fuel more?
There are other believability issues too, mostly concerning the scale of the world, but those are technical issues more than design issues so they don't bother me that much. It wouldn't make much sense to have players fly around for hours.
Right. I like it as it is, but I would love it were it bundled with the tension stemming from oxygen management. Sure that would kind of change the mood of the piece, but with leniency on the resource management side it wouldn't be too challenging.
:rocket::zap: