Every Man's Sky by blaster391

Have you ever wanted to explore a limitless, universe of SMALL WORLDS? Do you want to help create a giant persistent universe along side other players? Well now you can.
Every Man's Sky is a player driven, exploration and creation game, discover different planets and rise the ranks to see who is the greatest explorer, or carve out a little bit of space and make it your own.
DISCLAIMER - All content in this game is player generated, I take no responsibility for what you might see. Please keep usernames and planet names clean guys.

LINKS
Windows x64: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5Ae5F19PtOaa3RrdVdVcFZYaG8
Linux (UNTESTED): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5Ae5F19PtOaa2JZYmJ3bV91cnM
Mac (UNTESTED): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5Ae5F19PtOaYlpRUzhOMHY4UlE
Source: https://github.com/Blaster391/LD38

Read Me
TO PLAY Download the zip from dropbox Unzip contents of folder. Run .exe
NOTE - This game requires a consistent internet connection to function correctly
CONTROLS - Move - WASD - Go Faster - Shift - Open Planet Creation Menu - Space - Discover Planet (when in range and facing a planet) - Left Mouse Button - View Highscores - Tab - Exit game - Escape
Created By Robert "Blaster391" Arnold
Special Thanks To My Testers - William Swift - Craig Griffin - Bruce Wallace (I guess?) - Matthew Raynor

Ratings
| Overall | 122th | 3.707⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 118th | 3.61⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 15th | 4.195⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 254th | 3.439⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 490th | 2.415⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 61th | 3.59⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 415th | 2.711⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 51🗨️ |
One small thing: on dual monitor, the cursor easily slips on the second monitor and minimizes the game on click. You should capture the cursor and not just hide it.
Or may be a global star map? And ability to create starts, and deploy planets on the orbits.
Also, could you please describe technologies used? Server side, protocol, etc. Looks interesting.
Thank you!
BUT. You sir have got me cracking with the name, and I love the concept. I love it. There is no real gameplay, but I don't care, you got my 5 stars for the overall segment, just because of how funny it was.
And I saw a "rush b" blue planet so a made a red and a white planet with cyka and blyat as names. Amazing! Your game has memes!
Kudos to you for trying something different.
I agree that there's some kind of skybox missing, which makes it pretty hard to navigate. Should be a lot clearer if there were just some kind of white stars or something in the background.
I'll definitely come back to this later so see how it turned out. Awesome work!
@icxon - watch this space, I might try typing up a blog post on how it all works and post it later today, I'll edit this comment with a link. EDIT: HERE - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/every-mans-sky/every-mans-sky-breakdown
@scornz - now the framework is there, I was imagining being able to extend this - I was thinking maybe adding stars, orbits would be amazing, I would need to think about how to get this all to sync with the server.
@zelos & others - adding a skybox was something I had considered, it was more of a time thing as to why I didn't add it - I'm hoping as the more of the universe is created it will be easy to navigate
I've left there a bit of surprise :smiley:
- Edit, move, or remove your own planets
- Show an alignment grid when placing planets
- Give the planets more personality/variety - even possibly to the point of the absurd (like being able to create a planet with a beard and tophat and name it Abraham Lincoln)
I spent a good while in this, great job!
@smiling-cat-entertainment thank you for the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed it, extending the creation tools is an interesting idea, I found it is a fine line between making it easy to use and giving everyone the tools they want. An alignment tool is a cool idea, maybe snap to grid would mean people could create even cooler things
@lipsch I do agree I should have added a bit more atmosphere, I wanted to put together some music, but it was such a rush to finish it I never got chance. Particle effects sound cool, my thoughts were the ability to create suns, that use more particle effects than planets, and can emit light to change the way the world looks.
@chris-delta I see it as an experiment about what people do when they have a blank canvas to draw on... Turns out people promote themselves lol, I'm leaving it all because I don't want to moderate the space at all. I do see what you mean about there not being much to the core of the game, it is more a tech-demo/practice for me getting server side sync working well.
@wheffle Added customization is top of my list for things I could add to this project - I want it to be a creative space (pun intended) and anything I can do to enable more creativity from players is a plus.
@porcus-pie There is no Ludum Dare anymore, only memes... But really I'm glad you liked it, even if it is a bit bare bones content wise, it is still incredible to see how much people have done with it
@kleinzach - I'm glad you like it! UI isn't my strong suit, so I just wanted to make it as clear and easy to use as possible, even if it isn't very pretty. You were right about it being a risk, I made it having no idea how people would respond to it. I'm happy that so many people seem to enjoy it!
@coleslaughter - a web playable version would be cool, I was tempted to make it, I was just unsure of how the network side of things would react in browser, and whether I would run out of browser memory, so I played it safe.
The text was a last minute thing, I did want to make it so the name always faced the player but this broke when I implemented planet rotation, and I couldn't work out the maths in time to get it to work properly, so in the future this would be implemented (hopefully).
Depth is an interesting one, that I have also noticed when playing, especially now the universe is more full, I was thinking of making a line appear, between you and the planet, to give a bit of a sense of distance? Being able to adjust the distance is also a must.
Thank you for your detailed response :D
@gundatsch - I do like how people are making one planet, then other people coming and adding planets around with the same theme, so I see the messenger side of this, it's like a tiny community being formed. And yeah, sound would have been in if I had time... I was tempted to just play the "2001 A Space Odyssey" theme on loop, but I decided against it on copyright grounds.
@slash-random I really was blown away by the creativity of some folks. And yeah, it is kinda an MMO, I just wanted too see what the LD community did when they all came together with a blank canvas
Altough I can't spend a lot time with such Games :p
The graphics weren't very good.
No sound.
I could imagine it be much more interesting if you would have added some athmosphere with music and some particles or something.
Great Game (:
In all serious though fantastic work. I had slightly too much fun mucking around and exploring this area. I can imagine that with more time you could really flesh this out into something really cool, a nice interactive space. But no I had a lot of, and just wish there was more content!
A few minor things that would maybe give it a little more polish: Maybe consider having the text that people write be readable from both directions? It was sometimes kind of hard to read some of the planets because the text was at weird angles, and because it would get culled if you weren't at the same rotation angle, sometimes it was hard to find in the first place. More options for text customizations would also be awesome, to allow people to add their own little personal flair to it. Also, I found it kind of hard to judge the depth of where my planet was being placed. If you can find a way to make that a little more clear to the player (maybe give them the ability to move their planet a bit within creation window as they're making it) would be another convenient little thing.
Honestly, I think you have a really awesome thing here that could really have a huge community behind it if it just got enough exposure. I hope you have plans to work on this more in the future! :)
My impression is, that this is like a new type of messenger ... everyone is creating something with some deep message hidden in there. And you have a huge universe of absolute knowledge ... uuh ... exactly :D
Runs great ... perhaps some ambient soundtrack would be nice to create that space feeling ... Other than that, i can't tell why, but it's amazing ...
Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share our creativity.
Congratulations, great job!
1 question: how do you remove planets that you make? I made a planet of the wrong size, and I regret it. It's called Eris near someone else's model of our Solar System.
Con-Categories; Graphics, Mood, Fun
Overall I would say that while it was cool to experience, as well as a bit fun to make my own solar system, it wasn't much of a game. The concept was nice, however, and I enjoyed seeing other people's planets. Kudos to you for making it multiplayer, which must have been hard.
This is less of a game, and more a standing memorial to how stupid an idea it is to give players the ability to name any world they want. I still approve greatly.
I left a little memorial to an actual thing of importance to me that was lost with the NMS Pathfinder update, in the form of a small giant-and-moon system in the void between Advertisement Square and the wall of white ringed worlds. I do like being sincere every now and then, even in the lands of dank memes.
I'm on a mac, so if you make a mac build I'll play it.
I'm betting this little planet is at the edge of the currently known universe. I must say, the screenshots you posted don't do justice to the experience. But I get that it's hard, since the experience comes from user creation and you gave us the tool. I really enjoyed placing planets, following the paths that one other player had created and then finding the little spec at that very very far distance and setting out on the hunt. In the beginning the game must have been pretty empty though, so I'm happy I came upon it this late.
There are some quite obvious things that would possibly make this even more fun such as better sense of flight, more planet types, some neat scan effect for discovering planets (the youtube "Making stuff look good in Unity" has one about the No Man Sky scan effect), and nicer UI for creating (especially if you only want to clone place the same planet type over and again).
Great game though!
@jishenaz - This is unfortunately a feature I didn't have chance to put together, maybe in a future version.
@local-minimum Yeah, I was intending on updating the screenshots as it progressed, but each time I logged on I was completely blown away, so I decided to try and leave it as a surprise for people.
@blackrose @dragonzlay @local-minimum (and everyone else Re: graphics) - Graphics has never been my strong suit when it's come to game dev, it's why I try and go for an abstract style, making things simple and clean for the user, but thanks to all the suggestions and material people have given me to work with, I am definitely going to hone my skills to try and improve the look of my future projects.
AND FOR EVERYONE
Thank you so much for taking the time to play my game and helping it become what it is now, this was as much of a game than it was an experiment to see what the community could create and it is beautiful in it's own way, all the support I've received is pretty overwhelming. Any criticism both positive and negative is really appreciated, allowing me to evaluate what I need to work on, as well as what my strengths as a developer are. It's kinda crazy seeing the universe as it is now, I'm very interested to see how far this will go before the end of the compo (or the server explodes) Thank you all again <3