Save Your Assteroid by Hyorvenn
Allez Chico ! On met la gomme !
Background
Hi,
Here's my game Save Your Assteroid. You're a space pilot, while tracking some imperial/bad guy/shady ship as a spy, your tailing is compromised as you enter in an asteroid field. Beware, because your enemy might use this opportunity to get rid of you.
Your goal ? Try to survive as much as you can by avoiding coming rocks. You can collide with your enemy to make him crash on an asteroid, slow his movements by picking slower malus. Who knows, maybe you'll come out of it alive ...
Real note:
This game is mainly built to be played with 2 local players. You can play with 1-4 players at the same time. Save Your Assteroid is basically a top-scrolling game where you must avoid obstacles coming from the top. You can move in all directions. As you advance in the asteroid field, you get points. When you've lost, you can see the score of all players and the final ranking.
How to run
This game is made with pygame for python 3, so if you don't have it you'll need to install it. You can easily install pygame from pip with pip3 install pygame or python -m pip install pygame, depending on your setup.
Once you have installed pygame, download the 'Ready to launch' package. In the SaveYourAssteroid folder :
python game.py
note: python needs to be python 3 for your setup.
Some screenshots
Ratings
| Overall | 619th | 2.842⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 401th | 3.184⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 687th | 2.316⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 685th | 2.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 425th | 3.079⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 484th | 2.294⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 549th | 1.794⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 551th | 2.583⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
The gameplay itself was good, the quantity frequency and spread of boulders felt pretty fair, and consistently challenging. The instant death at the edges of the screen was pretty aggressive though. I died several times after moving toward the edge of the screen to pick up a heart that had spawned on the edge. Some mechanic to make that less punishing would have been nice. Simply bumping the player back in bounds, or disallowing further movement in that direction perhaps. It would have been nice if the powerups moved down-screen - when they spawned near the top they were quite risky to go for, and when they were control reversing powerups and spawned nearer to you, they could stay in place near your critical moving path for a long time, making them less about recognition and one-time avoidance, and more like mine spawns. The core game is a very simple dodge the things game, which made it hard for me to engage with it. This isn't helped by the super-clean control you have over your ship. There just doesn't feel like there is a lot of depth to the game. The powerups helped in that regard, but they mostly ended up being more of the same kind of ship maneuvering gameplay.
The one bug I noticed, is that the score doesn't seem to reset from one playthrough to the other. This even seems to carry over to multiplayer, with all players taking snapshots from the same, unresetting score variable.
I think the sound effects could have been quieter, other than that they weren't bad. Would have been nice to have some music for the game - it's completely quiet when you are busy just successfully dodging meteors.
To me, this seemed to be a straight-forward dodging game. If there are two themes, it seemed unclear what they were. It's quite similar to other games I've played before.
Graphics : Yeah, at first I had only idle sprites, and it was already nice by itself. I tried to make things a bit more lively by adding turning animation but I'm really not good at pixel art, and as it was really secondary I rushed them, the result is clearly visible.
Gameplay : For the insta death borders, it was to add some challenge by preventing player to put themselves at the bottomleft/right positions. But I realize it was indeed both non intuitive and frustrating. For the item spawns, I voluntarily make bonus spawn at the top and invert control malus spawn at the bottom of the screen to force the player to move from safe spots. But yeah I should have prevented bonus to spawn at y 0 position because it's just impossible to pick them without taking a hit 50% of the time. I just wanted to reward players that take risks in order to get an advantage against others.
Score bug : I wasn't aware of that but I think I know where it comes from, and thus, was a rookie mistake from me.
Sounds : I don't really know what to think about it. At first I didn't consider making any sfx for the game at all, because I don't know anything about music/sound creation/composition. I read about sfxr in the last hour and tried to make some basic sounds. In the end it wasn't really worth it and I didn't even manage to fix the pygame sound lag problem. I think it was a stupid mistake to include audio like that, at least I will be more prepared for a future game dev. I really would have liked to have some kind of exciting music, though.
It is a straight-forward dodging game, absolutely. There is no two (incompatible) themes, the LD theme didn't inspire me at all so I tried to make something with what I learned about pygame for 2 weeks. I'm really aware about a lots of weaknesses from this game, the biggest being the lack of personality or something to make it distinguish itself.
Thanks a lot for your review again, I greatly appreciate it !