Desperate Vessel by mr. a
A briefly-made 2-button game about surviving a hail of rubbish.**
It's kinda mean, but perhaps that makes the struggle more meaningful?
There's no tutorial, so please bear with me:
INSTRUCTIONS:
You are the little pink-ish cube.
Your controls:
- left-arrow / "a" key thrusts you forward and spins you left-ward, in a spiral-y fashion.
- right-arrow / "d" key thrusts you forward and spins you right-ward, in a spiral-y fashion.
N.B. Press both keys to move forward without spinning.
Your objective:
- Touch the little spinning circle-things before they disappear to increase your score.
- Score high enough to win.
- Move outside the screen for too long to lose.
Other bits:
1. Rubbish rains from above. Knocking into it won't kill you, but may knock you off-course.
2. You fire forward constantly and messily. Your fire can break down the rubbish.
3. Gravity drags you down. Keep thrusting against gravity to avoid falling off the screen.
4. The big drunken circle-thing in the background indicates which way you are pointing. You can look at this when you're offscreen to try to navigate back onto the screen. Watch for your fire entering from offscreen, too, for an extra clue.
5. When you lose, click the unremarkable bit of text that says "Retry?" if you want to retry.
END OF INSTRUCTIONS
Theme:
2 buttons = 2 buttons to control the ship
Growth = Rubbish is a common byproduct of growth, one way or another.
Credits:
Textures/icons are all from default Unity packages; I just tinted & scaled them. Hence the opting out of the "graphics" category. Not that it makes much of a difference.
**The game is also about having been knocked out of a time-stream and being rescued by your compatriots, but I'm afraid you'll have to engage your imagination.
[I'm looking into Unity Webplayer and WebGL builds. Looks like I'll have to make separate itch.io pages? And install the JRE for WebGL? To be continued. Someday.]
It's kinda mean, but perhaps that makes the struggle more meaningful?
There's no tutorial, so please bear with me:
INSTRUCTIONS:
You are the little pink-ish cube.
Your controls:
- left-arrow / "a" key thrusts you forward and spins you left-ward, in a spiral-y fashion.
- right-arrow / "d" key thrusts you forward and spins you right-ward, in a spiral-y fashion.
N.B. Press both keys to move forward without spinning.
Your objective:
- Touch the little spinning circle-things before they disappear to increase your score.
- Score high enough to win.
- Move outside the screen for too long to lose.
Other bits:
1. Rubbish rains from above. Knocking into it won't kill you, but may knock you off-course.
2. You fire forward constantly and messily. Your fire can break down the rubbish.
3. Gravity drags you down. Keep thrusting against gravity to avoid falling off the screen.
4. The big drunken circle-thing in the background indicates which way you are pointing. You can look at this when you're offscreen to try to navigate back onto the screen. Watch for your fire entering from offscreen, too, for an extra clue.
5. When you lose, click the unremarkable bit of text that says "Retry?" if you want to retry.
END OF INSTRUCTIONS
Theme:
2 buttons = 2 buttons to control the ship
Growth = Rubbish is a common byproduct of growth, one way or another.
Credits:
Textures/icons are all from default Unity packages; I just tinted & scaled them. Hence the opting out of the "graphics" category. Not that it makes much of a difference.
**The game is also about having been knocked out of a time-stream and being rescued by your compatriots, but I'm afraid you'll have to engage your imagination.
[I'm looking into Unity Webplayer and WebGL builds. Looks like I'll have to make separate itch.io pages? And install the JRE for WebGL? To be continued. Someday.]
| itch.io (osx/windows/linux standalone) | http://mr-a.itch.io/desperate-vessel |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=45525 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 59% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.10 | 724 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.03 | 619 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.37 | 666 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.39 | 328 |
| Mood(Jam) | 2.75 | 819 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.81 | 382 |
Wasn't able to click the retry button?
Besides that, good graphics!
I really like the control scheme, feels fresh, challenging and fun.
Game was made even more challenging due to some graphical glitches that seems to be a common theme among the Unity games I've tried so far.
I managed to capture a bit of it here: http://home.znur.re/unity_bug1.png
and not drift off into nothingness. Navigating back can be tough once you're to far out of view.
Overall really fun once you start to get the hang of it.
Also thanks for the tip on the "Simulation Space" on my game. That changed how they reacted, Ill have to keep it in mind in the future. Cheers.
My suggestion would be restarting the game a second later you get off screen. Also being drastically rotated by hitting obstacles makes it extra difficult, if it could be a more controlled/less random rotation, the challenge would be more acceptable.
Another suggestion could be making some change in the player's cube so we can easily know the current orientation (I focused more on the cube than in the big arrows in the background).
I don't know why you disabled the graphics rating, honestly I liked them.
keep it up and thanks a lot for your feedback on my entry :)
Some powerups falling down would be cool too.
Based on comments from my own game, excellent job with the arrow in the background, it is insanely useful.
Overall I thought this was quite fun!
Also, the retry button worked fine for me.
A better solution would've been adding a marker/arrow ad the edge of the screen when going off that way. Perhaps with a little cut out bubble showing your pink cube so you still see what you are controlling.