Space Collapse...

Our team is in for the first time! We are Going out of Space!

Here is the plot:
- Asteroids are being attracted by the Sun.
- You are the only one that can save humanity.
- Take command of the Ice Space Ship and help contain the Heat!

A Short Video of the work in progress.
https://youtu.be/Fv_JnLJdMJ8

Greetings!

Good job! I like the way physics are working!

Graphics were on point. We made a space based game and I can definitely appreciate your excellent asteroid animations.

Gameplay is... difficult. It's hard to keep track of everything that is happening, but blowing up the asteroids is very satisfying. A clutch sound effect would help with that.

Good stuff.

This was neat! Gravity is a tricky thing to program to feel right and I think you got it pretty close here. The controls took me some getting used to, I found myself wanting A and D (left and right) to continuously circle the sun instead of having to use up and down to move in those directions.

Beyond that, it was fun enough to make me give it a couple of good tries and see how far I could get but I had trouble with the fire asteriod and green asteroid (radioactive?) parts and ended up dying in the huge swarms of them.

How far did I get compared to game length?

Heh, running out of SPACE, hehe. Had the same kinda of idea at first.

Back to the game: Really funky controls with all that gravity business. Makes it fun, but hard, and sometimes I feel like my pilot skills can't do anything about the situation. Art is good, needs some spacy music to get a good mood though.

Nice work! I managed to save the Earth. Now everyone will know my nam-- But wait... is that more Asteroids!?

I always enjoy experimenting with unusual control schemes, so I liked the fluid crazy spaceship physics here. One problem with these sorts of space games is when the player goes flying off into nowhere, or collides into things, so I think you made a very good design decision to add the outer ring constraining my movement, and letting my just bounce off the sun without too much punishment.

There was a lot going on in the first few moments for me to sort out, so it took me a an adjustment period. I think it was nice to include Mercury as a sort of early warning/lesson to let me see how it plays out before losing the Earth!

One thing that caught me though -- the spacebar shoots, but it also skips past text, specifically including the end of the game. I didn't even quite realize I had lost because I was hammering spacebar to shoot and skipped right through the end!

I liked the graphics and sounds, and felt like it came together in a nice cohesive feeling.

Overall I had fun bouncing around and learning the ropes, then battling some asteroids! Nice job and congrats on a successful LD.

Wow that was great! The graphic is look nice and the overall theme fit very well. But I feel like controlling your character where you want to go is very difficult. Since you just slide all over the place and hit the enemy on accident. Overall I think the game is really fun but extremely hard due to the movement.

Thanks everyone! We love and appreciate all of the feedback.

@max6333 @howard-duong @thecommonthug totally hear you on the loose physics. Thanks for the feedback!

@burgee a couple more "waves of asteroids" to go! Let us know if you have any trouble! Thanks so much for playing.

The graphics were great, and the music very easy to play to.
Maybe I don't know how to steer the ship correctly, so all I did was circle strafe the sun and spam attack everything coming in. Still, fun game!

The graphics was so great. Specially the particle effects that you used. Gameplay was also good but the movement of the camera was not so stable for which, character controlling was more difficult than average. Overall, it was a nice submission.

It's technically a bug, but I love bonking into the sun so much that I'm begging you not to remove it. As a side not, the game was great.

@flashviper That's exactly how we felt! It's staying. Thanks!!!

@blurred-lines I agree, we could have tweaked the camera a little bit more.
This was our first time with the cinemachine targetgroup component in unity, lots of flexibility out of the box, can't wait to experiment more.
Thanks for your comment!

Very clean presentation overall. Great graphics and sound, and on point with the theme. Definitely challenging!

I liked your effort. I was drawn to it because it reminded me of games like Asteroids and Omega Race. I felt like the shots should move faster than your ship and I really wanted to be able to rotate and thrust like the games I mentioned. Looks good. Great effort!

This is gorgeous. I really love everything about this submission. Tightening up camera stuff maybe-- but overall an amazing submission with obviously a tremendous amount of effort applied! :)

Wow, the gravity really messed with my brain! lol So, I'm curious why you decided to have the ship fire in toward the sun, it didn't seem very intuitive that way and I was getting frustrated quite alot, otherwise, great game.

I didn't understand how to get very far in this game. I probably only lasted at most 20 seconds. It is pretty hard to hit the astroids when you can only shoot towards the sun. Good look though.

interesting! Neat idea!

The controls make this game different, but also difficult and frustrating to control. Why WHY would you point your gun inward, when your threats come from outside? Why orbit the sun if you want to protect earth? It just doesn't make sense to me.

@fizzpowmike1 It was all an experimentation and discovery process, when we first started, the spaceship bullets were able to cool down the sun(size would go back to original after enough shots), so sun was really your main target, the flying mechanics of aiming seemed a little complex, so we started flying mostly orbiting always pointing to the center and that became a space drifting "skill".
We didn't think back to it once we got in orbit with the rest of the tasks, this was a crazy weekend, Cheers! and thanks for the comments!

@mccarlp thanks, I have to check those out, deep in my heart I keep "Geometry Wars", I might have drafted some inspiration from it, but I can't compare them, "Geometry Wars" is king!

@jose-rodriguez Thanks for the explanation! And yes, it was crazy, most of our team had never done this before, but it was cool and so much fun!

@michael-wingfield @maartene
Totally agree, all I have is LDJam excuses for you guys, check out my previous post to @fizzpowmike1.

The best I can recommend is to fly in orbit, without letting the space bar go, I use the arrow keys and drift my way around, pick up capsules as you orbit and use your spaceship to hit asteroids too, everything is game, bounce against the Sun to pinball your way around.

Hope this give a different perspective, sorry you didn't like it.
Thanks for all feedback!

Your game is fun! The physics felt weird at first, but once I grasped how they work, it was a nice experience.
I love the text prompts between the waves, but I must say that I'm a bit confused. Does the game ever end? The texts looped at some point, so I guess I won? Sometimes I get failing texts, so I guess I lost? I cannot really tell, and as the position never restart, it's hard to say. If there's not really an end to the game, there should maybe be a score or something to give a goal to the player ^^

Anyway, nice submission :)

@rafiki you got it, you certainly beat the game.
We didn't really had much time left, so we try to loop it in a way that would let one wondering if it has ended, glad you felt that way ;)
Once the earth is gone is game over!

I'm the best pilot and nobody takes this from me!
I liked your ambience, and how you manage to setup your solar system as well.
Just the controls were a bit hard to manipulate. In the third time that I saved Earth, i was just pressing A + E + SPACE, and i saved the earth.

@welliton I have to try flying your way! But even if I learn, you will always be the Best Pilot!
Thanks for saving us many times, and all the kind words.

Cool idea and nice job on the implementation! I like how the sun grows every time an asteroid hits it. The controls feel a little loose, and I wish there were more abilities/powers and levels. Nice work!

I managed to save Earth! (and then immediately died) This was a fun game, though if I had one complaint it would be how poor the controls felt most of the time, it was almost impossible to steer where I wanted to and there seemed to be some delay between pressing buttons and seeing the ship respond (this might have been just me though, I'm not sure). Not bad for something made in a weekend though.

I'm in love with the overall ambiance. The design, the music,... (I actually still have it playing in the background as I'm writing this..! Can't get enough of it.) Though as many already pointed out, it is quite frustrating to have such a hard time controlling due to this gravity effect.. Shame I couldn't get through the second round of asteroids. Also, I'd say that with this aesthetic, the 'hero to save mankind' factor feels a bit out of place... It'd be interesting to have something more to this main character, to go out of the box of the traditional shoot'em all. I'm sure it totally has what it takes. In any case, great work!

Nice entry. I like the overall mood, it feels like you are controlling that space ship. However it took me quite a while to figure out the movement, and even when I did I had a hard time moving around and collecting lifecells to survive when accidently hitting asteroids. I think the movement would need some more tweaking, even though I enjoyed that it was something different. Good job overall!

@gus-the-shark Thanks a lot! We thought the Solar Expansion was a funny twist. Glad you liked it too! We're definitely considering ways to add new powers, tighten up the controls, and expand the levels. Completely agree!

Right now we are going to add - change of fire power. Ability to go to the outer solar system in other levels. Adding some planetary information and a Menu screen (lol that it doesn't exist at the moment!). Open to others ideas as well!

@historymaker118 that's awesome that you played through! We really appreciate it. We'll definitely work on tightening up the controls in any future iterations. There's a bit of a drift and orbit to the controls that appears a little polarizing in the comments!

Thanks for playing and commenting!

@ignf Character development is where I wish we could have invested more too! Thank you so much for playing and your kind words on the audio tracks.

If you're interested, there's a little drifting and orbiting technique that really helps (along with shooting the whole time). Either way, sorry the controls didn't work out for you! We are definitely looking into how to tighten them up for the future.

@jackou Thanks for playing! We enjoyed trying to simulate that slippery feel of zero gravity, but indeed it is very difficult to control and especially pick up the health packs. We are going to look into tightening that up without losing too much of the drift (we hope!).

Cool game. I like how the ship itself is orbiting.
The graphics are very nice too.

Nice job, will be bookmarking it for later :)

@hakro Thank you so much! Awesome to hear. Hope you enjoy!

Not too shabby, however, while it makes sense to have slidy controls in space, I really did not enjoy how difficult it was to get my ship to move and stop anywhere close to where I wanted it to be. This made me put down the game a lot faster than I normally would have...

Hey, cool idea for the game! Here's some feedback on how you could improve it:
- not sure about this hip-hop backing track-like music in the background - it's a space game about epic destruction of Earth, this wasn't much fitting, I hope you agree!
- you can press space constantly which shoots projectiles non-stop - it's like a way to cheese the game. If you wanted it like that, implementing a constant shooting without the need to press anything would be better, while if it's not something you intended, you should make sure there's a cooldown on shooting.
- there are a plenty of spelling mistakes here and there, and you could make text more nice - probably by using a font and drawing it in a less random place :)

I hope this wasn't discouraging, I wish you the best and good luck with the jam!

This game was gorgeous! The gameplay took me a bit to understand at first, but once I got it I really enjoyed it. I would have loved to see a slower ramp of asteroids coming in and perhaps make them more deadly.

The idea is amazing! Gameplay is fine, the graphics are really good. Also physics are well made. Really enjoyed it! Good job!

Controls were frustrating (couldn't really make precise movements); after fixing this you would have a great game here

My first contact with the game wasn't too good ; but once you understand how the controls work (the ship always pointing towards the sun is a little disorientating at first), it gets way better. I love your take on the shoot'em up genre, as well as the twist on the theme. The text is also a great addition to the game. All in all, great work !

Really had fun playing this, was a lot of fun! LOVE the concept. Congrats on the great submission.

Pretty solid game, although the controls were a bit frustrating for me. Seemed like I'd be really slow one second, then like, super fast the next. Good job, though :D

Good job, Gameplay and controls would be nice if you tweaked them a little, but I can see this game after a bit of extra work, becoming addictive and fun to come back to. Good job!

Very challenging and a cool idea. Interesting implementation of the theme. Good work!

Hey I just played the game and I got drifted so far away I cant even see myself haha. Im somewhere near the red circle at the bottom. Maybe the could be a boundary to where I cant drift away even further? Because getting back is very difficult, and when the camera is zoomed out too much I really cant even see where Im at to go back.


Another problem was the jitter at the score placeholder, though it's very minor, it's a little bit distracting. Just increase the size of the red rings a bit so the is no overlap with the white cylinder.

The texts sometimes register "read" with the space bar, sometimes with the mouse click, so that could be cohesive by just using one input as well.

Those are just some minor details that I think you could quickly patch to make the whole experience better. Leaving all of that aside, I think the game was pretty fun. I do know, very clearly, what my goal is and how to do it. GJ!

Quite fun game.
I accidentally got so far out that even the sun was no longer visible.
Somehow made it through several waves like that. Hilarious.

Neat game! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 42 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/7ueEev7q6Kg