Destination - Mars by Cricket
My first Ludum Dare submission, not my first attempt though...
In space, no one can hear you scream. Had problems with audio and not enough time to find a workaround, so no audio, sorry.
To summarize the idea, basically you have to sacrifice your first missions to lay a track of abandoned ships that you can scavenge in order to reach Mars. More details:
Input: * [Esc] - Main menu. * [W, A, D] - Move. * [Q] - Abandon Ship.
Goal: * Reach Mars with a shuttle.
Start: * Assign starting resources by dragging appropriate handles. * Do not exceed your ships capacity
Resources: * Fuel - only used when moving, but runs out fastest. * Oxygen and food - low but constant usage.
Scavenging: * When close enough to a shipwreck - it turns red. * You can mouse-click on it and scavenge resources from the abandoned ship. * But be careful, hitting it will destroy both the shipwreck and your shuttle. * Drag appropriate handles to offload the resources from the wreck to your ship.
Minimap: * Arrow - direction to Mars * Red beacon - abandoned ship location
EDIT - 04/12/2018 Some clarification about sound: * Firstly I thought that there was a problem with sound on WebGL which was complimented by a warning message in the console and other people having problems with it. But, at the end I found that my browser tab was muted... * Secondly, when I was implementing simple audio ques in the editor, the thrust sound was working fine (that's the terrible placeholder sound you are hearing) but I could not figure out why explosion sounds would not work, neither with PlayOneShot() nor with normal Play(). The sound is not corrupted and would play in some specific cases.
Anyway, because of all of this I left the audio for the end and I only figured out the muted tab mistake minutes before deadline. And vualia, now it's even worse than no sound because it has a terrible thrust placeholder :D
If you want to play it as it was intended, mute the tab and listen to a Synthwave mix. suggestion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZUpO2t5WM
Ratings
| Given | 10🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
Apart from that the playing is good. I think it's very good that you can set the resources beforehand. That gives the game replayabillity. The graphics also fits.
It felt like the flight time between earth and mars should have been longer to allow for more interesting decisions, and some random debris like broken satellites and/or meteors to harvest would have been nice.
Once I figured out that the broken spaceships were the dead bodies of my former attempts, it was really easy to build a ladder of dead shuttles and win consistently. I don't know if that was the intended way to play though.
I like that you took the time to make the celestial bodies have orbits that they follow. I feel like that's something that a lot of people wouldn't notice, and I wanted you to know that at least one person appreciated it.
At first I expected the shuttle to maintain it's inertia when I stopped burning fuel, and it surprised me when I realized that I can't just burn fuel to reach a certain speed and then just coast at that speed. Not necessarily a bad thing to do it the way you are if it accomplishes your design goals, but I expect a lot of people aren't going to expect it to work that way.
Great entry. I really liked it.
I made an edit at the end of the page, giving some explanation about the audio.
To answer some questions:
* Not sure about not being able to scavenge, did the shipwreck turn red and you clicked on it? To offload the resources from the wreckage you need to drag the sliders to the left, opposite of what you do in the beginning.
* You can only scavenge resources from your abandoned ships and the resources that you can scavenge are the resources that were left on the ship before abandoning it. So if you want to have extra oxygen for your next mission, load up on oxygen, fly out and abandon the ship.
* I did consider debris for obstacles that could destroy your abandoned ships, but didn't have time
* It is intended that you build a "ladder" of ships to reach Mars that is relatively close. Reasoning for that is so you guys have a short play-session to be able to judge the whole idea
* No inertia is also a decision to make it simpler, ideally I would make it more realistic
Ps.:
Thanks for noticing that detail.