Planetoid Piracy by RobotSoulsGames
You are spacebeard, the great pirate. The planetoid you live on is small, but it's certainly the greatest, right?
Who else would be qualified to conquer the galaxy?
Pilot your planetoid across the galaxy. Fight your enemies. Destroy their planets & their national pride. Take what's left and use it to make your planet bigger and better. Find all the flamingos.
Fully destructible terrain. Technically open world. Fast and difficult action. Lovely sprite art. Lovely classical music (which we did not make).
Steal the entire galaxy, that is, if you survive.
NOTE: The "Landlocked" state occurs when your planets gravitational field intersects with another planet's gravitational field. (as seen by the transparent rectangles) Destroy the planet you've intersected, and you can move again. Sorry this part was confusing. Remember, you can pilot the planet by pressing down near the chair. Win by collecting all the flags and placing them onto your planet. Sorry we never had time for a tutorial or anything.
Thanks for all the feedback! We've been working on the game since LD, and are trying to make it much bigger and better. The annoying "landlocked" feature has been removed, and we're adding rebindable keys to the newer version. Of course, we're gonna re-balance the difficulty, add more enemies and planets, and give you a big universe to explore and conquer. Hopefully, we'll have an updated version on GameJolt sometime soon.
Created by Jim and Dean Yockey
Download at GameJolt.
https://gamejolt.com/games/PlanetoidPiracy/252133
Made for Ludum Dare 38: Small World
Fixed: Faster loading screen!
(Music used is open-source)
Ratings
| Overall | 290th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 438th | 3.048⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 125th | 3.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 233th | 3.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 444th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 391th | 2.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 624th | 2.7⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
Love the graphics! Your binary is really small, what did you use for making it ?
We just updated the game, and fixed the loading time. Hopefully, it'll work now.
We used C#. The .exe is small because most of the graphics are stored in the folder with it.
But seriously, I like the style and feel of the game. I also appreciate how you have multiple methods by which to conquer other planetoids, by building guns onto your planetoid or taking matters into your own hands.
I promise Ill give this a proper go tomorrow!
Oh and also shoutouts to @cassio-eduardo who linked your game for @pixlark to play on his stream!
I'm glad to hear that. We didn't know about the Planets Suite ourselves until Ludum Dare. We were browsing through classic music we could use, and struck it rich, I guess.
If it reminds you of Star Wars, that's because the soundtrack of Star Wars was heavily inspired by the planets. After listening to Uranus over and over, I had to go boot up XWing Vs Tie Fighter, and Star Wars Dark Forces!
Ega?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ega
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter
I had to look it up . . .
The pallete isn't anything special. I just chose whatever random colors looked good. If it looks like ega, that's cool, but it wasn't intentional.
I'll try to check out that stream!
The game looks awesome and deep, with a lot of content and fitting music. I'm sorry I couldn't test it more.
My problem was the keyboard layout. This is probably fitting for qwerty but I'm using an azerty and even by switching my keyboard layout on windows, I got confused by the key positions.
This is probably an easy fix to do after the jam though.
You also get an extra honorable mention to do it all from scratch in c#.
(You can see me playing this game for the first time on the vod https://youtu.be/34z-nBWKdEw?t=1h34m13s )
Amazing stuff, it was a lot of fun, the music is great and I feel gives the pirate a bit of an arrogant and comical characterisation which I love, building the planet allows for plenty of configurations which can be efficient wacky or good looking. The factions all feel distinct from each other, with their signature guns and tiles. Gunplay while not the focus is serviceable. sound effects can get a bit jarring, but proper mxing can fix that.
Graphics I feel are pretty great, you got a lot of character out of few pixels and the palette is pretty good looking.
I just can't believe how many features you guys managed to implement in such short amount of time kudos to both of you!
Maybe you guys can expand the core ideas and turn this into a full game.
I enjoying sneaking up on other asteroids and taking them out from below. As others have mentioned it was a little easy, it seems like you guys probably know the main issues with the gameplay: ramp up the difficulty and introduce the core mechanics a bit better.
You have a great idea here though. I enjoyed the emergent nature of the gameplay, it was interesting to see different pirates attacking each other with no intervention from me.
The graphics are classic NES style pixel art, so nothing too groundbreaking but they fit the game well, and are clear and readable.
Some criticisms:
- the controls were really confusing at first (it took me longer than it should have to realize that the prompt for jumping was "z")
- even after learning the controls, I found that they required a bit too much context switching. I'm surprised a Terraria/Starbound-like control scheme wasn't used, with the items being scrolled with mousewheel and the weapon being treated as an item slot. This would have allowed for WASD + mouse, rather than arrows + ZXASW + mouse
- I noticed some talk of music in the other comments, but didn't hear any while playing. Possible bug?
- landlocking probably should have just been for tile collision rather than bounding box
- getting killed for leaving the playable area seemed a bit harsh; it probably should just use up one of the teleport charges to save you instead
- the balance of the combat is suited for the player running around doing things, but once you've got a few turrets you can pretty much cruise through the rest of the game in planet mode
- the .pdb isn't needed as part of your public build, it's for debugging
Great job!
If you wouldn’t mind having a quick go of my entry and letting me know what you think I would be super grateful. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-pow-collins
The game mechanics though were very solid and there is a really good base of a game here, and could go somewhere if extended further. I'm very impressed!
