They Dance With Asteroids by TurnWolf

Overview
“They Dance With Asteroids” is my first entry into Ludum Dare38 which was a great experience which I learned alot from doing! It’s a small god/puzzle game where you must create a planet which can sustain life by blocking unwanted asteroids and letting others crash into your planet adding their element which they carry and progressing from a small world to a large one.
The game is available to play on itch.io as both a browser game and a Windows download:
- Click To Play -

How-To-Play
* Controls: * Grab your mouse because that’s all you’re going to need! Left click on an asteroid, hold that button down drag in the direction you want to fling it and let go and watch that baby fly.
* Concept: * Crash asteroids into your planet and watch as the element which is signified by its element symbol makes a change to your planet. Experiment to find out what element does what.
* Aim: * Get your planet to that goldilocks zone so it can start to grow life. Watch as life slowly rises in your world and when it reaches 100% you get a cookie! – Well not really but you do win!
Software and Development
This game was mostly created in one sleepless coffee induced coder-thon where I tried to make up for my lack of time on day one. I used Unity to create the game, as this is the engine I am most familiar with and will be working with in the future - so good practice to. Blender for the small amount of 3D modelling I had to do for this project which I wanted to keep to a minimum. Photoshop was used to create all the textures for the 3D models and the particles and finally sound was created on http://www.bfxr.net.
Opt-Out
I did not make the music, the track used was sourced from: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) - Ambiment - Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.
Feature List - Completed
- Asteroids with Elements represented by their respective periodic element symbol.
- Planet smoothly changes in form and colouration with asteroid impacts.
- Simple main menu and credits.
- Basic Sound and music.
Feature List - MIA
- Tutorial level.
- Better more user-friendly UI.
- Better asteroid spawning.
- Two more levels with different difficulties.
Links
* Website: * www.turnwolfproductions.com
* Twitter: * www.twitter.com/turnwolf
* YouTube: * www.youtube.com/turnwolfproductions
* Thank you for taking the time to look at my game, any feedback is appreciated! *
Ratings
| Overall | 478th | 3.211⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 634th | 2.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 66th | 3.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 180th | 3.789⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 324th | 3.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 340th | 3.313⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
However, i find the gameplay quite hard and tedious. I did not manage to bring the planet to the goldilocks zone. I had problems especially with getting water, because both H and O reduce core, and it seemed that every element, that increases core, also decreases water. I also agree with Sleepy about the asteroids.
Those problems can be easily fixed by some number tweaking and i love the gameplay idea.
If there would be a way to experiment in a slower speed I would be playing it until solving it, but it all comes too fast.
I love the visuals and Kevin McLeod's music is always a good choice for this kind of games.
I was expecting to mix elements and toss them at the planet, but the gameplay is more just of just randomness. The elements go so fast I can't tell what they do because I'm busy swatting other ones away.
Overall it was fun to play, and well presented, but it is a bit confusing and that's from someone that knows what those elements are for the most part. I imagine it will be super confusing to anyone that didn't like science.
My first reaction was like some other commenters mentioned: omg what just happened? I felt like the elements flew at me too fast.
But I played a bunch more times. The gameover screen doesn't give much info about why I failed, and the restart loop is a little slow - consider going right back into the game rather than to the main screen.
I spent a few games learning which elements upgrade my core. As I watched I think I realized the biggest problem. You need more transparency in the system to the player. I want a different sound effect for when an element affects a different aspect of my planet, so that I know right away if the core was grown vs the crust, etc. I think a little pop effect with a different icon to double-convey this information would also be worth it. This is the most important info for me to learn but the game doesn't do very much to facilitate that. Outcomes of actions should be multiplex-communicated via sound and graphics.
Next the controls were a little tough. After I learned to grow a large core in the initial phase, I made it quite a way with my planet, and eventually it grew to fill the whole vertical size of the screen. After this it was an EXTREMELY short time that I had to click-drag away the elements. I think that there are two problems here. First, does it have to be click-drag? What if it was just "click to bat away" instead? Second, I very often just barely missed when I flung my mouse to the opposite side of the screen to click-drag an asteroid away, and this was frustrating. You could consider being more generous with the click detection. For example I bet right now you just check whether I've clicked on the asteroid. But is the game really a dexterity test, or a decision test? Maybe you could have the game notice when I click anywhere, and if there's an asteroid within a certain generous radius, then I grab it. This way even if I miss by three pixels you can still carry out my intention.
The last big point is about the colors of the elements. I didn't feel like they conveyed the information about what effect they would have, and in fact they often conveyed misinformation. For example the iron is dark and heavy looking, and increases the core. The Mg is a very different look but also increases the core. But the aluminum looks like the iron, but does not increase the core. At least that's what I came to believe, maybe I got that wrong. But generally it didn't seem like the art informed me of what the element would do.
So in summary I suffered from a lack of information: opportunities were there to convey the info in advance, as well as after the fact to confirm the outcomes, but none of these channels were strongly utilized.
I did enjoy playing, but I focused on the shortcomings in this feedback because I felt like I *could* have enjoyed your core idea on a whole other level if I was understanding and feeling more in control.
I hope all of this is helpful, and it's not to say you have a bad entry here, on the contrary it's a cool idea which is why I spent extra time trying to get to the center of what could have been smoother.
A definite highlight here was the art, and the way that the planet changed visually as the mix of things changed, I really got satisfaction when I did have an atmosphere.
Game looks nice, but surely would look better if I knew how my actions affect the planet. Overall, nice idea, but execution could be better. Maybe next version?