In-Depth Guide for Planet Sitter: The Galactic Inquest

-Interaction-

Left click and hold to move the ship toward the cursor

Click cargo to select

Right click or hold to eject cargo

Spacebar to brake

Esc to close the game window


-Mechanics Explained-

The base mechanics for the game are a planet's temperature and sea level. These fluctuate naturally over time. H20 and Heat can be taken from a planet by clicking or clicking and holding on their status bars or the buttons beside their status bars in the Planet Statistics View.

The Planet Statistics View is made visible while flying past or resting in orbit alongside a planet.

The cargo currently on the ship is shown in the lower left corner of the game screen. When resources are taken from a planet (like H20 or Heat) they fill the ship's cargo. The cargo has a maximum capacity.

Cargo can be ejected from the ship by right clicking or holding down the right mouse button. Cargo is ejected in the direction the ship is facing, and also shares the ship's momentum. Cargo is affected by planetary gravity in a similar fashion as the ship.


The next important mechanic is population. While a planet's sea level and temperature are in a comfortable mid-range, and if the population is less than 0%, the population will naturally increase over time. If a planet's population is more than 80%, dangerous world events such as plagues or world wars are more likely. If a planet's population is at 100%, the planet is overcrowded, and enlightenment can't increase.

World events are dangerous phenomena that occur randomly and affect a planet's statistics. For example, a global wildfire increases the planet's temperature.

-Hint-

If the ship's cargo is full, and planets need resources removed, you can eject cargo at any time into the vacuum of space away from your planets to make room.

I really liked the planet art. Neat game!

I had fun playing it while it lasted! 2/3 of my planets were enlightened. However, I couldn't tell if I was actually effecting anything by unloading cargo. I saw the meter slightly increase, but it kinda felt like everything on the planets just kind of happened on its own and that I didn't do much to actually progress them.

The ship may have been a little too fast to control well but I didn't mind much because the concept was so interesting. It's pretty impressive for 3 days.

Good job! Things I liked: Creative movement, I liked the tutorial, it was well explained. Things I didn't like: Navigation was a little difficult. Wasn't sure how to unload easily.

Fun! I actually enjoyed the way the game felt, as well as the actual concept. :)

I found myself getting a LITTLE confused on how to move forward when two planets both seemed stuck at about half enlightenment. I eventually figured out that I could force it to start moving if I brought levels out of balance and then rebalanced them, but this also caused some planets to temporarily die. Also, most of the planets seemed to balance themselves out without any intervention. Maybe you intended this? It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a tad confusing and definitely took away some of the challenge.

I think you could benefit from having different planets start at different balance levels, rather than all starting equal. That way all of them need some modifying to reach enlightenment, encouraging the player to prioritize and move quickly. I would also love to see more resources introduced as the game progresses (I only played the first 3 levels so apologies if this is already the case).

I think the visuals were both pleasing to the eye and conveyed important information quite easily, so kudos there. Overall I really enjoyed it, I was just a little confused at times and sometimes it felt like I didn't really need to play the game to succeed. Tweak the difficulty balance a bit and I think you have a really, REALLY solid project. Nice work!

You raise some great points, ctClarke. If only we had more time to balance! There is so much untapped potential in our engine, as you correctly point out.

P.S. Have you tried firing excess population out in to space? They will float around out there for quite a while, and they seem to be able to handle it without complaining too much. (Select population in the lower right corner, and right-click. It's mentioned in the tutorial but many of the people we have shown the game to missed that detail.)

I really enjoyed the idea of fighting to be in orbit matching the equilibrium that you're trying to create in the planets. Would love to see it finessed so you could slingshot off the planets and dance between them. On a few different playthroughs my planets died before I could have much impact but them's the breaks.

@eamon-kane You can actually slingshot around the planets! A few of our programmers are actually physicists so that was the first test to gravity that we tried haha. But yeah balance was our last obstacle,and sadly we couldn't perfect it in 72 hours, but we're glad you had fun!

Really fun, very simple controls, amazing concept, and very well executed. Definitely a game worth playing!

really fun

This was a really fun game, at first a bit confusing because i didnt get how to get more population. With some help I understood how to play and after it was really good. Well polished and hope to see more ^^

really nice game! At first, when I saw the screenshots I found it was like the game I made, but after playing I saw it was completely different.
I liked a lot these mechanics and concept. Really nice job on this game!

Loved the concept! and i'm a simple man. I see planets or space, and I click.

Very chill simulator with some interesting implications :D

Did have a few tries and always accidently killed all the planets :( Before I stopped playing I did manage to ascend one though - which was a planet I was ignoring up until the one I was actively babysitting died on me. Funny how these things can turn out :D

Absolutely excellent work for a jam game! I can't even start to begin to imagine how much math was required in the making o:

Do you guys think it would be possible to map Heat, Life and H2O Cargo-Selection to the 1,2,3 keys (or better even - the mousewheel)? I just intuitively pressed them and had to remind myself that I actually have to click them.

Phenomenal work all in all though!

@trexxak We really like that idea, if we continue this after the jam the bars are going to get mapped to the mouse wheel for sure. Little things like that are more than crucial.

Good game

Fun game! I enlightened 3 planets.

This looks really fun, and I want to play and rate it, but I can't find the 1.0 version download link anywhere. Can you make the jam version available again please?

Good game! Enlightened 3 planets.

@jamioflan Hi, the 1.1 version is pretty much the jam version with no added features, just bugs fixed! But if you wish to try the 1.0 version it's on the github page under releases, hope you have fun!

Really creative game! I feel like I am the alien behind the scene of all civilizations. Even my waste becomes meteors and disasters to the people. The controls are simple and easy to learn, but the system is of great depth. A planet appears in different ways if the parameters are changed.

Nice concept. I like the combination of an arcade-style flying game with a management/spreadsheet game as they are two very different tasks to manage. My main critique is that adding more planets does not change the game much. I can let a few turn into snowballs while focusing on the rest, and once a few are enlightened I am essentially playing a previous level. To make the game more engaging beyond a few levels I think the number of enlightened planets or complete wastelands should impact the game globally somehow, or there should be some sort of soft clock on the level. Besides any issue with pacing after 30+ minutes of play, great work!

Greetings from the PyGame community. Your game runs smoothly in the current pygame 2.0 development git master.

Good take on the theme, nice graphics!

I particularly liked how you changed the look of the planet based on the parameters. Was this hand-drawn or did you generate it?

@blubberquark Thanks for helping make Pygame! Yes, we have run on the latest 2.0 pre, it's necessary to get it to work on recent OSX.

The terrain is a mix of hand-drawn and procedural: our amazing artist Ellen designed height and temperature maps for the planets, to which the game adds the sealevel and temperature offset of that particular planet's state. The bias+state temperatures and elevations are then used as x and y coordinates to look up a color in a 2D colormap, the result becoming the color of that pixel in the planet sprite. This was all made possible by Pygame's Numpy integration. This particular feature took all of my time for a day in sum, but it was worth it. :)

This is really great!

The procedural planets and dynamic representation of the conditions were really impressive.
Love it!

I do love me some bar-balancing games! The physics sim parts were cool once I figured out how they worked, but that gameplay felt disconnected from the bar management to me. It feels like 2 games, a little physics flyer and a management game, and I wish there were more interplay between those aspects.

I wish it were easier to get/push resources quickly (maybe with a hotkey or something) so that you could do it as you flew past a planet. That way the player would end up kind of trying to keep this smooth circuit between the planets while also sucking up the right resources and shooting them in the right directions, that could be pretty fun.

Definitely enjoyed it though, and the graphics/sound are great!

@prakkus Thanks for the feedback! Although it isn't easy, it is actually possible to fire resources through space from one planet to another, so that you can transfer them without having to fly. A lot of people who play our game don't even realize that resources can become little physics projectiles, which is probably because they never render if you are so close to the planet when you fire them that they are immediately consumed.

Hello, what a nice alien perspective you have there! I like the interactions between population, temperature and sea levels :) only managed to enlighten one planet, since I had trouble taking off off planets until I figured out how to handle the physics - they elevated the game greatly. Love the soundtrack, it makes for great atmosphere. Very good, thanks!

Nice game for this short time!