Flight Stick Uncalibrated by thingus
https://thingus.itch.io/ld47
How to play
Fly through the hoops!
A+D to control roll
W+S to control throttle
Look, don't worry about pitch. Pitch takes care of itself.
Pre-flight checks may have been skipped, and I'm not sure that the joystick was zeroed properly....
Thoughts
This LD was mainly for getting the hang of Godot, so the project is a little basic...but oh my is this game editor lovely. Referencing objects is simple, the signal/observer pattern is clear, 3D tools are close enough to Blender to be doable, it's just nice. This was also my first solo run with Blender, another program that's come on in leaps since I last looked at it.
The game itself has a cunning pun in the mechanics (stuck in a loop, see), and I was going for the idea of taking a simple task (fly though the rings) and making it tricky because the agent in the game isn't quite doing what you want. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a good way to solve the depth-perception problem, adding an extra layer of frustration on top of the already existing layer of frustration that's supposed to be there. Please give thoughts in the comments!
Credits
Game implemented in Godot: https://godotengine.org/
Models in Blender 2.9: https://www.blender.org/
Daily Life font by Etig Letters:https://www.behance.net/etigletters
Thanks to Emma for care and feeding over this LD
| Youtube | https://thingus.itch.io/ld47 |
| Youtube | https://github.com/Thingus/ld47 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/flight-stick-uncalibrated |
Ratings
| Overall | 497th | 3.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 558th | 2.568⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 221th | 3.5⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 51th | 4.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 409th | 3.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 255th | 2.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 550th | 2.375⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 14🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
If you go near the edge of the map, collision stops working with the ground. Good take on the theme.
I like the idea and feel like there is some potential here, but the learning curve is quite steep. I could never get through more than 3 loops before crashing. With a little more polish I could see it becoming quite fun. The biggest issue is probably that it’s hard to judge exactly where your ship is. The shadow helps, but since the terrain isn’t flat (or doesn’t look it at least) it’s really hard to judge exactly where your ship is. Having the top and bottom side of the ship look the same doesn’t help either.
@gurbx @joonamo I did try a flat ground, but it was actually worse :/ And early exeriments with the camera nearly left me feeling seasick, I wouldn't wish that on anyone XD
I might try hazy clouds at set layers, to give a set of of under/over layers.
@indigo I looked at coroutines, but was having too much fun with the rest of it - next time, though...
@finalforeach Yeah, I meant to add a fence so you were around the central areas where all the rings spawn, or at least encouraged to go back there but time. The ground collision was a bit hacked together.
I think the shadows do a decent job of giving me a clue about the depth, but maybe tweaking the camera FOV to be a bit wider (looks like it's orthographic as it is now) would make it more obvious.
Strenghts :
- The interpretation of the theme
- Fun contextualization and gameplay
- Still easier to control than Elite Dangerous with no assists
Possible improvements :
- Please stop reminding me how much I stuck at flight/space sims