Space Scavenger by magzh
Game created by Magzh and Soul.
You are the captain of a scavenging spaceship and your mission is to survive an endless trip through an asteroid belt.


Use 'WASD' or arrow keys to control the ship.
Press right or left shift to fire the torpedo.
Pressing ‘space bar’ slows down time, so that you can pick the upgrades/repairs.
Use the scrap metal that you've collected to upgrade or repair your ship parts through the UI on the left.
Upgrading cost is the top button and repairing cost is the bottom button.
Press 'Escape' to exit the game.
Upgrade explanations:
Hull decreases damage dealt to all components.
Shield decreases damage dealt to itself.
Engine improves horizontal acceleration.
Thrusters improve vertical acceleration.
Oxygen decreases depletion rate of the oxygen.
Railgun decreases cooldown for the gun. (Cooldown is indicated by the bottom left bullet icon)
Programming by: Soul and Magzh.
Graphics and UI by: Magzh.
Audio by: Magzh.
Font: "Kenney Future" by KenneyNL
Skybox: "Purple Space Nebula Skybox" by TL Multimedia
Used tools: Unity 2019.3.5f1, GIMP 10.10, Aseprite, Bxfr, Audacity
Bugfix update 1.1:
Fixed difficulty manager not working as intended.


Ratings
| Overall | 1661th | 3.3⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1570th | 3.15⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2018th | 2.85⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1464th | 3.55⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1782th | 3.175⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1520th | 2.447⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1881th | 2.156⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 2073th | 2.816⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 11🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
I enjoy the movement of the game, it's very different from what you usually get with these types of games where it's mostly instantaneous movement - the addition of acceleration makes it stand out well.
I do think the difficulty curve is a little bit flat though. Since the game goes on forever, it would be nice to have it scale so that the player eventually loses at some point, I played for 10 minutes and I could probably go on forever if I wanted to.
The art is nice, the design on the spaceship is pretty unique. I also really liked the movement in the background and how it feels a bit circular.
The UI is a little bit complicated, and I had to double check which buttons did what in order to really get it. Perhaps some icons in game would help alleviate that. Also, I wasn't sure what the point of upgrading things like my oxygen and railgun were, maybe that could be explained better with a tooltip of some kind?
The sound was also a bit heavy attack heavy, it's quite jarring to hear such a strong sound every time anything happens in the game. I would mellow out some of the more common sounds and save the heavy ones for important things (like dying, etc...)
Overall, a fun game and nice interpretation of a classic genre. Great work! :)
There is a difficulty manager, that we thought to be working, but it might have a bug. At least during our testing phase, it increased asteroid speed and their frequency.
Thanks for the complements on the art. I haven't done pixel art in quite some time, so I wasn't sure how it will work out, but it turned better than expected.
Yeah, I agree on the UI. I wasn't sure as more icons would make it even more cluttered and it already takes a lot of space. I probably should add what each upgrade does to the game description.
Here is the list of all upgrades:
Hull decreases damage dealt to all components.
Shield decreases damage dealt to itself.
Engine improves horizontal acceleration.
Thrusters improve vertical acceleration.
Oxygen decreases depletion rate of the oxygen.
Railgun decreases cooldown for the gun. (Cooldown is indicated by the bottom left bullet icon)
Audio could've been better, but I am still learning how to use Bxfr and Audacity.
Again, thanks for the feedback.
This also reminds me that I forgot to add this to the control explanation:
Pressing 'space bar' slows down time, so that you can pick the upgrades/repairs.
Thanks for the feedback.
I agree with @bulent-altinay some blasters would be really nice!))
Keep up the good work, and well done :)
I dug the floaty physics movement and thought you could play that up even more. I also liked the slow speed of the rail gun (more like a torpedo really, rail guns are usually insanely fast, maybe a new feature?) however the length of the cool down really reduced its usefulness.
One suggestion around the pausing feature is rather then actually pausing the game, just give people a break (10 seconds, 20 seconds) between waves to build the ship or vary the intensity. This way you are still putting passive time pressure on them but are able to remove both a full button and an UI from the interface. I also found after 5 minutes it was getting exhausting and could use a break. Just a thought.
Also, you could consider asteroids coming in from different angles as well. This would let you greatly reduce the speed required (for the asteroids) and the total number as they could come in from different angles and that would be much harder to avoid. Be careful with this though, it could easily become over difficult. That would reinforce the strategic elements you already have in place.
I also agree with some of the others that it was hard to tell scrap from the asteroids, although that could be a feature in some ways. You might want to have some more obvious scrap and then some which looks like asteroids but is higher value. You might also want to consider high risk, high reward trade-offs such as an asteroid that you could destroy with a rail gun to gain a big boost of metal . This would give players as skill shot to work on and would greatly increase the depth. It sounds like you are already working on variable difficulty too.
Other people have mentioned sfx, vfx etc and I think those would also really help.
I can see you are managing many uploads. You may want to consider Itch.io for hosting (also allows for long term updates) and especially Butler, which is a command line uploader for Itch that is very cool. Google it and you will find the docs. That is all you need.
Good job! Keep at it!
At first the game was fun at first but i noticed that the asteroids quickly got spaced out more and more to the point where there were only 3 things on screen at every given time. The upgrades were a nice touch but i couldn't tell what all of them did.
Artwise the ship reminded me of FTL but everything else felt a bit weak.