Swerve by IC Rainbow
Stable orbits are too boring for a G-force seeking space racer.
Test your skills and reaction time in this twisted mess of warp.
Goal
There is a wide, but not too tall "track" which is peppered with attractors of various sizes.
You spawn on the left side, and on the right side is the huge finish, which you should ~crash~ arrive to.
Hit Esc to submit your score and restart.
Ship controls
Left/Right- turn your ship.Up- use engine to change course.
Items
- Boost (
W)- Gain a massive engine power boost. Fades quickly and charges slowly.
- Shed (
S)- Convert your kinetic energy to radiation.
- Jump (
X)- Quick dive deeper into warp and back.
If we do not steer, we run the danger of ending up where we are going.
Notes
- The track itself is quite short after you got a grip on controls.
- You're welcome to try different tactic, do tricks, get into scoreboards.
- Don't get too addicted to boosting, the need for speed is real.
Indicators
The mess around your ship is mostly your gravity analysis unit working.
- Short grey lines - some mass that way, but doesn't influence your trajectory too much.
- Longer grey lines - some mass coming up closer. Probably affects your trajectory.
- Green/yellow/red lines - usually visible on screen.
- Yellow wiggly line - that's your trail.
- Cyan wiggly line - your trajectory, plotted into the future.
- It will turn purple when the collision is detected on your current course. Take evasive action!
Bugs
- There is something wrong with sound loader, it may take a while to load on some machines, but not others. Sorry.
High scores
A free service provided by @owca.
- Top speed - maximum speed achieved.
- Run time - get to the goal ASAP.
- Burn time - get to the goal with least engine use (items are ok).
| Haskell | https://gitlab.com/dpwiz/swerve |
| Ubuntu | https://icrbow.itch.io/swerve |
| Link | https://icrbow.itch.io/swerve |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/swerve |
Ratings
| Overall | 407th | 3.773⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 580th | 3.568⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 207th | 3.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 915th | 3.364⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1126th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 75th | 4.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 624th | 3.143⭐ | 16🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 776th | 3.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
The graphics are pretty minimal/abstract at first, it's hard to decipher what you're actually looking at.
Liked the sounds and music though.
The physics felt pretty good, it's basically a simulation. :P
After roughly half the distance there were no more planets though unfortunately.
And then I tried the Jump and seem to have jumped PAST the goal, and could not find it anymore after that?
Overall pretty nice experience though.
Also loading sounds takes over a minute on my laptop, not sure why that is.
My first few tries, I flew off into space. Eventually I realized that the distance to the goal is increasing instead of decreasing. You can go to pretty high speeds there, and I think I eventually didn't see any attractor objects any more.
The music was very fitting for the space theme and also fitting to the pacing of the game.
The high-score system deserves extra praise.
Things to improve:
- I still don't know what the radiation thingy is for
- I realized far too late, that the purple line is not the "ideal racing line" but more my trajectory which I can influence, doh!
- I think the boost power ups distract a little from the more interesting mechanic of gaining speed by doing close flybys on planets. That could have been explored more
All in all, I really like it!
Something I think that might be interesting to talk about is how the game doesn't really tell you how to play it (beyond the short description). Of course we usually expect the game to teach us how to play it, but I honestly had a pretty good time while just figuring this game out... playing through a couple times and getting a better grasp on the mechanics. Maybe it's because space already evokes themes of the unknown, and of complex technical systems... but it seems to work pretty well, which I think is neat.
It is interesting how you can end up way outside of the space where there are any asteroids. One of my runs, I ended up warping there, and I thought I would have a pretty smooth ride to the finish... until I realized I had flown way out of wherever the finish was. It made me pay even more attention to where I was going, in future runs...
On that note, it's pretty cool how once you're near the finish, you can tell where it is located based on the trajectory line. Especially if you reset your velocity with S, which is the strategy I used.
A small note is the first high score I tried to upload didn't save my name. (I got #4 in speed, I remember).
Overall, this was a lot of fun to figure out and satisfying to win.
The first play-through, I didn't understand I was supposed to go somewhere particular and the distance is kind of a smallish thing in the corner. Perhaps place it closer to the vessel and/or make it visually more obvious when one goes the wrong way by perhaps color and flashing.
I had a lot of fun though, very well made and the audio was very nice!
I did seem to lose attractors, even though my distance to the goal was still decreasing. Seemed like there was a "course" or "track" that I should have stayed on? Maybe there's a way to better indicate that.
Also, some sort of global arrow pointing to the finish line is something to consider. Otherwise I'm gauging my heading by the "velocity" of the distance to goal, much like watching the axis position in Minecraft XD
Otherwise, this is a fantastic sim! Right up my alley. I could sit in this all day!