Crisis: Reactor by arkinrev
Crisis: Reactor
You're hurtling through space at impossible speeds, and the ship's AI has put you in charge of the ship's reactor. You don't even know anything about reactors! Well, after taking a long and groggy look at the console, you're the only one standing between an unstable reactor and reaching your destination. Can you prevent reactor meltdown while a malfunctioning AI fiddles with controls?
Goals: What to Watch Out For
Here are the main 5 conditions to watch out for: - WIN: Your distance to home reaches 0. - LOSE: The reactor temperature exceeds the core melting point by too much. - LOSE: The core is completely waste. - LOSE: Your coolant supply is completely contaminated. - LOSE: The pressure exceeds three times the recommended 1000 MPa.
Reactor Basics
There's no time for everything and all of the details. Browsing through the manual shows a few things:
Reactor Power Sliders
These are the main sliders which put a load on the reactor. The higher the load, the more power the reactor will try to produce. You can see the amount of power each slider is using, as well as other power drains, to the left on the information terminal.
Emergency Control Arm
To the right of the containment chamber, there are a few buttons to activate the control arm. Each consumes some power. Each does some good job, at the expense of the others. - [Fortify Core] -Waste Mass +Core Temperature - [Flush Coolant Pipes] -Coolant Contamination +Waste Mass - [Core Cooling] -Core Temperature +Contamination
Pressure
Contaminated coolant leads to increased pressure. Raising the pressure lowers the effective melting point of the core. Keep the pressure near the recommended minimum 1000MPa.
| Link | https://github.com/ArkInRev/LD49 |
| Link | https://arkinrev.itch.io/ld49 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/crisis-reactor |
Ratings
| Overall | 306th | 3.409⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 393th | 3.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 171th | 3.636⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 63th | 4.182⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 88th | 3.977⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 140th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 57th | 3.762⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 71th | 3.795⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 19🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
Great job!
@meredori You're right, it can get hectic, and the AI left out a few helpful details. There are some stable states for the reactor, but the AI should randomly tinker with things so it's never a smooth ride.
@shadowmyst Thanks! There is a lot to take in, and I was worried the tutorial part was going on for too long. There are a lot of moving parts in this artificial nuclear reactor.
Hopefully someone was able to make it home! (If so, my next personal challenge was making it home with the engines at full power.)
@ghoulean There's enough play in the values that you can run the reactor hot with maximum engine and still make it home. It was difficult to set some warning lights because you can push any one of them to the edge as long as you keep enough of the contaminant/waste/pressure from accumulating. That empty space at the bottom left corner I was hoping for some graphing, and the left wall would have been the fuel cell and coolant cistern capacity.
Thanks for checking it out, and I hope some of you made it safely home!
@wolderado I'm glad you liked it! All of the numbers have meaning and you can really push the reactor. I really wanted a timer as well to show how long the trip took as a way to get out of the comfort zone and push the reactor to its limits.
@nyxkn The pressure is off to your right off of the control panel. Pressure is tricky and builds up faster with contaminated coolant! Pressure and Meltdown are the most likely ways to blow up the reactor, but it is also possible to contaminate the coolant completely or deplete the core.
Thanks for trying it out everyone!
i thought i was doing well, but screen suddenly faded to white then i died, and i have no idea why, it just instantly goes to rebooting screen, so i didn't get a chance to learn what i did wrong to do it better next time.
@masaru First sitting down at the reactor is rough. The AI is changing the settings on you, and does it less frequently if power is applied to the AI, which costs a lot of additional power.
The intent was for the robotic arm and the reactor core to have more animation/lighting with the reactor condition to provide additional visual indicators. You're right about those things missing! Thanks for checking it out!