Whoa! It's like a space game or something! by circle
It's a space exploration game where you take control of a ship and trade resources between planets. While trading, enemies will attempt to attack you and must be defeated.
I was originally planning on including things like a story and economics simulation, but had to cut those features. Such is life. Instead, enjoy flying through space and avoiding enemies. I think flying is quite fun, I spent a decent amount of time tweaking the code as well as the animations to make it just right. I hope that if you decide to play this game you enjoy it even close to as much as I enjoyed making it.
As for controls, they can be changed once you've started by clicking the gear icon in the top right, the defaults are as follows:
click - shoot ship points in direction of mouse shift - activate thruster, begin accelerating. enter - confirm text e - interact with planet. and all the buttons obviously can be used by clicking. Also, you need a mouse and keyboard to play this game.
Also also, if your hp reaches zero, or your fuel with your cash less than 2000, the game will end.
Try and put off your inevitable bankruptcy/death, there is no way to truly escape either in this world.
If you want, curse your grandfather for leaving you a space ship instead of a nice old farm.
If you need to feel like you beat the game, try accumulating 50000 cash and fighting some of the larger space pirate spawns. I don't know if anyone else is like this, but last ludum dare I really enjoyed trying to complete each game I tried. For the theme this time, I'm not sure if that'll really be possible though, as most of the games probably don't have any kind of "victory" condition.
Rate and comment if you like. Feel free to let loose whatever criticism you want, anything at all. I really want to improve and deeply appreciate any and all comments. If you need anything, the game is bugged for example, please leave a comment informing me such. I can't say 100% I'll fix it, but I'll at least give it my best shot.
Okay, that's all from me. Please enjoy!
HEY! HEADS UP! If you're having trouble pressing enter in the tutorial sequence, close the tab and reopen it. I don't know why this happens and I don't know why this fixes it, I appreciate your understanding. EDIT: Okay, I looked into it a little, I think the game just needs to finish loading everything. If I were paying more attention to good practice it wouldn't be a problem. If you wait a little while you'll be able to input keyboard.
Another Heads up! The game pretty much only works on google chrome. Limitations of other browsers prevent it from being played. I could probably fix it given enough time, but a lot of the features I use requite google chrome.
| WHOA! SPACE GAME - Web game | https://waifudestroyer2.itch.io/whoa-its-like-a-space-game-or-something |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/whoa-its-like-a-space-game-or-something |
Ratings
| Overall | 477th | 3.125⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 405th | 3.125⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 461th | 2.953⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 589th | 2.609⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 365th | 3.288⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 343th | 2.625⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 401th | 3.032⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
I like the spaceship travel between planets and having to use the map. Sometimes I have pressed "m" when I wanted to open the map :smile:
Nice job!
To answer your question, I used an ai music generation program, aiva, as well as the sfx generator sfxr for the sound, so it didn't really feel right to me, taking the easy way out, to be judged for audio.
Music + SFX were pleasing, and the visual appearance was nice!
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set properties of null (setting 'imageSmoothingEnabled')
at script.js:11:33
And yea, that's a good point about the enter key as well. Space is probably more natural.
And also, by the way, thanks for taking the time to play! I really liked Runic Moon, it's got some of the most appealing art and music I've seen so far in this jam. Really good work on that one.
Like others have said, the GUI and game itself are not intuitive but the core gameplay loop of going to different planets and fighting monsters along the way is itself engaging, and even though I didn't know what I was buying or harvesting half the time, I still had fun doing it.
By the way, if I inherited the ship from my grandpa whats he doing giving me advice at the start of the game?
And yea, lessons learned I suppose. I put in more information about what everything is and why here than my last game jam game, but it looks like I still have a long way to go. Your grandpa does mention, very briefly, what all the resources are.
I think just adding mouse over text would make a huge difference. I'm going to start including that in all my games.
Also. Thank you so much for playing a lot and for leaving a big comment!!! So cool of you! You said such nice things to me. Me! I'm just some random piece of garbage! Jokes aside, really appreciate your comment.
It gave me flashbacks to an old black and white space trading game I played as a child.
I liked the humor, sound effects, and space combat.
Trading was a bit difficult because of fuel and money not being shown on the mining and selling screens.
Also, I do appreciate the unity tutorial, but I actually make my games in javascipt, using the 2d context canvas element and the webgl context canvas element, with a little help from PIXI js. While its not too different from working in Unity, there are a number of quirks that make tutorials less interchangeable. Still really appreciate you taking the time to share, as well as linking a video. That's like super cool of you.
Since you went through the trouble, I figure I may as well share a little advice regarding enemy ai and pathfinding. I'll go into the Pellets page and share that there.
The game needs a lot of polish, but there are some neat bones underneath.
One thing that surprised me was using the warp gate, harvesting from the star, and then setting that sent me from $300 to over $69000. As nice as this is, it seems like values need tweaking.
Also, I believe you're one of the only people to actually bother with going to the other area! Thanks! That made me really happy!
Also also, yes the game needs a lot of polish. Lessons learned, next jam I'm going to focus more on creating a good experience, and less on packing in features.
Also also also, wowowwowwowow. Your game looks so good! The arts incredibly pretty! I'm gonna go rate it now, but wow. Really impressive stuff. You should definitely update it more! It's so cool!
I somehow busted the money and was getting ridiculous amount of money haha. I really enjoyed the presentation and how big the world felt. Really well done. I wonder what was your inspiration for how the UI was designed? It felt quite 90s but in a good way
On that subject as well, normally these days I'd probably add lots of animation to the ui as well, I simply lacked time. My favorite thing to do for ui is to give it a kind of liquid/solid look, like this test button I just made. 
Well, that was a complex game! The first time i saw the interface and a intro dialogue, I was perplexed about the scope here!
I traveld to all planets/satellites/moon and get everything, but I couldnt buy anything beside materials in water based planets. Am I missing something here?
The first time I played the return action didnt work (enter), i needed to refresh my browser (and i dont know why it worked only on Edge, my firefox didnt show the first screen).
Beside that, it was fun playing it and gathering resources. The last thing i did was go to out of screen, maybe searching for a new galaxy, and due to movement i couldnt return (that was risky and i knew it haha).
I liked the sprites. And, i'm curious. Which engine did you use?
And finally, congratulations! Nice game :) :)
The reason it works on edge and not fire fox is because edge is built on chromium, which is kinda like a bare bones version of google chrome. The game only works on browsers running chromium for a lot of reasons that I can't really go into here.
On the subject of engine, well I guess you could say I built a custom engine for it when the jam started? I programmed everything in javascript, and used the canvas element to render everything. I also included the open source PIXI js library, as it gives easy access to the webgl context, but a graphics library is not a game engine. I also used the regular 2d context where it was easier to do so, for example the planets are running on their own separate offscreen canvases, with a cycling image being rendered onto a circular gradient only where the gradient is already rendered. The game also employs DOM manipulation to efficiently render most of the text.
Finally, thank you very much for the congratulations! I really appreciate you taking the time to play so much of my game, and then further taking time to post such an in depth comment. It's really nice of you, and I appreciate it.
First off controls- Took me a short while to get used to. Initially I didn't like the mechanic about not being able to move while shooting, but overtime I came to enjoy it, as it was.. well different, from the usual topdown space shooter mechanics.
The whole idea of trading and/or mining resources- I'm a sucker for those- So I was hooked even before starting.
There are obviously a lot more that can be done to the current system, but suffice it to say, I loved it. Once I got the hang of it, I Basically just moved back and forth between the starter planet (Sorry forgot the name :-( ) and the sun. Mining and selling, while killing off the odd pirate now and then.
That was easy money. Now eventually when I felt brave and rich enough, I ventured beyond the portal (Of course with my hold loaded with various goods). I was.. slighlt surprised by the increase in pirates, but luckily I had already skilled up a bit in the 'safer zone', so I managed to dodge/survive, and even skill up quite a lot.
Once I hit the 50.000 mark you suggested, I decided to press on, for just a little while longer, and ended the game with over 150.000. I may go back and beat that score, as it is sadly, a bit too easy to make a profit- But again I fully understand that balancing economics (And the AI, and other stuff in your game) is nigh impossible in just 48 hours.
As for the graphics- I loved your artstile for the planets, it was really great, and had a nice mood to it.
I would love to see what this game could evolve into, and would be a good candidate to have some story implemented into it as well, if one wanted to do that.
Anyways- I throughtly enjoyed playing this - So far this is probably the game I enjoyed the most this Ludum Dare, so Thanks a lot for sharing the game, and keep up the good work :-)
Appreciated the control customization and that you address them in the tutorial. The tutorial was ok for the first time, but the amount of text gets tedious when you come back and try the game again. The text was slightly too small for my taste and could use some background to help readability.
Overall it seems you got a lot going on here and that's impressive. Good job!
That's really good advice about the tutorial. I'm thinking an opt out button as well some way to more deeply engage the player would be nice changes to the current system. It tries to explain everything in the game all at once, it's a bit much.
Thanks for playing! I really appreciate your feedback!
I'm amazed by the amount content, different gameplay mechanics, art and music you were able to produce in such a short time! The main gameplay loop is really well done, it's just fun to fly around and shoot space pirates.
It's hard to complain about this game because there's so much in it for a compo, but I'm going point at a few problems a ran into:
* the tutorial was a bit too long, maybe giving info partially could work better;
* I couldn't run it on Firefox, but it's ok;
* when I accidentally press tab I can't move anymore. this is the biggest issue I had and it kind of prevented me from progressing far in the game
Anyway, a really impressive job!
I recorded my playthrough. Here's a link in case you'd like to see it https://youtu.be/aJkdjOKW03M
And yea, that's a really good point at the end there, about a downloadable version. Any future version I were to make would probably get packaged with electron js or something anyway, it wouldn't be too hard. Lessons learned.
Yea the tutorial is a bit long, especially after you've already seen it.
Thank you so much for taking the time to play, I saw you had some trouble getting started, seeing you continue to get it working made me really happy. I really appreciate you going through the trouble. And not only that, you even recorded yourself! This is incredible and it means so much to me. By the way, I just wanted to say one more time that your game Keep The Power is an absolute delight and still sitting in my mind. It's that surprise at the end that really hits you, I loved it.
Thank you so much though. Seeing someone play like this really does make a huge difference.
However, the game end quite early as the "harvest" button does not work for me :tired_face:.
But still, good job!
The game is fun and even if, at first, the control feels a bit difficult to manage, I got used to it :smile:
Really cool, great job !