Love the concept. Do feel the it is a bit hard to control the probe. It is also a bit hard to see the probe and meteors on the highly saturated background.

Nice. Took a bit to figure out that vertical movement is a lot less energy intensive than lateral. Once I found that out it was easy to navigate in the cloud layer and get to about 100, but getting beyond that seems really hard.

Is there a way to catch fuel without relying on chance? Or is that just part of the mission ending being inevitable?

Nice idea to make THRUST-style game with this theme. I scienced as hard as I could but in the end gravity won :laughing: :comet: Well done!

Nice job!

I almost gave up early on because there was nothing much to do, but then the monster certainly added to the game because you had to move around and not just stay in one geysir.

The graphics could be better, I think it might help to make things more abstract, e.g. the floor could be a line instead of a detailed texture.

Quite a simple game but executed well enough. Controls could be more responsive but overall pretty good.

I agree with the above commenter that going for abstraction may be a good idea if the art is a bit lacking. Another point about the graphics would be that all the objects are really tiny on-screen. Would like it all to be bigger, chunkier.

Sweet! I like the balance with having to choose to move horizontally vs vertically. I hope I'm not just too bad at this, but it'd be sweet to see some environmental pickups to keep things going a bit longer.

I like the minimalism of the background, but it feels like the floor is an antithesis to all of that? It's a bit more "visually dense" relative to the rest of the environment.

Nice job! I eventually managed to get good at hovering near the steam vents and gathered a lot of fuel. I wasn't sure what to do past that, it would be fun to have random bonuses up in space, unless I missed them!

I like this idea of expanding on the classic Lunar Lander. It was modified it such a good way to fit the theme.

Very nostalgic vibes! I liked the concept but I felt it's a bit caotic on screen.

Maybe it's just me, but maybe try to increase the window/resolution size (or whatever it's called) of the web player on itch. It cuts a bit of the screen and there is information that's not well displayed.

As @jepjoh2 mentioned, prudent use of vertical up thrust makes the game more interesting. I played on difficulty level - easier, but still found fuel supplies scarce.

Well polished and with a simple and good music!

If i can offer some suggestions: set a bottom limit for the camera and look how to apply some paralax on your background. Those are two little tricks with very satisfying results!

@jepjoh2 The fuel bubbles are random but they do appear in the vicinity of the player.The Fuel Geysers on the surface are in fixed positions. I tried not to make the fuel too easy to get to make the ending more inevitable.

@christian-zommerfelds, @studio-vykanic . I think adding some points of interest to collect extra science or something similar might be the way to go. With only the Fuel bubbles and geysers it can be a bit sparse.

@glayson Suggestions are always welcome. I'll have a look at both.

The controls were pretty good. It would be cool to have a landing mechanism added to the game. Like you have to fly to a landing pad before your fuel runs out.

Managed to hover a little bit!

Pros:

- Easy controls
- Clear objective
- Any music / sounds in Compo is always a +
- Options for settings on +
- A bit of enemies variation

Cons:

- The 'science' scoring system is a miss here. No particular objective or incentive towards leaning to the ground or staying in the atmosphere
- The controls are ok, but unfortunately not designed for keyboard. I also believe that using horizontal controls burns much more fuel for some reason
- The geysers on the surface are not efficient enough to power your rover and the actual trigger system for them is kinda confusing (not sure when I'm actually in the geyser factor)

A cool concept for a probe to collect as much data as possible before crashing, but should have been done in a more slow-paced fashion. Good effort nontheless :)

After some attempts I simply stayed hovering over a geyser. I though I had found a degenerate strategy (well, I think I sort of have), but then when I reached about 100 science I was eaten by a giant flying squid. :slight_smile:

I think this game makes very good use of the theme. The idea of sending a drone that will crash into a planet (or, at least, be destroyed by weather conditions on that planet) but will be able to send some useful information seems to make a lot of sense to me, and is one of the more creative uses of the theme I've seen.

I also like how science is measured with a single number. That is simply fun. On that note, my best Science was 159 Science.

The way I scored my highest scores was by using one particular strategy: flying left (although I imagine right would work as well), and then essentially just hovering. My high score came because I was lucky enough to hit a random fuel bubble and so I was able to hover for much longer.

I may have been able to score even higher had I held left less... it seems like the directional movement uses a lot of fuel, and I imagine I didn't really need to move left as much as I did, I probably could have kept going with a lower momentum.

Either way, it's a fun game to play around in and look for different strategies, especially because there are a couple different things to try. The geysers seem to provide an opportunity, and staying in air seems to provide an opportunity (especially because you can fly up to space...) so I think the core gameplay loop provides a nice sort of sandbox puzzle, which is honestly kind of novel.

So overall, I really like how creative this game is and how it is open-ended yet still has strategies that can be developed and refined.

Edit: Okay, so I went back and played another round after writing this comment. And I found out my strategy is totally broken.

So, this time, I didn't accelerate left as much as I did before. As such, I didn't waste fuel accelerating left... but more importantly, I just kept colliding with bubbles, over, and over, and over again. I was sure I was going to lose at some point, but I just kept hitting bubbles. I eventually resigned myself to just giving up once I hit 1000 science, as my fingers were getting tired from mashing to hover.

And yup. I reached 1000 science. And then I spent the rest of my fuel accelerating up and left. I still had enough fuel that I hit the ceiling at the top of the space area :laughing: and then I of course fell down and lost. I ended up with 1022 science total. The lowest my fuel ever got to was like 8... but near the end there I was hovering between 25 and 30 fuel most of the time.

So that's crazy. This game really has a lot of depth as far as the strategy goes... my initial attempts I thought I would never get above ~40, then users here got 100... and now I've found a strategy that blows that out of the water.

Although... it is too much button mashing for me at this point. :sweat_smile:

This is an excellent compo game! A menu, sound settings, and everything!
I got to above 100 science. The sound effects work well, the music is decent, the graphics look good, and it's fun to play. Ticks all the boxes :)

This game has a good feel, at first it physics was a bit confusing, but after that I felt very nice during my EXPLORATION. Good job.