Pax Nebulae by p-r

[raw]
made by p-r for Ludum Dare 50 (COMPO)

Hints:

The rules of the battles are as follows:
  • let x be total damage of the attack from the source ship;
  • let y be melee or ranged according to the type of the attack;
  • let w be the shield value for either melee or ranged in the target ship;
  • let z be the speed of the target ship
  • damage = (x + y) - (w + z)/(x + y)
  • If the damage is below 1, it will be rounded to 1 point of damage regardless

  • This is all done automatically of course, but it should be known if you wish to make more educated moves in battle. It can really make a difference.

- In case of power attacks, all active ships from the target team take 20% of the damage made to the main target. Power attack information wasn't added, but it could be perceived if you are attacking more than 2 adversary ships. All attacks for your ships can be searched in Training stations throughout the game, as the name implies, damage made in battles are outside the normal scope and it will not affect your fleet afterwards.
- Do not take heed on the "type" field outside of ship information, it is mostly wrong and does not provide any meaningful in-game applications as it was intended.
- The 2 "go to x" buttons below the map do not move you into those locations, it will only show them on the map. To move you just need to press a position on the map, but beware of the fuel costs. You can buy fuel and increase tank space if needed.

That's pretty much it, the rest I think is very straight forward.

Cargo bug: The game is not removing cargo space after you lose ships in battle. To get around this bug, download a save file, search for the first instance of "cargo", and change the value manually to your current number of ships (if you have 3 ships in deck => "cargo":3 ), until I upload a post version with that correction.

Ratings

Overall 517th 3⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Fun 547th 2.667⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 359th 3.183⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Theme 570th 2.733⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 555th 2.661⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Audio 332th 3.103⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Humor 462th 1.938⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Mood 303th 3.258⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Given 37🗳️ 43🗨️

Feedback

eLeDe
04. Apr 2022 · 20:35 UTC
I only get a black screen :cry:
jesusnoseq
04. Apr 2022 · 21:28 UTC
Same

the black screen of death!
Phlip45
04. Apr 2022 · 21:36 UTC
Yup Me too. Using Opera browser if that helps at all. Please @ me when it is fixed and I'll come back and give it a try.
A Chill Lemur
05. Apr 2022 · 22:16 UTC
Black screen on Firefox :(
gbgames
06. Apr 2022 · 04:56 UTC
Ooh, now it is working! I like the music and sound effects.

It feels like an expansive world, with lots to explore. Movement was a little unintuitive, as I didn't realize I was traveling multiple spaces at a time. At some point, I ended up running out of fuel with no way to buy more as I was stranded, but the game kept going.

I managed to do a bit of trading, but I didn't feel the urgency that the intro to the game seemed to imply. The combat was interesting, sorta like Risk in that you can put multiple units into the attack, but if there is only one opponent, then you can really only use one attacker at a time. I realized I should have pulled one of my scouts out of the attack before it got destroyed, so there was some neat tactical aspects to the fighting. I felt accomplishing taking out my first communications system, as it felt like there was going to be an endless collection of capital ships to fight with my lowly scouts.
🎤 p-r
06. Apr 2022 · 22:00 UTC
@phlip45 the black screen was due to a parser error which I was already able to fix, same probably applies to you @elede @jesusnoseq and @a-chill-lemur. I've tested in most known modern browsers and without any issues so far.

@gbgames Thanks for the extensive feedback, very glad you enjoyed it.
tylerstraub
06. Apr 2022 · 23:08 UTC
Pretty expansive game - I enjoyed finding new encounters and exploring different planets or stars. I think there is a cool foundation here, but like gbgames said, sometimes it's hard to tell when you're moving since it's all black. I like this overall though, some GUI polishing and more in depth content could make this really fun
Yahwooday
06. Apr 2022 · 23:15 UTC
Chrome works for me, but it was a bit lag for some reasons. I feel like the game is kind of like Pokemon, but since there aren't many instruction for the battle, it did take a bit of time to figure how to play. Overall, I think the idea is pretty good! I have never thought of game like this style!
PickyBurrito49
06. Apr 2022 · 23:19 UTC
Decently fun I must say. I flew about did, some mining, found a cool star or two, Landed on a planet and finally found some enemies to fight but then after I killed the first enemy it froze on me (playing on Chrome). Seeing the colored squares 'behind' me gave the sense of movement and the controls made decent sense. I appreciated in combat that if I forgot to select my type of attack that there was a prompt! Only thing I couldn't figure out how to do was sell my minerals. I stoped at several cities and didn't see a sell cargo option. All in all I enjoyed the concept and think you did a great job.
Mooptychunk
06. Apr 2022 · 23:28 UTC
This is really in depth! With some extra polish I could see myself losing hours to this.
LDJam user 76491
06. Apr 2022 · 23:57 UTC
I really like this genre, it's the kind of game that can take you away for hours on end :smile:
The world music was very nice, the battle one kinda got a bit repetitive. There was one time the game froze during battle, I had a lot of fun playing nonetheless.

Exploring the world was a fun experience, and I see a lot of potential in games like this. Neat work!
realryanrogers
07. Apr 2022 · 22:12 UTC
I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but I found myself really enjoying the loop of just exploring around and finding things despite the lo-fi aesthetic. Well done and thanks for sharing!
tigerfinch
08. Apr 2022 · 00:23 UTC
Absolutely loved the aesthetic, and the exploratory vibe was cool.
Control scheme was a little hard to get to grips with off the bat, but not necessarily a bad thing, felt like working out an old computer.
Did have to mute the music pretty fast, but there was a kernel of a good background theme there.
ExeVirus
08. Apr 2022 · 01:16 UTC
Wow, okay I just played that for like 40 minutes. After the second battle, I got to a decent planet. Thought we couldn't actually get fuel haha. Proceeded to realize this was going to be a lot of clicking... so I pulled out trusty 'ol **autohotkey**...

![ahk.jpg](///raw/472/d2/z/4d7ae.jpg)

[auto click 20 or 100 times rapidly when pressing windows+Q or windows+W]

So with that power, and about 20 more minutes...

![Yes, it's a lot.gif](///raw/472/d2/z/4d7af.gif)

Yikes, the slowest part is the damn battles haha. Speaking of which, you need to get rid of the scrollbars and make the screen width bigger, sliding to the strongest attack every time is rough. Also, far too easy to just swap out anyone willy nilly. Maybe restrict to one swap per round? also the 2 moves only for my round thing needs improved. I liked the initial difficulty, but as you can see, it get's really broken quite fast. Especially with free insta heals ;)

Note the **160 cargo capacity!!!**
🎤 p-r
08. Apr 2022 · 09:51 UTC
@tylerstraub @mooptychunk @conradoclark @realryanrogers @tigerfinch Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

@yahwooday @pickyburrito49 you would assume chrome of all browsers would perform well, but there's a lot of inefficient coding on my part that might be causing the lag. It might also be due to the fact that it's being played embedded, cohabit with all the itch.io frontend stuff.

@exevirus lol amazing feedback, it looks like you're ready to take over the universe with that fleet :D. Yes as you can tell there is not much level design as it should have, but time constraints dictated that I should follow the law of random. Appreciate your feedback and I am glad you enjoyed it.
Etherion
08. Apr 2022 · 21:03 UTC
Was completely lost as to what to do
Combat was a bit unintuitive, but ended up figuring it out. Balance was strange though, since numbers on either side really affected hit points since the number of actions was always the same.
Visuals were very jarring, with the bright yellow being a bit painful to look at.
lbrande
08. Apr 2022 · 21:47 UTC
Not a lot of instructions. Very hard to figure out what to do.
Kiddy
09. Apr 2022 · 17:35 UTC
Pretty complete game, maybe a but too, with too many mechanics
elimarable
11. Apr 2022 · 19:53 UTC
Wow, there is an astounding amount of content here for a compo game! I like the idea, and it was fun to explore a little and fight a battle. The music was overpoweringly loud, I had to turn my volume almost off. I think this game could most benefit from an organic sense of progression -- rather than having everything available immediately, start with a small subset of the game mechanics and introduce more as the player demonstrates mastery. With a bit more work, I think this could be something really special! Nice job!
🎤 p-r
13. Apr 2022 · 08:42 UTC
@etherion @lbrande @kiddy @elimarable Thanks for the feedback!
LMB
17. Apr 2022 · 03:50 UTC
This game is pretty deep for a compo entry, and the kind of game I could spend hours on. I'll join the chorus, though, and remark that I found hard to understand how to play and what is going on while in combat or space traveling. It was fun (although a bit grindy) after I got the grasp of it.

The music worked super well, created a good space atmosphere (see what I did here? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) without feeling repetitive.

This can be quite a fun game with some polishing and balancing!