Solar Drift by Dan Davis
Suddenly you wake up. Alarms blaring, lights flashing... something's gone terribly wrong with your ship while you were in cryosleep! You're barreling out of control towards a nearby star, and it's up to you to prevent disaster.
In Solar Drift, you play a civilian passenger, awakened unexpectedly to a dead crew and a ship in serious trouble. Investigate your surroundings, and find a way to prevent certain doom. In this faulty state, the ship's systems are resetting every 10 seconds, causing gravity to fail, and power to shut down for 10 seconds. As the game progresses, the ship's hull temperature increases as the star draws ever closer. Your goal is to regain control by disabling various failsafes and fixing broken equipment.
Controls: arrow keys or WASD, click to interact with the environment/dialog.
Can you restore control before all is lost?

| Link | https://alienairship.com/bin/solardrift/SolarDrift_Dare51.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/solar-drift |
Ratings
| Overall | 276th | 3.824⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 423th | 3.559⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 353th | 3.588⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 193th | 4.088⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 144th | 4.279⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 193th | 3.838⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 339th | 3.29⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 155th | 3.984⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
Loved the game, and the visuals of seeing space fly around in the window was great!
I would have liked to be able to jump the gap on the top floor when gravity's on and have a bit more control when it's off - I found myself waiting for the gravity change so I could go side to side more than once. Jumping also feels inconsistent, I think you can only jump on one frame in the idle/running animation, otherwise your input is ignored.
This didn't get in the way of me enjoying the game though, I enjoyed hunting for things and especially liked the placement of the broken cable.
The broken ladder is a bit obscure, I was stuck there for a long time until I finally saw it. It could do with some emergency lights or markings on the ground to highlight it more.
Also you can't jump when holding a movement button. Took a while to figure out why I kept failing to jump over the hatch.
- The music is great, but very repetetive. The tones when floating make me think of thos progressive rockbands in the mid 90's ^^
- The graphics are awesome. I like the mix between 3D and papermario-like graphics. Just curious: was that the plan? Or did you come up with that in a later stage?
- When the ship goes dark, it gets reeealy dark. I could not see anything
- After a while I found out that there is an arrow you can klik at the bottom right. If that is very important, I would make it flash or maybe bigger.
- Sometimes, when i click the item i click double, and the textprompt at the botton disappeared
You can be proud, this one was fun :-)
Regarding the weightlessness mechanic being a hindrance, this is absolutely intentional. It is perfectly timed to the music so that you can feel it coming after a while, and that introduces a small sense of panic if you're trying to do something that would be hindered by it.
Remember: You are a civilian waking unexpectedly into a chaotic situation, much of which is out of your control at first, and by the end, if you win, you overcome these obstacles.
We could have made a standard side scrolling platformer with like a 10second flashlight or something but this gravity mechanic forces you to think about timing when going up to the 2nd level, and to win, you must go up and down at least twice.
About music... It sounds like a brainstorm: "How do I tell the player that it's going to be bad soon?"; "And let's add in music?": "Go!"... In general, I want to say that the main problem is in the mechanics itself and the places where it is used, and not that signals about its approach or anything else are incorrectly given. And the player will never think about the "author's idea". And I, as a player, say that the mechanics of gravity are used very poorly in lvl design). I didn't have a feeling of panic, but only a feeling of irritation: "Ehhhh... Again, waiting to go up ...", and good mechanics should not give such a feeling. That's why I said that a good implementation of 10 seconds with a change of something is when you have something to do constantly in these 10 seconds.
In no way do I want to offend you or anything else there, but I'm just saying that it's much more important to the player that how it's played and how he feels, and not what you put in there and meant). Therefore, I advise you in the next games to think about what the player will do every stage of your gameloop, so that he can never get bored.
And I just wanted to give an opinion on how to improve your future projects, so you can just not listen to me). I won't be offended, huh).
Your assumptions about the way we got to where we ended up are pretty narrow and shows an inability to imagine people complexly. We have a dedicated sound guy who took time to consider a specific mood and style; something that others have found pleasing enough to mention more than once.
I'm honestly done with this exchange as you have nothing useful in your observations and it feels as though you came to grind an axe rather than provide anything constructive.
none of your opinions were "how to improve your future projects". go back and read your own writing. You merely listed everything you feel we did wrong, without a single suggestion for improvement.
Khm... I must have really expressed myself very badly about the music - sorry for that. I didn't mean that at all.
I just advised you to prioritize your next projects more carefully, because if you do non-standard mechanics, as you say... Although your comment about the fact that elements in Tower Defense have been used for a long time sounds very strange, because what's wrong with combining different mechanics, because I didn't pretend to be original from the very beginning? Right, nothing wrong. And I have never said in my comments that your mechanics are not original, because this is not the problem. I agree that about the key card and the panel - after some time, you could guess by touching at everything on the screen, but I'm talking about priorities. If your main mechanic is gravity, then it was necessary to use it in full, and not just in one place in order to climb to the next floor. This was the claim that the main mechanics are used in one place, and in others only hinders, and it is not worth trying to justify it with a narrative. And about the music, I meant that you added a change in music to show the player about the change in gravity, but this does not affect the fact that the main mechanics themselves were almost not used in the gameplay in any way. Even considering the second moment when you need gravity - it breaks down by the fact that you can solve it with a jump. That's why I say boldly that in one place.
In general, all this time I just wanted to convey that the main mechanics of the game are woven into the game badly and first of all it was necessary to focus on it, although of course the problem of having to poke at everything on the screen to catch the hitbox is the second problem that I am now facing even more when I just passed your game. Especially considering that weaving what needs to be done into the text is not the best idea in itself.
In general, okay: listen to me or not is your right). I just said my opinion about what problems potential players might face. Considering that the same problems are indicated in the some comments above. And let's finish our discussion, if you think I'm talking nonsense, so as not to waste time with both of us).