Asteroid Miner by BalimaarTheBassFish
This is my first Ludum Dare and it has taught me A LOT already.
The most important of which was if you are stuck, get up and do something else for a few minutes. I lost a lot of time trying to work out bugs that instantly solved themselves when I stood up and went outside with my dog for a bit.
I have had to finish early owing to commitments suddenly arising over the weekend which has eaten up a fair amount of time and more happening in the last few hours of the morning coming up. Hence I am submitting almost 12 hours early.
About the Game
Introducing my first LD game Asteroid Miner. In this game you play as a fully qualified Asteroid Miner for Lunar Expeditions. The company cunningly set up a teleport pad on the moon and sent you through just in time to mine for rare minerals in an asteroid storm sweeping through the solar system following the destruction of Mercury and Venus.
Your ship armed with the lastest in cannon-aided mining tools, is to be used to break down and destroy as many asteroids as possible and deliver the collected ores to the teleport pad on the Moon's surface.
Good luck!
The Controls
HINT from the maker: For easier turning, tap (dont hold for long!) the relevant buttons and use your forward thrusters to change direction.
W and the Up arrow = Forwards
S and the Down arrow = Reverse
A and the Left arrow = Rotate ship left
D and the Right arrow = Rotate ship right
SPACE and Left click = Fire cannon
R = restart game
ESC = Quit
What I Planned to Add if Time Permitted
(1) Upgrade shop to make your ship more effective (2) Penalties for damage to the Lunar surface caused by asteroids (3) Special bonus asteroids that are more dangerous but worth a lot
What I am going to be doing for next time
Next Ludum Dare I will be forming a team and offloading the sound and visuals on to people who actually know how to do these things. The asteroids are heavily edited rocks from my garden. The moon is from a photo I took from a friend's telescope and the skybox is a photo of the stars above my house. Just those alone ate up a lot of time that if I had known would take me this long... I would have skipped audio and visuals altogether and just focused on my game features.
Thank you for playing my game and leaving a review! If you leave a response a below I will certainly leave one for yourself.
Ratings
| Overall | 379th | 2.771⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 376th | 2.563⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 403th | 2.042⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 401th | 2.229⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 319th | 3⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 311th | 2.479⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 344th | 2.646⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
How did you make the Asteroids? I ask because the art style of the ship vs. the sky vs. the asteroids are very different from one another. I'd love to follow a tutorial to be able to get such nice looking asteroid objects.
I'll be streaming @ twitch.tv/balimaarthebassfish in about 10.5 hours from now. I'll definitely be playing your game :)
There's a couple things around the edges that could use some polishing--I think the ship should turn a bit slower (although honestly, you could lean into the idea of the ship having wacky physics) and I got lost off the side of the screen a few times.
On the criticisms of what you have, your ship turning is way to fast which makes it hard to control. You can also go off screen and get lost.
The ship was very hard to control for me, spinning too fast :P
Was a great experience to play a classic asteroid game, thanks for your submission :)
@asmadigames thank you for playing :) I had planned a few more features but unfortunately RL interfered.
@braveskin I had planned to make more asteroids, make more spawn over time and so on. Unfortunately... time :D
@mitur @shiiigear Maybe I should have a new emote for my streams :D A Spinning Ship :D But yes I do see the issue with the turning. Its a case of the dev deciding it was too easy and making it harder - sorry!
@fluburbio Thank you for playing :)
1 thing I would change: make the turning less sensive. Or even better: use WASD for forward-backwards-strafing, and just use the mouse for turning/aiming/shooting. It would be much smoother, easier to control, thus the asteroids could be faster, etc. What do you think? :) Keep up the good work, see you next time! :D
https://youtu.be/ETLrDx2yaVY
I thought I should include an invuln timer on respawn because it would hardly be fair on a player to lose another life just because the respawn point also happened to have an asteroid in it at that particular moment.
For the main feedback: The controls are too floaty. The decceleration on the rotation should be way higher to make it more controllable. Then you can play around with the momentum of the ship as a whole if that is the challenge you want to introduce. Difficult controls are generally not the way to make a game difficult, they often make a game frustrating. You want the challenge to come from the mastery of the player and the control they can exert over the game.
- The ship is a little small
- The ship spins quickly making it hard to control
Other than those small issues though the game is nice. I also like what you said in the first reply which was that you took rocks from your garden for the asteroids. That's really cool using rocks in your backyard then modifying them for your own asteroid assets.
@synthol Thank you for playing my modest effort :) I had to take examples from nature because I can't draw to save my life haha. Apologies for making the ship too hard to control. Its a lesson I have learned for next time.
One piece of advice I'd give is to limit how many brand new skills/unknown things you tackle during the jam. It's really easy to get sucked into rabbit holes and lose sight of the bigger project. You want to be focused on creating content, not figuring out HOW to create the content. For example, for my game, I limited myself to learning three new things: Unity's PlayerPrefs (for save data), Unity's spline package (for rail grinding), and action game movement (jumping, dashing, etc). Everything else I already knew how to do, for the most part anyway.
Btw. the embedded html build is cropped out so that's probably why some people go out of screen and some think you don't have a score system implemented.
@commanderstitch I ran out of time to implement a "kick to main menu" after the final death :D But hey you get to have another 3 lives instead :D
@iggy-lonely if you download one of the other builds you will see I do in fact have a score system in place. For some reason the web build embedded on the site here crops out a fair portion of the game screen.
@paulhocker thank you for playing! sorry about the controls. I had decided early on that it was "too easy" and so made it harder. looks like I went too far the other way!
@jiri-hysek ah ha! the mystery resolved! maybe I made the game area too large? do you happen to know what the dimensions should be for embedded games on LD should work at?
Here's my playthrough, if you'd like to see it.
https://youtu.be/xsKf9BKrdq4