Spaceout by very dark lord

made by very dark lord for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

Aliens! They're attacking Earth, and for some reason they're using a Breakout style strategy for their invasion. You decide to take it upon yourself to defend the planet against these ghastly intruders.

Controls: Arrow left/right to move, A/D to tilt your paddle, Space to hold on to an asteroid. But the chief commander will explain it all to you.

Note: Game might take a minute to load. Seems like my loading screen is not working properly, so it starts out with an unresponsive black screen. Working on a fix.

There are 4 levels. With a bit of, uh, let's call it cutscenes in between.

Graphics are mostly created with Midjourney, plus some heavy postprocessing on my side.

Music by TeknoAxe ("Edge of Tomorrow" and "Driving to the Future").

Game engine and physics engine written by myself, so please forgive any hickups. :)

Changelog:

October 3rd: a bunch of small post-release bugfixes within 2 hours after initial release, e.g. bug in explosion calculation, issues with player name input, last level being unbeatable after latest balancing changes., music was not looping.
October 4th: hotfix of a bug that caused the game to crash for some players
October 8th: fix of a bug that broke mouse controls in the menu for some screen resolutions; plus general screen resolution fixes, as in previous versions the game canvas didn't adapt properly to all resolutions

Link	http://shellfishgames.com/games/spaceout-ld54/
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/spaceout

Ratings

Overall	447^th	3.688⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Fun	436^th	3.583⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	712^th	3.188⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Theme	933^th	3.063⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	684^th	3.409⭐	24🧑‍⚖️
Humor	219^th	3.646⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Mood	774^th	3.271⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Given		22🗳️	24🗨️

Feedback

dratinyy

03. Oct 2023 · 00:15 UTC

Coll game, I like the spherical twist on the genre sometimes causing the ball to hit many bricks before landing on the pad again. The last level felt very grindy though. The level design is cool, it's very satisfying when the ball gets stuck behing walls of bricks and hammers everything. Good job!

ROBOWARRIOR1982

03. Oct 2023 · 20:30 UTC

Very polish game, amazing graphics, cool sound ! Maybe too slow at the start and there is some moments where we look the asteroid made her life alone. This is an original recreation of arkanoid.

Maxim Cebotaru

03. Oct 2023 · 20:37 UTC

very nice game, its a pleasure to play this game and is very fun, easy controls and cool theme. i think you could get a very good place in ratings, good luck!!

Steampowered85

03. Oct 2023 · 20:40 UTC

Yo, cool game! I like the that you used Space Ltd as the company name. Great music and art as well. I feel if you made the meteor faster it would make it a bit more intense.

KingTuning

03. Oct 2023 · 20:47 UTC

Pretty nice game, didn't quite get how to aim the asteroid tho.

Sheepolution

03. Oct 2023 · 20:50 UTC

It was really funny how the guy mispronounced my name. That's a great addition. The game itself is nice, though I wouldn't mind the asteroid going somewhat faster. That said, with 2 asteroids it did get very hard all of a sudden.

BoxedMeatRevolution

03. Oct 2023 · 20:57 UTC

Great entry! The art was great and the story was funny. I like how the papers still got my name wrong even after being crowned ruler of the earth.

Overall, I thought the gameplay was solid and engaging. One bit of feedback is that sending multiple asteroids into space didn't up the challenge much. After one asteroid made it into space it was often trivial to send the rest out the same hole. But I still had fun getting the first asteroid out, and liked the spherical twist on breakout!

🎤 very dark lord

04. Oct 2023 · 20:29 UTC

Thanks for the kind comments everyone! :pray: I just released a small hotfix, because it turned out a few players experienced random crashes between levels. This should not occur anymore, sorry if anyone here was affected!

F1Krazy

15. Oct 2023 · 20:33 UTC

I'm surprised this has so few ratings! I'd hate for it to miss out on getting ranked :(

This is a really clever take on *Breakout*, with an impressive variety of power-ups and effects. I really appreciate how some of the power-ups make things harder for you, particularly the one that spawns more asteroids; in most *Breakout* clones you'd kill for a power-up like that, but here it turns the game into an impossible juggling act that invariably costs you a life.

I also really love how your name constantly gets spelled and pronounced wrong, that's a really clever little running gag. I'm not a big fan of AI-generated graphics, but they're allowed by the rules and I imagine they saved you a lot of time, so the only graphical element I'll complain about is that it's *really* hard to tell that that's Earth I'm meant to be saving.

Overall, great job! There's definitely scope here to expand this into a full game with additional levels and such.

myrmyxo

18. Oct 2023 · 00:16 UTC

Nice game !
Really nice take on the original concept, with multiple asteroids and all.
THe first 3 levels were super easy but the last one is very interesting with the red/blue vortexes being EVERYWHERE, and all the blocks that change your characteristics, it got challenging at this point which is nice.
Nice music as well (even though it's not to be graded lol), and the graphics were really nice, I don't know how much you were involved in the post processing but you made it look good (the planet was a but weird but the rest of the graphics were nice).
I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THE HUMOR. Like actually. The mispronouncing of the name I had written byt absolutely EVERYONE including in the ending was so fucking funny, and the way this was written was hilarious to me.
Really nice game, I didn't expect it to be that good especially seing the AI graphics at first (on second thoughts for LD AI graphics actually are nice for devs who have no idea how to art lol). I hope your game is gonna get 20 rating because it's honestly really fun !

Helen

18. Oct 2023 · 16:15 UTC

Great turn on break out. I had fun playing it multiple times. Well done!
I'm not sure if you should opt out the rating for graphics, because it's generated. But fits perfectly.
I think the intro was a bit long.
It was really funny how my name was misspelled. In the end I was Good Cypruth :D

Gossian

18. Oct 2023 · 17:37 UTC

Really liked how the orbital format added a new element to this kind of gameplay like with how the asteroid would just fly by straight to the other side sometimes. Great to have so many different effects for the blocks, which meant I wasn't really in a hurry to get the asteroids out, I just wanted to see what all the different blocks did. Only thing I would say is that if you're using AI graphics, aren't you supposed to opt out of the graphics category?

🎤 very dark lord

18. Oct 2023 · 17:43 UTC

@gossian Thanks a lot for playing and for your kind feedback! :) Regarding the graphics category - maybe, I'm not sure. When I made my entry, the rules still said something like "we're not sure yet what to do about AI generated content", and I too wasn't sure what to do about it. The game contains purely "original art", and over the weekend I've probably spent around ~8 hours on the graphics. I'd very much like to get feedback on it in form of a rating, but at the same time wouldn't want to compete with people who manually crafted their own art. Ultimately I'm happy to follow any official decision here, but given the circumstances decided to keep the category while being upfront about it, hoping that it's a good enough compromise. :slight_smile:

NuiN

18. Oct 2023 · 18:51 UTC

One of my new favourites, very creative twist and the last level was so fun

TinySalad

18. Oct 2023 · 18:59 UTC

A great entry and a pretty solid breakout iteration. The art looked good but the earth was a bit too stylized I think. There were some gameplay issues, the extra asteroid block essentially felt like a forced lost life. The gravity swirls were cool but they made the last level pretty tedious. With the large play area and relatively flat brick structure I felt you loose some of the fun chaos of other breakout games(my inability to manage 2 balls was probably a big factor). Overall I enjoyed it though.

pndaa

18. Oct 2023 · 19:18 UTC

I'm the ruler of earth!

The tutorial is really good. It is funny and go to the point.

The last level isn't really fun. Maybe too many blue and red void and they take too long to go away.

Great game. Good job !

PS: The misstyped names were really fun. Good idea.

🎤 very dark lord

19. Oct 2023 · 06:11 UTC

Thanks a lot everyone! I see there's some disagreement about whether the last level is fun or not. :laughing: I guess it's a bit slow and drags on, but at the same time it leads to some of the most interesting gameplay with the asteroid doing unexpected things, and speeding up over time. But yeah I agree, levels could certainly be improved, and I hope to bring some more interesting (and faster) levels (or even game modes?) to the post jam version. :)

KnightGames

19. Oct 2023 · 17:04 UTC

Graphics are very cool, game feels polished and is fun. I had fun playing it, well done!

MistaGiggles

19. Oct 2023 · 18:18 UTC

Great entry, I had fun playing this. Presented well with good graphics and sound. Gameplay was fun, but requires more balance I think (felt a bit too easy early on, maybe making things faster overall could help with that?) . I really like the "breakout but in a ring" concept!

Lenny Rudeberg

20. Oct 2023 · 04:33 UTC

Very impressive game! Had a lot of fun playing this, the art style and assets are top tear and the music is fantastic.