Airman57 by Prvaak
Deliver urgent message into the depths of the gravity well.

Controls
W - Forward
A, D - Rotate
Attributions
Music: Futuristic 3 by Alexander Nakarada (www.creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/airman57 |
Ratings
| Overall | 652th | 3.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 552th | 3.205⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 823th | 2.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 613th | 3.364⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 639th | 3.205⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 536th | 2.579⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 508th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
Going fast seems just like a bad idea as you have really low amount of control of the pod. And going too slow gets kinda boring. And in the end bit where it gets kinda dense and hard, I just lucked out and found out you can pretty much go around everything and travel in the void. Made the ending a bit anticlimactic.
A bit more structure/content would have been nice. Like shorter mission but having multiple of em. Going a different direction too! Dunno why but that bottom right angle just seemed unintuitive to me. Also kinda annoying that you were mainly going down and have less visibility due to game being landscape.
So yeah, it controlled pretty well and flying around was quite nice. Except in the most dense bits getting bumped around from asteroid to asteroid because a small nick wasn't too fun. It feels to me like the bounce amount is a bit too much due to how little control you have to recover. Shorter missions and more variety/things to do would have made it stay its welcome better and not get that boring.
The music was nice, moody and a good fit (though I guess it wasn't made by you or for the jam). The acceleration sound effect sounded a bit harsh on startup. It was especially noticeable when trying to do small adjustments which was pretty much how I always played. A bit of a fade on it would probably have been better as it just was too harsh too fast from nothing.
Anyways, that's all I've got, good job! 👍
I sort of want the stars in the background to sparkle and shine a little bit. I'd also really like some visual feedback when the ship hits an asteroid. Like a lil screenshake or something maybe?
manage to get below 350m away.
I finished in 2 minutes using the warp drive.

but even though I failed too reach the end I still had fun playing, well done !
Nicely done! Sorry I couldn't get very far.
The graphics are well done, the variety of asteroids are especially impressive. And gameplay is super solid, easy to understand, but hard to master. The music is suitably chosen and i didn't find sfx grading, surprisingly it's not annoying, despite all you do is fire thrusters (including rotational ones) so sfx could have been annoying easily, but they are not in my opinion. But perhaps it's down to audio situation of specific players.
Nice idea with mission starting with 57 and then incrementing.
Parallax background would be welcomed indeed. And I also like the idea (by @antti-haavikko) of structuring game with missions to have a more graduate difficulty curve.
The strong force applied to the rocket after the impact feels a bit strong and for me it often lead to more collisions and fast demise. Also I sometimes forget which way rocket is facing and it's hard to tell at a glance. While nose is rounder and it has thrusters (but they are dark on dark background) i think something like a colored stripe near nose (or back) of the rocket would enhance reliability.
I enjoyed the game it's fun and have a nice audio visual appeal, but difficulty is a bit high I personally feel. But still fun, I feel i will replay it from time to time, it has good vibes from flash era of games!