Thought I would share an early concept drawing that ended up looking almost exactly like the end product.

the illusion of control

Implementing rotation control in a physics engine turned out to be more complex than expected, as you can see from this early planning diagram (which is almost exactly what ended up in the final game). Since the player's ship is part of the physics simulation, it's subject to all forces in the simulated world. That means that crashing the ship can result in angular velocity (i.e. spinning) that is impossible for the player to cancel out given only the basic Asteroids-style controls (e.g. hold left to turn left at a constant angular velocity, let go of left to stop turning instantaneously).

My solution to this was to add an auto-stabilizer that would stabilize the ship by applying a damping force until the angular velocity reached 0. However, trying to rotate the ship while the damping force is in effect makes for a rather janky experience, so I decided to simply ignore player input while the auto-stabilizer is in effect. After I did that, I noticed that it felt bad to have to wait for the ship to stabilize before trying to control the ship again, not to mention it would have seemed to new players that their inputs were being eaten, so I implemented input buffering, which is what you see taking up more than half of the state diagram. You still can't control the ship while the auto-stabilizer is active, but at least you can act as soon as the ship is fully stabilized.

Thank you for reading. You can play Outer Space Transport Service here.

Thanks for coming back online, ldjam.com. We missed you!

Hello everyone! I am currently streaming Game Dev, but my original plan was to stream LD games, if you have any you would like to have played on stream, join me at https://www.twitch.tv/ladymistleaf

See you there!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/vomit-up-the-universe

Hi all!

Thank you for playing our game! We have made some updates to our games, based on your feedback.

our game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/vintage-space-restaurant-with-ai

• Increased the machine fixing speed. Now it will be easier to beat through all the levels. So you could focus more on experiencing the story and gameplay mechanism better.
• Added some dialogs to tell the story better. Previously we only got time to tell the story at the end, which is after you finish all the levels. And since our last levels are too difficult to pass, we guess not many people see the ending, which will explain why our robots are not working well sometimes.
• Added sound effects. We prepared the sfx, but weren't able to add them before the deadline. Now we have it!
• Added Chinese language.
• Bug fixes

So this is the ending. In case you still can’t beat through the end, or simply just want to know what happened in the end. At last, the nostalgic fast food restaurant has still been taken down. Everything was converted to different resources, to be used in the new department with the latest AI department on the spaceship.

All the equipment in the restaurant was the most popular at the time, and they are the first model of a full automatic food chain using AI technology. But technology grows so fast that they are antiques now. From the Modern fast food, now it’s just a place for people to enjoy the retro feel.

Maybe it’s not bad? The gone of the antiques will provide opportunities for the new comings.

It's so good to get to know so many good and friendly artists here. It’s so interesting to see many creative ideas. We enjoy the game jam, and hope you will enjoy our game. Thanks again for playing our game.

our game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/vintage-space-restaurant-with-ai

Hey guys I hope everyone is doing great... Unfortunately we're a little behind on Ratings... I would appreciate it if you could play ShakyShaky and give me some feed back and some ratings...

Good luck and Have fun

And feel free to check out mine: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/instability/ :)

I'm waiting sir!

https://ldj.am/$266515

Play and Rate

The best business ideas have yet to be tried. The best books have yet to be written. The best games have yet to be made.

It's not too late. The space of possibilities is endless. The most interesting terrain remains unexplored.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/vomit-up-the-universe

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/vomit-up-the-universe

Hey! I've done some quite some improvements to my game, WackyJet, in the latest WebGL build (only) so you can go check it out and leave some feedback so I can continue to further develop the game.

Take care now: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/devils-sitter

Do you have 1 minute (really) ?

Do you love toilet paper ?

But you don't love when they fall to the ground ?

So, SAVE IT !!!!

Wow we almost have 80 reviews. Amazing.

So far we have gotten nearly 80 reviews? Help us make this jam extra special and help us get to 100.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/mint

We want to get to the 100 ratings, if you want to help us here you go https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-21 Put your games to the comments so we can play them too!

Please rate and leave feedback, we are almost at 50 rating. Thank you!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/1000-shells

Fight alien creatures but be careful if your ship got damaged some parts will be unstable in which you need to fix in the middle of a dark space.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/ship-unstable

Help me get 20 ratings, I need 9 more.

~~Edit: Nevermind. Looks like itch.io is having a problem displaying game pages, which will affect like 90% of the games on my queue. I might make up for this stream later.~~

Double edit: Itch is back up, but it's around the time I would've ended stream had I started on time, so I'll just do an extra stream some other time.

I'm now live on Twitch for the next few hours to play your Ludum Dare games! I'm happy to give constructive feedback or just have fun with it. I’ll also be rating every game I play (but not while I'm live). If you want me to play your game, type !submit url/of/your/game in the Twitch chat. I can't promise I'll be able to get to every game submitted to me, but I'll do as many as I can in the time I have.

If you submitted to me last weekend and I didn't have time to get to yours (I know there's a lot of you), just let me know you're there in the chat, and I can give your game priority for today.

If you miss today's stream, I'll be streaming one last time this Sunday at 3PM EDT (assuming I'm not hours late again, like I am today...). I hope to see you there!

P.S.: My entry is a game called Reactor. Feel free to check it out!

Mark Brown made a video and I liked this image from it of how a game is architected. Key: with game design being the foundation.

And here is a representation of my approach this jam:

Now I know what to improve for next time!