Space Trader

Controls, controls, controls. Please make a post-compo version with better controls! I have the same controls in my game (Exxon) And surprisingly many ppl have trouble with that style of control.

Nice idea, (I've never actually seen a third person Elite). Enemy shooting sound was nice, and touches like the starfield effect & particles looked good. I found it too hard to dock to any distant planet ... the whole 'realism' in space travel thing (too easy to overshoot) meant I couldn't get much out of the game. Maybe a "distance X parsecs" type display for planets would help, so at least you know when you are getting close and need to start firing the retro-rockets.

Is small. Maybe you could had scaled it up? I couldn't really get past the ship controls. The ship seemed to always turn a lot more than I wanted. Also the ship seemed to go off screen when I flew a long way. Is this really minimalist though? Seems pretty complex.

Since I love space trader games I really did try and put good amount of effort into exploring this one. In the end, I believe it mainly suffered from needing a further round of play balancing, tweaking, control refinement etc. I was able to use an exploit on a cargo route to beef up my ship so that I could explore for long amounts of time. If I hadn't found the exploit, I get slaughtered in seconds. I also experienced the stuck in limbo effect where you fly of screen and disappear. I tried really hard to get use to controls too and feel that they are too hard to use for me at this point even with a lot of effort. If you release a tweaked version of this game, I'd gladly check it out again!

so tiny... i had trouble telling which direction the ship was pointing. Very hard to control. Impressive that you managed to pack a lot of stuff in this game but I think the minimalism took away from the gameplay in this case.

Wow, that screenshot from before was actual size I see!! Deep game for something so small, hope you keep working on it.

window was too dam small. didnt have alot of time to play through the game, but it seems to use too many keyboard buttons instead of a gui. nice attempt for an elite type game in the timeframe.

Really nice! It took a while to get past the controls (though they are still somewhat awkward), but there's a surprising amount of depth to the game. For example, I started shooting at one of the white ships, and it started running away while a bunch of other white ships came running after me! I love the graphics. It didn't go into 320x240 native mode, but it went into 640x480 mode with black borders, which worked well enough.

Even if you want sim-like controls, there are ways to justify simpler controls. When a turning button isn't pressed, for example, you could have the ship automatically thrust in the direction of slower turning. I can get used to momentum-based movement, but the turning is pretty unmanageable the way it is; I had a lot of trouble picking up cargo dropped by destroyed ships before they expired.

Quite hard to control, maybe everything shouldn't be realistic. :) Also I had real trouble surviving any of the gigantic rushes the enemy made with a gazillion bullets. The screen could've been a bit bigger, since even when full screen the texts are blurry.

Tiny.

I really wanted to like this game. Really. But the problem with controlling the ship makes the entire thing lack any real fun. It's just painful to move around, and get where you want to go. If you release a polished version with better controls (and bigger graphics), let me know, because I like the concept, but can't play this version. Sorry.

Had to comment out the psyco loading to get it to run, should probably make that optional. (psyco doesn't exist for 64-bit, and last I tried it on 32-bit it kept making things segfault anyway).

Tried the fullscreen mode first, but once in it I found I preferred the windowed mode, so I tried to get back to that by hitting f again. That didn't work. Had to quit and restart the game.

Once I was back in the game, I discovered I really had issues with the controls and couldn't get the ship to go where I wanted it to. After struggling with it for a little while I got a tiny bit more used to the controls, but not enough to actually have any semblance of control (specially not when things started shooting and I had to dodge bullets), so I gave up and quit. Seems like it could've been fun with better controls though.

Also, the font used for the credit digits doesn't really work. You can sort of make out what it's supposed to say but mostly it just looks like a mess of pixels up there.

The low res was nice, but it would have been nicer if you had the window at 800x600 and used pygame.transform.scale to size it up to that level. My LCD monitor blurs it pretty badly in fullscreen. Pretty looking game.

I'm impressed that you managed to make so complete a game during the compo, even if it is very unbalanced.

I don't think it's a problem having realistic controls, but it is a problem if the computer-controlled ships don't behave similarly. They seem to be massively more manoeuverable, have a high rate of fire and are able to fire spread shots. What's more, they start firing when they're not even visible on-screen.

It would be helpful to have some sort of indicator telling you more precisely how far it is to a planet (the existing change of colour doesn't tell you accurately enough), and maybe a speedometer, so that you can judge more accurately when to start slowing down as you approach a planet, rather than reaching it, starting to slow down, and taking 10 seconds just to stop.

The first few times I played, I got shot up by pirates straight away. I'd like to be able to restart without having to quit the game. Eventually I managed to trade some goods at a profit. Then I saw that one commodity had a higher selling price than buying price and exploited the loop to make massive amounts of money and buy lots of upgrades. Then I took on some pirates, then some other traders. Realistically, I don't think you have a chance against them without massive upgrades.

I think there's a bug where you can't refuel your health if you're on full fuel.

I'd like to see higher-resolution graphics, although I suppose that's a matter of personal preference. It's sometimes tricky to tell which way your ship is facing.

I ended up spending a relatively long time playing this game.

Starfields! And blinky ones too!
First up, I've disliked space trading ever since I first touched Elite... This one is a bit better in the sense that I can actually manage to do anything but die (only just, though). My main concern is with the ship controls; rotation is much too floaty, which (coupled with the insanely small ship graphic) makes it really hard to navigate effectively.
The enemies are also crazy, why do they fire at 5000x the rate you're capable of producing or enduring? I guess you can upgrade your ship, but not until you've traded for a good while. If you happen to run into an enemy early on you're pretty much toast.
It's all very ambitious and stylish though, while being minimal in some way.

It looks like it has a lot of potential. It was just hard to see things and move around, especially when the enemies fire so much more than you do. I think my biggest problem with the controls was just being able to aim accurately. That and of course, getting lost, because I'd try and accelerate away from the bad guys and then I'd be stuck trying to slow down and get back to the planets. Would love to see more though.

Hrmm... It sounds like fun, but so many things got in the way of actually playing. First of all, why a tiny window? Would be nice to have a regularly sized windowed option (maybe 800x600?). That will increase portability as well.

I got molested right off the bat by some ship that killed me before it was even on screen. Literally I hadn't move yet. The controls are impossible - turning seems to be in increments of like 50 degrees so I pretty much zig zagged everywhere I was trying to go. I guess that was a good thing though, since red ships were at every planet I tried and they promptly blasted me to smithereens without me being able to even face them, let alone fight back.

Still, I'm a huge fan of space shooter and space trader games, so if you finish this up, let us know.

First try: spent all my money on cargo space and hull upgrade. Had to restart
Second try: bought a full load of goods from planet X, decided to see if the prices would be good on planet 'stinky'. Some red bastard blew a hole in my ship en route.
Third try: got shot on my way to planet Y
Fourth try: got shot on my way to planet Y
Fifth try: made it to planet Y, sold some sweet cargo for a profit. Started my way back to planet X and somehow ended up off-screen, in limbo.
Sixth try: made it to planet Y, got a profit, loaded up on more cargo, and got shot en route to planet X.

Overall, it was pretty fun, but too hard for me. Easier controls would have helped the most. Though it could be that I wasn't buying enough hull.

I just have to agree with everybody... the controls utterly ruin this game. I would've played this for hours if it just had nice clean asteroids control. It was cool enough that if I knew python, I'd probably hack it to do just that. But as it is, I couldn't stand it. I landed at Dumbville by tapping X really quickly as I rocketed over, then tried to get to Slinky to absolutely no avail.

I think simulation is not exactly a fair/realistic goal when your ship is 3 pixels. All you really did with the simulation was kill all of the fun of an otherwise really nifty game. And it doesn't make it remotely realistic anyway... I mean, I'm flying in 2 dimensions! And I can dock at 8000km/s, and when I undock I'm still flying at that speed. I just think there are better ways to add realism (not that I think you should, honestly) than to make it impossible to play.

Real spaceships are flown by experts with years of training. How about simulating that by making the controls simple for us normal humans? You could say you're the commander, giving directions to the pilot.

Anyway, I just rant because this game is ALL there and a total winner, except the totally horrible control.

The window was really small and full screen didn't work (my monitor won't show low resolutions).