Space can be a lonely, empty place. Especially when your ship is crippled and you've lost all contact with your people. You will need to control your ship manually while avoiding those dangerous gravity wells! Can you orbit the sun? How about finding all 8 planets? Enjoy.
Made with Unity, Paint.net, GIMP, Blender, sfxr.
Procedural textures created with tools available from:
AzP, I gave it a quick shot, but it would require more than just exporting to the web player, controls would need to change, and I'd need to fix up some GUI positioning to accommodate a smaller resolution (unless 800x600 is Ok for a web game?)
Pretty cool space environment. I had a hard time figuring out what my objective was aside from fly around and burn up in the sun. If you continue with this project, I would add a few more objectives, and ease into the complex controls. Getting hit with a big block of text which explains every button is a little overwhelming.
Wowzers, that's a pretty space scene. :) While a bit more direction might also detract from the loneliness of space aspect, I also feel that a little more of something is needed.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." Carl Sagan, A Pale Blue Dot
=) I enjoyed the experience but I agree with summaky there is something missing. I didn't feel a sense of purpose. =) Full points for the breath taking solar system that you've created.
Love the solar system model, but your ship has a ridiculously high velocity which made the planets seem tiny :) I flew by some planets very close but didn't seem to accomplish anything...
Spacescape rocks though, I'm using it too on my current project.
Hey all! Thanks for trying this out. I might argue that the concept of objective or purpose (beyond survival) is absent when you are alone in the universe, and that this is part of the aesthetic here, however it was definitely a failure on my part to properly communicate the idea. I appreciate the feedback, my friends. As a tech demo, it does work too, which is very encouraging... I feel that I should definitely set some time aside to keep working on expanding this one.
The lack of music seems to work here. Love the atmosphere, very good mood and sense of being lonely/alone. Didn't like the control scheme, too many things and I wasn't able to move the ship the way I wanted. I guess that's part of "being alone", you only have the ship's manual to figure out how to survive.
It would be nice to have a bit more feedback from the game, particularly in terms of how you're moving, as in direction and what sorts of speed you've got (the sun as a reference frame would make sense). I think an arrow pointing in the direction you're moving would be more useful than one pointing at the sun. The sun's big and not that hard to find if you look around.
Basically, I think this needs more of a hud. Normally I like minimalistic displays, but it doesn't really work here.
Cool idea, but kind of rough. Wasn't sure what my goal is. And it's sort of hard to tell how you're moving. Some kind of movement lines or something that shows in which direction you're moving would be nice.
I loved the style. I think exploration has trouble existing by itself as a game mechanic without immediate feedback or metrics to let the player how much exploration they've done. In this case, it would have benefitted the player to know how far they've traveled.. or how close they are before they can no longer explore.
But, still awesome for a 48 hour entry. This has lots of potential!
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voxel9 Jan 2012, 09:51
Anything that involves not smashing into things in space gets my heartfelt vote
The web version was acting up so I had to download the Windows version. This could definitely be expanded and would be very fun. Needs more sauce on the chicken as of right now, though.
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If you continue with this project, I would add a few more objectives, and ease into the complex controls. Getting hit with a big block of text which explains every button is a little overwhelming.
=) I enjoyed the experience but I agree with summaky there is something missing. I didn't feel a sense of purpose. =) Full points for the breath taking solar system that you've created.
Spacescape rocks though, I'm using it too on my current project.
Basically, I think this needs more of a hud. Normally I like minimalistic displays, but it doesn't really work here.
Good job with the emptiness of space though.
But, still awesome for a 48 hour entry. This has lots of potential!