A little game about bringing life to lifeless worlds. Hope you like it!
Wellspring Wanderer was written in Scala using the especially excellent libGDX game development framework (http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/). Levels and plant life are randomly and procedurally generated. Non-procedural art was crafted lovingly in the GIMP. I used Propellerhead's Reason, my fingers, and a number of piano keys for the music.
The theme is "growing" only for this submission. I tried pretty hard to get the controls down to two buttons, but it wasn't to be. Oh well!
All art, sounds, words, music and code are my own and were created during the 48 hours of the LD34 compo.
The graphics and audio are really nice, and the gravity/physics mechanics must have been pretty tricky to get done in time! An option to skip (or speed up) the dialogue would have been nice.
I remember your previous game, Derelict... you've got a great way of creating these moods that make want to dig into the slower-paced games with nice slow tension.
Although I never got off the Derelict (so close!) in this one I got through a bunch of worlds, maybe 6 or 7. Although I started the game terrible and crashed pod after pod, by the end I was getting pretty good. I think I got through one world without losing a single pod, and I definitely got at least four in a row.
World two was the hump for me, I almost didn't get past it.
The style of the art, sound, and even the text really work together with the mechanics here, it's great design.
I feel all my crashes were fair in terms of physics, I never felt cheated that way, or at least not once I knew how it worked. One thing that kept getting me about the controls was the turning... once you start turning you can pretty easily stop with a tap of the opposite direction. But I think I would have preferred to have it stop on button release instead, so that no keypress expresses a command to stop rotating. I feel like the handling would be more intuitive that way, but I can't be sure.
The other thing I would say is early on while I was still crashing a TON, I felt frustrated the retry didn't start faster once I was past the special text ones. Once I was a good pilot it didn't matter as much, and in a way it may have forced me to slow down and relax so maybe you did that on purpose!
Wow, impressive entry. The soothing music really fits well the smooth graphics and the gameplay is well done. It's also nice to see another LibGdx entry. Will have a look at your code later.
Oh I found a bug. When I change the window size things get weird. Grass is no longer on the planet surface and floats in space the position of the ship changes and all kinds of funny things.
The serene sound design and dark color palette create a wonderful mood for this game! I really like it. My only complaint is that the difficulty is fairly high in the beginning with trying to understand the gravity for the oddly-shaped planets.
The atmosphere and mood are great. I enjoyed the reassuring dialogue and the gameplay was fun. It was a little frustrating trying to get the pods to land. It also seemed like there was some type of gravity bias that made it really hard to try and land on the bottom of the planet.
Thanks for leaving a rating and commenting on my game! I included your game in the second episode of my Let's Play Ludum Dare 34 series to show my gratitude! :D
How you managed all of this inside of 48 hours is quite amazing, looks beautiful and plays remarkably well. I would've liked to have seen perhaps some parallax on the stars in the background, and maybe a slightly better transition to a new level rather than just a white flash.
Thoroughly enjoyed it what I could see, but try as I might, I could only ever land one of the pods successfully. No fault of your own though, I just don't have the finesse required for these games.
E
Erlend Aakre27 Dec 2015, 17:54
Great concept, nice mood and graphics. For me the collider for the planetoid was quite off compared to it's rendering, which made it quite hard.
Congrats on the strong finish! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with in April.
P
personalurban15 Jan 2016, 14:08
Nice, really nice gravitron style game. But way way too hard to land the thing, I think maybe it was rotation rather than speed for me, but I only could land a couple of pods, all on the easy side of the first world.
Comments35
Although I never got off the Derelict (so close!) in this one I got through a bunch of worlds, maybe 6 or 7. Although I started the game terrible and crashed pod after pod, by the end I was getting pretty good. I think I got through one world without losing a single pod, and I definitely got at least four in a row.
World two was the hump for me, I almost didn't get past it.
The style of the art, sound, and even the text really work together with the mechanics here, it's great design.
I feel all my crashes were fair in terms of physics, I never felt cheated that way, or at least not once I knew how it worked. One thing that kept getting me about the controls was the turning... once you start turning you can pretty easily stop with a tap of the opposite direction. But I think I would have preferred to have it stop on button release instead, so that no keypress expresses a command to stop rotating. I feel like the handling would be more intuitive that way, but I can't be sure.
The other thing I would say is early on while I was still crashing a TON, I felt frustrated the retry didn't start faster once I was past the special text ones. Once I was a good pilot it didn't matter as much, and in a way it may have forced me to slow down and relax so maybe you did that on purpose!
Great compo entry across the board.
Look at my jam post, this is an example of how you can control a spaceship with two buttons
It's really difficult by the way! haha :)
Cheers, really liked it
Below is a link to the post with details, and you can find out my opinion of your game in the video as I play!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/12/21/lets-play-ludum-dare-34-episode-02/
please put zip archive.
Avesome physics. But very difficult for me. :)
Beautiful sound, graphics and gameplay. Orbital physics are annoying, but realistic.
I can't call this anything but good though.
i tryed to fly away to far far galaxy...but