Interplanetary Billiards

by benjamin-l

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Fun★★★★★★★★★★4.33

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.67

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★4.67

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.33

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.67

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.33

Interplanetary Billiards is a game about knocking planets into a black hole. Or it's a game about somebody doodling on a piece of paper pretending to be knocking planets into a black hole. It isn't really clear.

The mechanics are pretty simple. Use the mouse to aim the red planet, and try to knock the other planets into the center black hole. Dotted lines will show up to predict the path of the planets for some time in the future. If the red planet lands in the black hole, you lose the game. Getting more than one planet into the black hole in one turn will give you point bonuses. If you don't get any in the black hole on a given turn, you lose some points.

Links

- Download (Mac/Windows/Linux): https://benjamin-l.itch.io/interplanetary-billiards
- Source Code: https://github.com/Benjamin-L/ld38

Comments5

Turncoda24 Apr 2017, 08:06

That was fun! I'm so impressed with your polish. Game world felt cohesive, game felt tight. My high score (nothing to sneeze at) was 6000.

blinry3 May 2017, 09:51

Wow, what a stellar entry! I loved everything about it – the sucking sounds the black hole makes, the shader effect, the pen & paper style, the clicky buttons, the hard and engaging gameplay, the simulations, the amount of control you have on the planet (how to control the strength of the force needs to be discovered, but is a nice plus!)

Definitely will show this around and come back to it myself. Thanks for making it! (I'll also have to steal how you do auto-resizing when scaling the window!)

If it didn't serve as an inspiration, you might want to check out Jonathan Blow's "Future Billiard Simulator" shown in this talk:

Oh, and I think there are some debug outputs left in the linked build (for the modes).

Certainly Canyon5 May 2017, 21:13

A very fun little concept and I love the creative art style! would be interesting to see you expand the concept into something more.

pi_pi37 May 2017, 07:31

This is a really cool game. But for people who don’t know LÖVE, it might be hard to play your game. Consider adding a Windows executable and providing instructions on how to play on Linux and Mac

randomhuman8 May 2017, 21:06

That's really fun, and I love the aesthetic. My high score was 14000 I think. I would have gotten higher but one stubborn planet skipped past the black hole twice in a row!

Other games by @benjamin-l

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