shipme (Starbase Shipping Simulation)

by lsummers

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.64

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.34

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.07

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.39

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.89

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.54

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.92

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.33

After getting promoted to a management role in the shipping department for the starbase LRX47, it is up to you to carefully handle the shipping of products across the empire...

Music, SFX, Font, 3D Models, 2D art - all made from scratch for the jam.

Credit to:
Music by GreyScreen (Kevin Stebner)
greyscreen.bandcamp.com

My micro postmortem:

- The UI pop-ups works OK. If I could do it again, I’d build it a stacking dialog system combined with a toast system (as I seem to spend more time just hitting OK to get the darn message out of the way).
- I drafted up the concepts of red space pirates to steal stuff, I never got around to finishing that part, but I fee like that could have been a cool addition.
- The game is a bit of an active clicker but started originally as a strategy design.
- Found it is helpful to turn off the feeders (dock area) to save cash while waiting for new transport ships
- I would have like time to add a skip-tutorial button
- I also had another crate/box/object type that I didn’t incorporate that I pictured as an accidental bomb-type

Source included. Models done in blender. Audio generated in bfxr. Font made in fontstruct. Intro song done in beepbox. 2D models, UI layout items done in gimp.

Main game song made by Kevin (see above).

Genres: simulation

Tools: BeepBox, Bfxr, Blender, GIMP, Unity

Comments17

Guilhermoni13 Aug 2018, 02:02

Solid game, had fun with it. Those text boxes right in the middle of the screen are really annoying tho. Simple and precise gameplay, good graphics. Well done!

Gary Beebe13 Aug 2018, 04:30

Very polished, but like @guihermoni said, the popups got in the way.

lsummersauthor13 Aug 2018, 04:47

Definitely thanks @guilhermoni and @gary-beebe if I could do it again, I'd probably move all the pop-ups over to more of a toast notification in the corner. And maybe get the user something useful to do when > 1,000$

Kultisti13 Aug 2018, 04:50

Looks so cool and the gameplay is sweet, sometimes the popups wee little annoying but otherwise good job!

smilewood13 Aug 2018, 04:51

This was a rather fun game. It took me a while to figure out that some trucks only took certain colors of box, but once I did it was a lot of fun. I really liked the sound design, both the background audio track and the sound effects were great and fit the theme well. I enjoyed the progression of trucks and docks. I did find some of the smaller boxes to be rather difficult to click on and towards the end was just letting them fall into the sun. I really appreciated the tutorial/story introduction at the beginning, this was one of the only games I have seen this Ludum Dare that has introduced the game so well. fantastic entry, great job!

Blondhie13 Aug 2018, 05:50

Really enjoyed having a little tutorial in the beginning. It was fun and easy to get into. I do agree that the small boxes were hard to click on, and at some point a crate (box) was stuck out in space. Overall great job!

elenesski13 Aug 2018, 06:50

Good job L. My only complaint is the popup boxes tended to result in me dropping the boxes into the sun. If they were replaced by a non-intrustive notification, that would have been better.

Tobias_Headstrong13 Aug 2018, 07:57

Hi guys. I had a lot of fun! Similarly to the others the pop ups drove me nutz especially once you get up to 4 docs and 4 trucks! A tutorial explaining how it works including colours may be useful so you dont have to sit through the initial popups every time you get fired... I got to $20k so can I buy a nice car now :-)

Furtive Pygmy13 Aug 2018, 07:58

Good game, probably sick of hearing it... but the popup boxes :p

jdhollen13 Aug 2018, 08:03

Nice job! I might speed up the pace of play after the first couple of purchases, but dang, you got a lot done in 2 days !

louckousse13 Aug 2018, 09:09

I have nothing to add I just wanted to congrats you, the game is fun despite what says before.

suve13 Aug 2018, 12:54

A very nicely done game! It's a bit of a shame there isn't any kind of goal to reach, since after playing a bit one gets so accustomed and the money flows in so fast losing stops being a concern. Still, the audio and visuals are really impressive for a jam game!

Oneiros13 Aug 2018, 15:21

This is not my type of game but I had some fun to play it.

recursor13 Aug 2018, 17:02

The only thing that bugged me somewhat was the popup dialogs. I think the animation and wait time between them could be tweaked to make them feel better. I enjoyed watching the little robots throw the cargo out. Watching the cargo get destroyed by the sun was also oddly satisfying. This was nice because even if there were no trucks to come and buy my stuff, I still felt rewarded. Enjoyed it

wildcard13 Aug 2018, 19:42

The pop-ups are quite annoying once the game gets more hectic and I also had problems with actually getting the crates with my mouse because of the precision required.

But aside from that this is a beautiful little game, I enjoyed the soundtrack, design and challenge of the game. It wasn't immediately obvious to me what I was supposed to do but I catched on pretty quickly. I also enjoyed the space atmosphere! Very well done!

Enver Arco14 Aug 2018, 00:10

Great job including a tutorial in your game, very graphically pleasing too

BloodJohn14 Aug 2018, 02:45

Awesome space! Pop-up messages are the main enemy in this game. Hate them.