A tech-demo/preview of the sequel to my Extra Credits Game Jam #1 entry, Astronaut Plus Skateboard.
Fly around a procedurally-generated solar system made to obey semi-realistic newtonian orbital physics with your jetpack and hoverboard.
DISCLAIMER: Some of the art assets are from the original APS. The music was made ahead-of-time, and has been waiting for this sequel to be possible. Skybox generated using an old verison of SpaceEngine. Some lens flare assets also from SpaceEngine. All of that is placeholder and fit to be removed. It admittedly took 30 minutes after the end of Submission Hour to get an actual functional build up for Windows, thanks to Unity throwing a fit.
Known Bugs
* "Return to menu" breaks the game on reboot, noncritical * You may occasionally fly off into space on spawn? * Stars will never spawn past the ~2200K temperature range, meaning they are doomed to being small and dim even when incredibly massive
Controls
* Press T to switch between movement modes
Skateboard
* A & D to turn left and right, respectively * W & S to apply forwards and backwards thrust - costs fuel if you're not grounded! * Space and left control to apply upwards and downwards thrust - costs fuel if you're not grounded! * Mouse to look around * T Above 25m/s global or surface, depending: * Switch to "Superman Mode" * Else, switch to Walking Mode
Superman Mode
* Mouse to change rotation pitch and yaw * Q & E to roll left and right * W & S to apply forwards and backwards thrust * T to switch to Skateboard Mode
Walking
* WASD to walk around * Left Shift to sprint * Space to jump * Mouse to look around * T to switch to Skateboard Mode
Shared
* Escape to free your mouse cursor * RMB to capture it * 1-8 to change time warp - 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128, respectively
Basics
When you open the game, you'll be greeted with the option to either start, or quit, and have the opportunity to input an integer seed. Defaults to 0 if one is not entered.
When you press "Start", the game will hang for a while as it generates the system. This can take a couple minutes if the system generated is big enough.
Once ingame, you'll be in low orbit of a random planet. It'll try to put you on an interesting moon, but failing that, it'll look for a semi-Earthlike planet. From there, you are free to explore to your heart's content - it's a whole solar system to visit, after all! Your fuel and oxygen are fully replenished whenever you land/take off, so don't be afraid to fly some weird courses to dip close to a planet's surface & refuel.
With respect to the mechanics that are present here, a couple of suggestions: - Some way to select what planet the altitude/velocity displays refer to would be nice when setting up a rendezvous. At the moment I feel like you have to get pretty close to a smaller planet before it switches which can leave you without a lot of time to slow down. - At high time warp factors the rotation controls are *very* sensitive. Possibly making them less sensitive or just disabling them completely at high speeds is a good idea; one would mostly be using these during interplanetary journeys, and while you might want to turn around and look at the scenery I doubt there will be many course corrections made at warp factor 8.
The game is very good and fun to play, however I would suggest trying to make a game around the theme next time rather than using a bunch of stuff from your old game and making a sequel. You can do that at any point, but the point of a game jam is to challenge yourself to make a game from scratch based on the constraint of the theme. I love the reference to Electric Boogaloo and I think you've improved a lot.
Great mood, however sometimes you feel like controls are doing almost nothing, and some other times, you feel like as soon as you press a key, you go light speed haha. But once used to it, I was able to know how to avoid being sent into outer space accidentally ;)
Definitely a unique game. It took me like 5 tries to get a seed where I could move slow enough to land on a planet. Really cool and chill atmospheric game. The speeding up and slowing down time works well for when you fly out of orbit. I feel like the seeds should generate more planets, because I'm seeing a lot of empty space even after trying 6 different seeds. Still a cool idea that is probably a lot harder to pull off than it seems!
This is cool, It was a bit hard for me to control. found the sitting pos with 'R' (cool addition). good music, too. The game can get improved and turn into a full game. (I went through the jupiter-esque planet)
So basically this is a Silver Surfer simulator? Speed checks out, cause I had very hard time landing anywhere.
I like the generation of planets etc, unfortunately, all seeds I tried happened to have only black planets. The background image is too much to process against the solar system you're in.
You have a wide angle of possibilites to go with it. Keep up the good work!
@tolmera I'm both, A: unsure if it'd be playable in HTML5, and B: past the point of being able to put out new builds without post-jam upgrades (didn't think to make a commit before doing bugfixing and upgrading, gah). Apologies about not thinking to include one earlier!
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With respect to the mechanics that are present here, a couple of suggestions:
- Some way to select what planet the altitude/velocity displays refer to would be nice when setting up a rendezvous. At the moment I feel like you have to get pretty close to a smaller planet before it switches which can leave you without a lot of time to slow down.
- At high time warp factors the rotation controls are *very* sensitive. Possibly making them less sensitive or just disabling them completely at high speeds is a good idea; one would mostly be using these during interplanetary journeys, and while you might want to turn around and look at the scenery I doubt there will be many course corrections made at warp factor 8.
I like the generation of planets etc, unfortunately, all seeds I tried happened to have only black planets. The background image is too much to process against the solar system you're in.
You have a wide angle of possibilites to go with it. Keep up the good work!