Ludum Dare #47compo

Endless Orbits

by wevel

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.00

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.84

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.58

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.85

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.27

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.20

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.84

This is mostly just a fun demo of N-body orbital mechanics, so while I have added some game mechanics you can ignore them if you want as it was done slightly last minute. The main thing is that you can watch how complex systems of satellites evolve over time. You can spawn more planets in, and even show the paths that they will follow over time. Right clicking on a planet will change the frame of reference to that planet so you can see just how weird orbits can get.

If you want to play the "game", you need to shoot chunks of a planet off into the solar system, trying to get them to reach infinity (cross the red circle). However, you only have a small amount of mass on the planet so how many objects can you get to escape, and how much mass can you send.

Warning, this is doing a fairly slow N-body orbital mechanics simulation so spawning too many planet will make things run slowly. This is especially true when future path prediction is enabled

WebGl build does not show background stars properly due to shader stuff, and probably runs poorly. I would recommend using a standalone build if possible.

Controls:
- Left click to fire a piece of the home planet
- Q/E move starting point to fire parts of your planet from
- Right clock to select a different planet to use as a reference
- Middle mouse/WASD/Arrow Keys to pan camera
- Scroll wheel to zoom
- Escape to bring up the menu

Made Using:
- Unity 2020.1.3f1
- Visual Studio
- Photoshop

There is probably some bugs, so let me know and I'll try to take a look.

Comments15

SinusQuell5 Oct 2020, 16:45

I played around with the web version a bit, it was fun and I think the idea is pretty good :)

Quinn_Patrick5 Oct 2020, 16:52

Okay, this was something kind of cool that I wasn't expecting. I'm sure you're aware of how buggy it is, so I won't give you a hard time over that, but I always like seeing orbital dynamics and physics games. I made one a few months back (not an LD game) that you can check out if you want: https://quinn-patrick.itch.io/ecliptic. It has N-Body dynamics programmed in, but only uses 2-body physics for the actual game, for the sake of playability, so I commend you trying to make N-Body work for a real time game.

FinalForeach5 Oct 2020, 16:58

If your planet crashes into another one it says your planet has run out of materials. Is this intentional?

Anomay5 Oct 2020, 17:02

I wonder why some orbits often shake...

Interesting physical game!

cagibi5 Oct 2020, 17:04

That's a nice simulation, it's always interesting to see projected trajectories of a planet's chunks. No need for music, there's no sound in space :P

Wevelauthor5 Oct 2020, 18:55

@sinusquell Thank you, I would recommend trying a standalone build if you can, as very few background stars render in the WebGL build.

@quinn-patrick Thanks, I had a look at that other game, its pretty neat. I wonder what its like with N-body physics, I guess its gets quite confusing.

@finalforeach Yes, its mostly a result of how I check how much planet mass it remaining, but also I wasn't sure how to deal with some other object colliding with it so I left it as it was.

@anomay The orbits shake due to floating point inaccuracy combined with a poor method of integrating acceleration and velocity. The accuracy is based on the time step, I use 0.005 for the actual update, but only 0.02 for the prediction so its not particularly accurate.

@cagibi Thank you. I hadn't thought of that for the music, but I guess it works.

CliffracerX6 Oct 2020, 16:59

This is a nifty little toy! I'm glad to see I wasn't alone in playing with orbital physics for this LD, and you went way farther than I did with every planet being part of an active N-body simulation. Prediction felt a little janky sometimes (especially when trying to shoot things), and the gameplay wasn't super clear to me, but had fun nevertheless.

Nice work getting all this set up in just 48 hours, particularly the prediction system!

Gonzalol7 Oct 2020, 12:24

It's an interesting interpretation of the theme. And the designs are great.

JudgeZedd7 Oct 2020, 15:45

Interpreted the theme really nicely, the systems work together well and it was a good relaxing time, I thought.

BOOtak7 Oct 2020, 22:05

Hats off for making N-body physics game for LD48! Well, that's a thing about orbital mechanics games. The idea sounds cool, but turning that into actual game is whole different story. That's why I naver had enough courage to try to make something similar, well done!

enderr428 Oct 2020, 13:39

OK, i see simulations - especially physics, i upvote. Graphics-wise the background is kinda mesmerising.
I do not know what to tell you about the "toy" except that we need more stuff like this) I also will be looking at the source for research purposes(if you dont mind), bc i had an itch to do something with n-body physics for a long time.