....To the Ends of the World and Back

Man they've eliminated global warming but have not invented auto pilot for spaceships

@nick-barrash I like to think that a human pilot is a bit safer than autopilot. Watch too many sci-fi movies and it makes you realize how unstable AI is.

Thanks for playing!

Nice idea for a game! The narrative was the best part and would be nice to see it expanded upon.

I wish the narrative and the gameplay aspects were mixed together more. For example, the access codes were told to you via the narrative box so that there was a gameplay link to the narrative.

@nick-barrash , Indeed. That's humans for ya. So long as they can get some bored,depressed shmuck to occasionally correct the steering instead, they'll just do that.

Also, the stuff in the windshie--- space shield? Reminded me of the starfield screensaver in Windows 3.1

Thank you for playing, @fakefirefly @epb9000 !

@fakefirefly The narrative bit was something I definitely wish I could have expanded on, I was doing that up until the last seconds. I'll probably post a devlog soon about the original narrative concept, you might be interested in it.

Awesome concept and framing device for the story you told. I can’t imagine being on a ship like that demanding for longer then the length of this little game. How do they sleep? Well done with the game!

Thank you so much for playing, @smilewood ! How they manage to sleep is a very valid question, it's possible that in 200 years there's a type of coffee that can give the body enough energy to not need to sleep? Leaving unintentional plot holes in sci-fi stories is always fun, I wonder what Earth is like in 200 years.

Very good storytelling, and the amount of gameplay is just right to follow the story. Can't wait for the devlog!

Combining visual novels with other types of gameplay has lots of untapped potential. On the other hand, the gameplay part, the way it is here looks more like a tech-demo ... which is not too surprising given that this is a compo game (as opposed to jam).

As for the story, I'm intrigued, but it cut off for me when Grace said something along the lines of 'wait, is that?' (it was just getting good), and the screen faded to a complete (opaque) white. After that, the game seemed to continue, but as I couldn't see the access pad it faded to a complete black after a minute or so. Either I'm missing something (very possible) or it doesn't run properly for me. (There's also the lack of mouse-pointer, and sometimes the yellow outlines are missing for me.) I may try later on a different OS/browser combination.

Oh, and I enjoyed the 'you are about to watch some high-brow cinema'-type intro with the white text on black background.

Cool!

Nice game. I liked the idea of having a visual novel instead of other types of gameplay. IDK if this was a bug, but my mouse cursor disappeared and I couldn't do some of the tasks, and sometimes I just couldn't do it in general. Maybe that was a me thing, idk. Also, (I know this probably wouldn't be possible due to the time constraints) but if this game had voice acting that would be amazing.

I also had my mouse cursor disappear, which made completing the minigames challenging. I really enjoyed the flying through space effect, and as others have said blending visual novel with other mechanics is really creative!

Enjoyable little game not a huge amount of gameplay but the nice little story makes up for it.

Thanks for playing, everyone! My apologies about such a late reply comment, notifications have been really bad for the past day or so.

First things first: regarding the confusion about disappearing mouse pointers, that is completely normal! It's the mouse locking typically used in shooter games and Minecraft, I decided to use it for something out-of-the-box and use mouse locking to simulate moving around the cockpit. Your browser should have said something about "Press ESC to unlock cursor" or something like that, if it didn't I don't know what's up with the browser.

Thank you for the appreciation, @cagibi ! I'm amazed people are actually enjoying the story, I typed the whole thing in about 15 minutes as the Compo was ending.

I definitely agree that visual novels with actual gameplay is something that really needs to have its potential more recognized, @remco ! I always think of one of my favorite LD48 games as a nice example of it. This game is definitely more of a tech demo as you said, it's also more of a demo in general than a complete game. There's no way I could have pulled off this project in a *week*, so the TtEotWaB that you know is somewhat of a demo, with a short playtime and a mere fraction of a story. This won't be the last the world will see of Grace and Andrew!

Thank you for playing, @chesschaser !

@mateu The cursor disappearing is normal, as explained above, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't let you do some of the hazard tasks. During testing everything worked normally, and it should still work even though last time I played TtEotWaB was about halfway through development since I didn't change any of the code regarding task management and scrolling. If you could make a Bug Report on the project's GitHub with your OS, browser, details of the bugs, etc that would be really helpful.

Your idea of voice acting is something I would definitely love to have in the full version, and hopefully in a Ludum Dare game one day! I have a somewhat deep voice though, and it doesn't pair well with microphones (especially my iPhone 6s' crappy one). I don't exactly see myself being able to voice Grace well, due to being AMAB I can't do female voices very well.

@alec Sounds like I might have screwed something up without realizing it.... I'll take a look at the source again tonight and see if I can find out what's up with the cursor bugs, the cursor should only disappear when hazard tasks aren't being done. A GitHub issue report would be greatly appreciated. 👍 Also, I'm glad you like the hyperspeed effect! I was worried it might have issues, it was quite buggy during early development and slowed my laptop down (no small feat for a Construct 3 game).

Thank you for playing, @theseusinabottle ! The post-Compo version (might be so post-Compo it becomes a full commercial release) will be sure to extend the story some, it's quite short and hastily written.

@peace-of-cake-games I believe it was because I was using a browser fullscreen window.

@mateu Just played my own game for the first time since the halfway point of development (the GitHub is filling up with issues, sarcastic cheers), on newest Windows 10/newest Chrome/fullscreen HTML5 build the mouse seemed to work fine, but there have been some noticeable performance issues (hence the respective GitHub issue). I'll have to make native desktop builds later for anyone else experiencing issues.

@peace-of-cake-games oh well, maybe it was just a me-being-dumb thing

@mateu I suspect that browser lagging might have caused glitches in the mouse lock and was responsible for issues you had with the mouse, I'll have to do a full debug inspection later. The project is quite messy right now and full of bugs, it's going to take quite a while to fix all of them but I'll do it extremely soon.

I'm echoing the same things about the mouse being gone which makes it impossible to play past the access code, which also makes me unable to advance the story further... but from the little I could get i definitely felt the hectic trying to balance my tasks and making sure I keep up with chat vibes.

Thanks for trying, @shreemp ! What browser were you using? I suspect browsers that aren't modern Chromium with WebGL 2.0 support (looking at you, Safari) might have issues with the mouse lock, I'll have to dust off the old Mac and test it.

@peace-of-cake-games I'm using firefox

@remco @mateu @alec @shreemp

Hey everyone! v1.1.2 has been released on Itch, if anyone would like to try the game again the mouse issues and misc bugs should all be patched now. Nothing has changed content-wise, it's all bug fixes so hopefully the bugs that don't let you win should be all gone. For best results I would recommend using a modern Chromium browser (Chrome, Edge) since it would seem that any other browser could impact performance and cause those bugs. There are also desktop builds of the unpatched and patched versions if you think poor HTML5 performance could be an issue.

@peace-of-cake-games thanks, I’ll be sure to check it out.

Interesting game! I really liked the ending.

~spoilers below~

I wonder what happened to Grace's girlfriend seeing as she promised to go to the end of the world for her, yet she also signed up for a mission which, if successful, would see her return to Earth thousands (probably millions) of years into the future. It's a cool little mystery.

It would have been nice to have more little tasks to stay do while cruising through space. Perhaps the option to turn on some music (or turn it off if you just want to listen to engine noise) would have been good. Overall, though, I quite liked it!

Fun game! The dialogue could use some work I think. Not the dialogue itself, but how it is handled. Maybe some mechanic could have been made so that you need to do an action to respond to Andrew. Maybe by clicking the box at the right top corner, and if you are too late than Andrew gets annoyed.
But then again, it is an compo entry and those are hard! First coming up with an original idea, and then executing that idea, I think you did a great job!
I think that this could be extended easily by adding more things to keep stable, the challenge in that is to not make it look like among us mini games I think :)

Also, probably an insignificant choice, but appreciated: I like how the theme is presented at the start, that's an idea I'll make sure to do that too next time.

Very unusual game — you certainly nailed Innovation. Graphics are also very good; I like the way you recreate the feel of old terminals with green scan lines and monospace fonts.

I too struggled with the controls; I was hoping there was a way to play the game only with the keyboard; but I suppose the challenge of learning the controls is itself part of the game. In any case, it's an unusual blend of two genres, task management and interactive fiction. One idea I had if you'd like to improve the game is to add more variety to the environment: maybe have some colorful planets or what have you. Also, you could have it so that you interact with Grace — e.g., you have a list of options about how to reply to her after she says something. These are just some ideas if you'd like to continue developing the game, or design a similar game. Overall, this is a very good entry for the Compo. Nice work, comrade!

*hug* for all the Andrews out there.

The game ran fine on Edge, I ended up getting to a pure white screen, then the noise of an alert started and after a minute, pitch black. Guess I won and then lost ?

On the other hand, at first I had tried it on firefox : the cursors doesn't reappear for the task on the right, so everytime I had to escape full screen, go full screen again, get the cursor, do the task, cursor goes away and repeat next time this task pops up. After 3 or 4 time it just completely glitched out. No clue why.

The game was pretty relaxing. I liked reading the banter. I got to a point where the screen went white, then black, and everything stopped. I'm not sure if that was the end or if I broke something. Either way looks pretty good!

Wow, so many great comments! Thanks for playing everyone, looks like I've got more games to play now since ratings received has exceeded ratings given. Hey look, TtEotWaB hit 20 ratings! 🥳

@human-writes-code It's actually kind of a mystery how long it would take to go the ends of the universe and back since the speed of hyperspeed is undefined! I like to think that hyperspeed is exponentially greater than the speed of light (which isn't how physics work but who cares, this is just under 200 years in the future, things are clearly more advanced).

I definitely agree that there should have been something to do, originally the dialogue wasn't going to pass so quickly and you would be able to listen to music (a chiptune cover of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up of course, I'm a total troll) and you could doodle around on a little holographic sketchpad popup. The source code actually still has an empty layer for the sketchpad popup and the code is designed to work with it if I had had time to implement it!

@wouter52 Thank you for all of those great suggestions! Talking definitely wasn't going to be automatically done, and your suggestion of Andrew getting annoyed if you don't respond soon is a good addition!

I know the official description of the game is "like Among Us meets visual novels" but still, glad to see someone who gets the Among Us references. 👍 Innersloth actually participated in Ludum Dare in LD41, I took a look at the LD page and it's hilarious seeing their comments talk about how they're in the middle of a space game when no one knew it would get so big! The plot is also a nod to the beginning of one of the levels in the game Celeste where instead of hardcore gaming you have the characters talk about their personal issues. There are noticeable differences there though, like instead of the female character talking about anxiety and depression it's the male character, they're in space instead of on a mountain, and the female character is gay instead of trans.

@gamebuilder As always, a major thanks for playing! Always good to get game tips from you. Glad you get the feel of the holographic displays, adding scan lines and pixel text (I hate that thing's character spacing but the Construct Team won't fix it) was a decision I'm glad I made since it's visually better than the MS Sans Serif and a plain green background. I definitely went with a very Ludum Dare 41 (Combine 2 Incompatible Genres) approach, eh?

I'll definitely have to consider keyboard input in the post-Compo release, that would make the keypad easier. I went with a mouse-only gameplay (plus spacebar to pause but that was mostly a dev shortcut and for the streamers) since the Construct 3 betas introduced the mouse locking like in 3D shooter games, and I wanted to try something innovative with the function typically used strictly outside of 3D games. In hindsight that was a bad idea since the lower-end browsers such as Firefox and the super low-power browsers such as Safari can't handle mouse locking well.

@masaru Yes, a hug for all the Andrews! I'm sad I didn't get to develop the character of Andrew more, he's got potential. I'll be talking about him in either the next devlog or the one after that.

Thanks so much for the detailed bug report! I just took a look at the source code and your bug sounds right, turns out that sadly absolutely *no one* has managed to win the game. The game doesn't bring you to the good ending when you win, and the bad ending didn't have its script associated with it so it just sat there at a black screen. Guess it's a good thing rankings are useless as far as I'm concerned, I probably bombed my own rankings by making such amateurish bugs. 😅

@queenofsquiggles You've been affected by the same bug as every other player! Turns out some code was missing and it was impossible to win, I'll have a patch rolled out ASAP. Thanks for trying it out and making it to what is technically the good ending of the game!

@nick-barrash @fakefirefly @epb9000 @smilewood @cagibi @remco @chesschaser @mateu @alec @theseusinabottle @shreemp @human-writes-code @wouter52 @gamebuilder @masaru @queenofsquiggles

Hello everyone! Thank you all for playing and helping out with the bug investigation.

Long story short: my game this time around is *extremely buggy*. Thanks to all of you playing I've managed to patch the bug that prevented the player from winning or losing. If anyone would like to try the game now that you can actually access the endings, it's live on Itch! No content changes have been made since the end of the Compo, only bug fixes.

Please note that Firefox and Safari being broken is an unfixable bug, if you use one of these browsers I recommend downloading your respective desktop builds. Edge and Chrome seem to work best, they always manage to run my games correctly. Chrome has been confirmed as almost always working correctly.

I liked the concept and can see additional features for future versions.

Thank you for playing, @embedder72 ! More features will be coming post-Compo, this is basically a tiny demo at this point.

Hey Cake, good to see you're still LDing, and that you explore different game styles. Impressive amount of creative freedom this one, it was enjoyable. Had to have another go and fail keeping the ship stable, both endings are quite emotional.

Keep it up!

Thanks @kr4ft3r , happy to hear such praise from someone who made such a genius game! Going way out of my comfort zones is always the fun of Ludum Dare, though next time I'll probably go back to my roots of an action game developer. All of my submissions this year have been story-based (walking simulator with story and "visual novel thing", as Itch has been instructed to call it), it'll be nice to make an actual "game" game next Ludum Dare.

Looking forward to seeing you at the 20th anniversary of this fantastic event!

(Also, I like the nickname Cake.... finally someone got my dev name a nickname!)

Ye I know the feeling, this LD was the first "proper" game I felt like making in a long time. Once you start going experimental or story-driven it is hard to go back. Well just do how you feel and where the theme takes you, that's what LD is about (I think). Much love.

Hi man, how are you? Your game is very interesting. It's a different interpretation of the theme.
The graphics are nice and the sound is simple but very good. There is good text content inside your game, that makes it more interesting. In addition, I think an excellent entry! Congratulations!

@kr4ft3r Oh yes, it's probably going to be hard to make an action game next time! Ludum Dare is always a great time to have fellow writers leave feedback about my hastily-written stories (I really ought to make a team next time and put myself in charge of audio and writing, doing that and the art and the programming is tough), so I've developed a tendency to make story games. Maybe LD50's theme will finally be something action game-inspiring! As much as I hated One Tool, Many Uses at least that would have motivated me to make an action game, most likely about serial killers.

And now I'm getting an urge to go play The Fall Of Alice for some reason since that was such a bizarre masterpiece....

Thanks for checking out this little project, @vphyre ! I'm doing great, playing your game really made my ~~day~~ night last night! Hopefully post-Compo I'll finally whip out *the dark arts of shader effects* and improve the graphics of TtEotWaB. Sounds could use some work too, I wasted around half an hour getting that ambient noise working since I took advantage of my phone's microphone's crappiness to make a distorted recording of a fan.

Simple but unique take on the theme! I'm a fan of VNs with light gameplay to keep you engaged. Would've been cool (as others have mentioned) if the dialogue was a little more involved with the gameplay, like you have to read Andrew giving you the correct code, or getting reactive messages from him if you're close to a task expiring and getting a bad end. I also wish I could make the dialogue box a little bigger, but since this is meant to be played fullscreen it's not that big of a deal.
If you wanted to expand on this I think small branching dialogue options would be a great addition! Doesn't have to change things drastically, but it'd give more opportunities to expand on the characters and maybe see more playful interactions between them. Or even having the option to refuse to interact with Andrew would take it in an interesting direction.

Great experiment and it has a lot of potential as others have already said. Thank you for the trip.

Thanks for playing and the great suggestions, @kantanloop ! Making the dialogue actually do something is definitely what I'd like to do when I remake this project one day, your suggestions could definitely help. Originally when a message from Andrew was received there would be a notification popup at the bottom of the screen similar to the notifications of the Xbox operating system, but that was one of the *many* things that got scrapped due to the Compo. I don't know about refusing Andrew though, I stuck a little bit of myself in him in the way that he's rather stubborn. 😏 Branching dialogues could be interesting if there are extremely increased amounts of hazards, depending on the story line different paths could mean different hazards.

You're welcome, @rufson ! Thank you for playing!

Neat little visual novel I thought it was a pretty good and engaging story and I never play visual novels at all so im not exactly the best to rate this kind of thing but I thought it was well written!

i liked the visuals for the stars, they were nicely mesmerizing. i think making correcting the steering a bit more involved would have gone a long way to make the game more fun.
i think it's nice that you made grace queer.

Why thank you, @aderpychickenstudios ! I would definitely recommend checking out some more Ludum Dare visual novels, there are a lot of better and more traditional visual novels made for Ludum Dare. VNs made for Ludum Dare always seem to test the limits of what a visual novel really is, interestingly most people use engines like Unity and Construct to make visual novels for Ludum Dare instead of using a "visual novel engine".

Thanks for playing, @sakura-magika ! Steering definitely could be improved, but it was kind of the quick and easy (yet frequent and reduced countdown) hazard so I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be a rip-off of Among Us' Fix Steering task on the Airship map.

👍 Glad someone noted and liked that! The game just wouldn't be the same in my opinion if Grace wasn't an LGBT character.

Woah. That's definitely a good take on unstable. I'm still feeling a bit unstable after playing, haha. Great job!

Ha ha, thanks for playing @yojammerjammer !

Pretty solid submission! I'm glad the fictional humans were able to eliminate global warming. I think it would be cool if you could manually progress the text, that way you can go at your own pace. I found myself sitting there idle waiting for the next text to pop up. Or a few more mini games would work too. Good stuff :)

Thanks a ton for playing, @blue-pin-studio ! It sure is a good thing global warming got eliminated, though the fact it took around 200 years doesn't bode well for the next 150 years or so. 😬 Text updates are definitely first on the list of things that could be improved post-Compo, right now it's too automatic. Seems to always be a problem with my story-based Ludum Dare submissions.... I'm hoping LD50 is going to have a theme that'll finally motivate me to do something I actually know how to do: action games.

I'm sure you've probably noticed that the center of the dashboard is pretty empty? Originally I was going to add useless little things you could do while the story progressed, like a holographic doodle board (I got so close to implementing it its basic code is in the source file but it does nothing) and a little radio that could play a few catchy chiptune musics since I specialize in those, and of course a chiptune cover of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. I'm such a troll. 😏

Cool little story Game, I liked it :)

The font was a little hard to read especially if you were distracted by the acess code and had to catch up fast. Was there a way to find the acess codes? I just did trial and error :D

Great game! It was mainly the story that made it good, as there was virtually no gameplay. Also, maybe the time given for tasks should be at least half of what it is now - I usually corrected steering within 0.5 - 2 seconds. (On a random side note, once the access code 4444 generated for me - what RNG!) The story was interesting, it's just no actual story events happened - an asteroid encounter or something could make it more exciting :-)
Good job!

Thanks for playing @ausstein ! I do wish that font was better, I finally had the sense to stop wasting time every Ludum Dare making a font (I'm very slow at it) and instead used Construct 3's built-in pixel font. The spacing on that thing is horrendous, and the Construct Team hasn't done anything about it despite making that font actually good has been requested for quite some time.

Quick tip: if you need more time to read the text hold Space, the game time stops running when you do that! Even for someone who can only speak and read English it's hard for me to read the font at times, so the pause button was designed for that. Hazard timers won't run when the pause is activated, since the keypad uses a deltatime-affected timer plugin and the steering countdown is actually this big JavaScript expression blob:

Heh, I remember when I first made the keypad system and the only way to figure out what the code was was trial and error, instead of saying a code it displayed "\_23\_" or something like that. When you press on the keypad to open up the overlay to enter the code it should say the access code on the keypad's screen.

Thank you too for playing, @robonaut121 ! That's some amazing luck with the keypad, I never managed to get anything but random numbers. Each number has the same chances, so that really is some good RNG! (Maybe in the full version that'll be made one day I'll add a teeny chance of an easter egg code....) The story definitely needs some more interactivity, but I still haven't learned my lesson that I *cannot* make a fully finished and polished story-based game in two days. 😓

I wouldn't consider myself a visual novel kind of person, so giving feedback might be difficult, especially anything anyone above hasn't already said.

I find the 2.5D first person view very charming; I LOVE that kinda stuff! And as I'd imagine people have already said, a fuller version of this game should definitely have more things you have to do to keep the ship 'stable'. I'm quite impressed to hear that you typed up all the dialogue in only 15 MINUTES! I don't think I could've managed something like that with so little time left!

As people have certainly said above, this game is certainly a tech demo. And as for a bigger version of this game... it's pretty interesting to think about, but I unfortunately wouldn't be interested; at least, in PLAYING it. Again, it's not really my kind of game.

Though on that note, this was also pretty easy to understand anyway, THAT, I really appreciate. It's a pretty neat game overall, even if it's a tech demo.

This was a nice experience to play! I enjoyed watching the characters interact, and the POV cockpit view helps to feel as if you're there. Though one of the stars did fly into my eye a couple times, which was a bit jarring lol. I think the countdowns for the steering and code entering could be reduced a bit to help with the frantic effect, if that's the goal at least - it mostly seemed like a peaceful reading experience, which is cool too! Well done!

Looking forward to playing both of your games, @ronanrory @brainloaf-studio !

I'd consider that some pretty darn useful feedback, @ronanrory ! (Spelled that as "foodback" the first time, guess my gluttonous stomach wants more dessert 😆) Feedback from non-VN players is just as valuable as feedback from VN players. I'm glad you like the 2.5D graphics, I spent a bit of time having to bugfix those! The light beams were quite performance-heavy at first, and this Dell of mine has decent power to it, so I'm glad making the game "potato computer"-friendly paid off and I got some praise from you as a bonus.

Whenever I get around to making a full version of this (two conditions: teach myself the art of 3D cutscenes and figure out how the heck people are seriously able to do digital art so well) there'll definitely have to be more hazards. The keypad is the only "proper" hazard right now since I couldn't think of any sort of mini-game for the steering that wouldn't be a rip-off of Among Us' steering task (adjust speed, fix wheel, and if you want to play around honk the horn like crazy for no good reason at all). Once I stop being such a slacker and write up the second devlog I'll talk about original ideas for that empty space on the dashboard, long story short you could originally doodle around while getting rickrolled.

And yeah, 15 minute speed-typing.... I was shaking with adrenaline (and possibly caffeine but I don't even remember what I ate that day) as I copy-and-pasted the script fragments to make the dialogue work. In hindsight it's a bit rushed-sounding when you know it was made in about 15 minutes, maybe one day I'll have the sense to join a team as the writer and audio producer since I can actually do those well (looking at you, poor digital art abilities) instead of forcing myself to go mentally insane doing the work of 4+ theoretical team members in an entire less day. Thankfully sharpening my skills has become quite useful, I made things easier on myself by making it so that the dialogue is actually a two-parameter function that just copies the "sender" and "message contents" to the chat box.

@brainloaf-studio Whoops, sorry about the blinding stars! That's the one bug I haven't figured out how to efficiently fix yet, since the stars are randomly generated and trying to delete any stars that could align with the camera would probably delete almost every star what with the camera moving in 2.5D. It's actually a fully 2D camera (despite me having added the 3D Camera plugin to the project) with some parallax layering and the stars are shoved back on the Z axis.

Right before the deadline I actually was going to reduce the timers (15s steering and 30s keypad I think?), the keypad would be easy since it uses a deltatime-affected timer plugin that makes it so that all I would have to do is change its time parameter. Changing the steering wasn't something I would have managed to do before the deadline though, since once the steering hits an angle of -30 or 30 degrees (hence the 30s timer) it triggers the lose condition. The timer for the steering is all mathematically calculated by a triple-expressioned line of JavaScript comparing the absolute value of the angle and the difference between 0 degrees and the current angle and all of that boring stuff.... 😴 Heck, I might even add difficulty levels for casual versus actually stressful playing! Never seen a half-visual novel game with difficulty levels before.

Very bold concept! I like seeing your LD progression over time because you're branching out into more complex games over time. I wonder what you'll be making years from now.

I think marrying convos within non-VNs could be done in clever ways. This is my favorite implementation of it https://youtu.be/o1g02WH7dEE?list=PLaMjvL2xXxO5jf_-UokTrRXyoJ7HQ2KGW&t=151

The Wangan series peppers dialogue throughout the story mode stages, usually on a straightaway so the player has time to read it, similar to how you did it in between unstable sequences. I think it's a good way to weave in the lore without being a cutscene that's not interactable. So needless to say, I like how you did it here as well.

Your gameplay was simple enough to grasp, though I did have some dread that there was going to be a lot more tasks to do. In some ways it was good that there weren't too many so I could focus on the story.

Great job and keep pushing those limits :)

Thanks for playing, @peachtreeoath ! It's nice how you've watched as my Ludum Dare entries get progressively less and less crappy, maybe next Ludum Dare I'll finally be able to make something fully polished and complete. I'm no good at making story-based games in a mere 2 days due to my background as an action game developer, and my first Ludum Dare game is somewhat dead to me, so I'm hoping that next Ludum Dare the theme will finally motivate me to make what I make best: some sort of action game.

I've never heard of the Wangan series! It definitely looks like an extremely fun game, as far as I'm concerned modern graphics were reached in 1996 with the Nintendo 64, so a game with a nice modern-retro vibe like that definitely speaks to me. After last Ludum Dare I knew I didn't want to do a cutscene for this Ludum Dare, though I did briefly consider setting up the entire environment in 3D and using full 3D instead of 2.5D visual effects. It would seem that as of last Ludum Dare it's become a tradition for me to try using brand-new experimental features in the Construct 3 engine during Ludum Dare, last Ludum Dare I tried the new 3D objects and this Ludum Dare I used the mouse locking, a classic in the 3D PC games field.

Looking forward to playing your entry, it looks like I'll be giving it a high Innovation score. 👍

Hey! That was nice!
The simple mechanics allows you to tell the story without worrying a lot of what's happening in the ship, it feels like a narrative experience, great! As the others noted, this allows you to add more difficulty with more minigames as Among Us or Five Nights At Freddy does.
If you are able to create such a game in 48h without being in you masteries, what will you drop when it's turn of an action game?! Hope one of them in LD50!
Congratulations!

About the story:
It felt so deep! I can feel the peace they're talking about. Keeps me calm and relaxed, I would read them for hours. (I replayed it for giving my opinion). Hope the girlfriend receive news from her!

Thanks for such great positive feedback, @byyiro ! More hazards is definitely one thing to work on, to the point where the full version might have a full 3D environment you have to walk around to get to different hazards.

Fingers crossed that the theme for the 20th anniversary finally encourages me to make an action game! 🤞 2021 has been the year of story-based Ludum Dare games for me apparently, hoping to get back into my comfort zone (but not too far in, because that wouldn't be fun, now would it?) for LD50.

Man, poor Grace's girlfriend. Her significant other just up and jets off into space for *who knows how long* just to prove the hyperbole she said to her was true. :smile:

This was a nice little game. :slight_smile: Some fun things to keep you distracted while reading the story, and a nice atmosphere to boot. Good job!

Thanks for playing, @coleslaughter ! Exactly how long it would take to fly to the ends of the universe is definitely questionable seeing as it's unspecified how fast hyperspeed is. My guess is hyperspeed is probably exponentially greater than the speed of light, but who knows, and who cares about realism in physics? I made a game 200 years in the future and you made a game about a table doing tricks like a skateboarder, the stability of physics is being tested here.

This was really nice! I've never made a story-centric games before, but you've got me thinking about that now. I might suggest having the conversation window more prominently displayed in the center of the screen, possibly with some cool animations like they've just received a text message. I think this would reinforce that it's the main thing players should bring their eyes back to between the repair mini-games.

@mhorth Definitely going to reposition and redesign how the messaging works! Originally it was going to be a screen on the dashboard like the keypad, and in order to advance the story you had to check it regularly and message back by pressing a button, but Compo time restrictions and all that made things different.

I don't know how one would go about doing this in Unity (all I've ever done is Unity is generate errors and crash the engine), but in Construct 3 I used function calling with a "Sender" parameter and a "Text" parameter, and the game just ran an overly long amount of code that would send periodic messages at a fixed rate. When the messaging function was called it would append the text that made up the messaging chat with the Sender, a : character and a space, and then the Text. Pretty straightforward. Everything else is pretty basic too: the camera is at Z 100, light beams are spawned at Z -100 and move forwards, the keypad just shows a hidden 2D layer and when generating a code it randomly assigns four code values a number, the player has to press the matching number according to the index of where they are in the code, etc. I know the scrolling would be effortless to make in Unity, it's the classic mouse lock used for looking around in PC shooter games and Minecraft and such, except I used it for an innovative 2D scroll by only registering X-axis mouse movement.

Cute lil story! The game itself makes you wait a lot, and fixing the stuff is super easy, but I get that wasn't your priority. The mood is excellent, that fan is really well utilized. xd And I'm glad there was a happy ending! I was afraid something horrible was coming when it started to fade to white. My only problem with the game is that the mouse sensitivity felt too low: I have to drag my mouse over twice just to reach the other side of the ship.

Glad you like it, @fupi ! I'll be sure to let the fan know that it has been appreciated. 😜

I'll definitely see about adding a mouse sensitivity config. During development I had tested it with both my laptop's touchpad and a mouse, and I didn't get around to making adjustable sensitivity since it felt fine for me (but then again, I'm the person who made it, should have gotten some playtesters to test the scrolling) but I knew mouse sensitivity was something I should have done.

I dont know, I dont much see what colerate with theme, sorry. Average fun game, but maybe next time you will polish the gameplay and it will be better. Sorry but you graphics is horrible, try next time to invest more time to that. Your audio is not good, maybe next time skip it.

One last note: I always write down honest review, because everybody need that, not just nice craps with some bullshit, but sometime I will appreciate very good games. So if this review insult you, but use it well :) Anyway every game is counting so :)

nice story and mood. controls are pretty simple and I think the additions you mentioned you would have included would have added to the player's role. I ran the win executable and at some point the screen turned white hiding the text so I couldn't get the end of the story (is that the end?). Nice submission!

Thanks for playing, @matias-correa ! I'm assuming you downloaded the original Compo version? In the original version (and v1.1.2) it was impossible to win the game and the screen would just turn white for whatever reason, I recommend playing the HTML5 or v1.1.3 version so that it'll be bug-free. I haven't changed a single thing in the game in the updated versions so no need to worry about being tricked into playing a better post-Compo version, it's all bug fixes and absolutely no new content.

I wish that while holding spacebar I had the ability to scroll up to see messages I missed; I missed the first few at the beginning of the game (since I was trying to figure out how far I needed to move my mouse to fix the steering) so I had to restart.

The mood of the conversation is a little off; Grace comes across as though her GF is dead or something, though the other party simply thinks it's cute that she's out here for her gf. It is additionally hard to tell who is speaking at the good end of the game since it's all one font color with no indication of who's who.

I enjoyed the low-quality fan ambience you went to a lot of effort for; it felt natural and I didn't even think about it until just now. The warnings were a little annoying yet also cute sirens in a way? I also really liked that the stars we were hyperdriving past seemed to have real dimensions, as I could move the camera back and forth to see them from the other side. It was a really cool touch, like getting to live inside an old screensaver or something.

Gameplay wise it was kind of boring having only two things to do that only happened sometimes, but I understand that the point is to make the visual novel part easier to enjoy (plus ludum dare compo scoping!), and I feel it; without the visual novel portion I don't think I would have the patience to reach the end of the world.

Overall I liked it! Good little story, good little game. :blue_heart:

Scrolling through the messages while the game is paused, why didn't I think of that? Fantastic idea, @papabirb ! You're definitely right about making the character's text different colors too, like in Celeste:

Glad you liked the fan's background ambience! The warning sound was intended to sound "a little annoying yet cute sirens in a way?", play too much Among Us and the warning sound will haunt you forever, so I went with something a little less.... ear killing. 😅

Ahhhh I'm glad so many people are enjoying the stars! They're fully rendered in 3D despite the rest of the project rendering in 2D, the game creates them every 0.1 seconds or so. The camera is at Z elevation 100, the game elements at Z elevation 0, and the stars are created at Z elevation -100. Each tick the stars create their aftereffect and step up one Z elevation, meaning the better the framerate the better it looks (couldn't find an efficient way to deltatime it and make it flawless at any framerate). Took quite a while to tweak the stars so that they would appear more or less centered no matter where you are, since 3D rendering and 2D rendering don't always mix quite right.

Yeah, gameplay isn't much since I put little focus on gameplay and it's more about the story (which is hilarious, because I spent almost the whole Compo making the scrolling around and keypad work and I typed up the entire story and implemented it in the last 15 minutes of the Compo). Post-Compo, whenever I get around to it whether it be a few days or a few years, there'll be more hazards to fix and lower countdowns for them (something I tried to implement initially but due to the way the steering is made it would have been too time-consuming).

Glad you liked it! Thanks a lot for playing! 😄

I really liked this! It was on the simple side, but thats the case with LD. Would like to see you expand on this concept in future jams, now that you got the execution haammered out. FWIW, playing on the browser worked well for me, once I figured out what was going on with the mouse. It was a little confusing to understand, but it worked just fine once I got it.

Thank you for playing, @pbg ! It definitely is on the simple side, the Compo is no joke and in Ludum Dare doing anything other than my minimalistic handdrawn graphics is a real time-killer (I like 'em though). Glad to hear that the Web version worked good for you! I'll probably have to add a little tutorial screen on how the mouse works post-Compo, seems like mouse lock in a 2D game was quite unexpected for most people.

Potentially an interesting idea! But currently not too engaging and not very fun unfortunately :( I also had some problems with the mouse not getting grabbed correctly.

@nyxkn What browser were you using? I thought I got all of those pesky mouse lock bugs gone.... Seems like the main bug creators and Firefox and Safari (not surprised at all about Safari), Chrome and Edge seem to almost always work right.

Interesting concept! Pretty atmospheric. Nice feeling of urgent task when you need to enter the code.

It was confusing that cursor hidden, so it was not clear how to interact with steering and keypad at the beginning.

Good job!

Thanks for playing, @retrome ! Sorry about the confusion about the cursor, that was poor mechanic implementation on my part. 😅

Good little game for the compo ! The dialogue was very cute. Well done for the compo !

Thank you, @kakapoy ! The Compo sure is no joke, two days certainly flies by....

We made it!

It was a nice relaxing experience. The dialog between Grace and Andrew reminded me a bit of my time playing Firewatch. I really enjoyed listening to the casual dialog in that game and I enjoyed reading it here too.

The text has an issue for me, I'm a bit dyslexic and the space between each letter is very large, almost as large a the "space" between words. This force me to focus a bit more to read the text and reduce the relaxing aspect of your game.

The dialog was also a tiny bit slow as I didn't had much to do in the game. I'm sure this will not be an issue if you added a few extra task around the spaceship.

Really cool short story! Congratz

Thanks a lot for playing, @togis ! Sorry about the crappy font, fixing its spacing and sizing has been a long-requested Construct 3 feature/bug fix and the Construct Team hasn't done anything about it. 😣 I'll be sure to stop using the SpriteFont plugin for fonts and just use a nice Sans Serif font for *everything* next Ludum Dare, admittedly I don't like that font either but the engine lacked a good built-in pixel font.

a neat experience.

Creative gameplay, I liked the control system, how you turn with the mouse, and the 3D star effects all add to the level of immersion which is well done.

The way of telling the story was unique, though it was more or less like reading a book it, combined with the gameplay, was definitely unique, and the story itself, while not super deep, was rather enjoyable.

Overall I like this, it’s creative, and it tells a neat little story, would've liked to see something happen at the end in regards to the story, but still, as it stands it's a solid little experience

Thanks for playing, @sinci1 ! It's always neat to see other Ludum Dare users who still play games and leave feedback on them after the deadline.

The story definitely needs some depth and a proper ending, if I had done the Jam I most likely would have done a full 3D environment and cutscenes and all that but the Compo sure is harsh. I'm hoping to come back to this project one day soon, it certainly has the potential for a full game (seems to be an October tradition of mine) but I'm waiting until I've managed to improve my graphical abilities (though I wouldn't recommend judging them by my Ludum Dare games, my art looks like crap compared to what I can do without deadlines).