My first (completed) game and my first Ludum Dare. It's just a simple web game.
You work on an asteroid mining ore. Ore is sent off to a space station for refining. It is your job to fire the ore off into space using the magnetic launcher. Once fired the payload cannot be steered. It is on a ballistic trajectory that is influenced by the gravity of nearby planets. Your path is unstable and you will need to use gravity to your advantage.
Written in Javascript with P5.js. It was my first time using P5.js or doing more than dabbling with Javascript but I have used Processing before (which is why I chose P5.js).
My only goal was to have a completed game. I had more ideas for the game (which I may implement later) but I kept having to reduce the scope of the project to make it manageable in the time frame and with my limited knowledge and experience.
As a learning experience it has been invaluable and I now await your feedback with trepidation.
Really fun concept. Love using gravity to move things. It'd be cool to add blockers or something to prevent the solution of shooting at the right angle below the level, rather than going through it.
I feel like it's a bit guess and check-ish, I would just adjust what I did if it failed and hope that it works, then retry if it didn't. The menu music sounds really good, and I feel that you could take this some where with some quality-of-life improvents (such as a trail of where the last attempt went). Overall, it was decent, fairly short though.
@cynthia-clementine Every time you launch a projectile it counts as an attempt, so the lowest number should be 6 (for the 6 levels). I think there's an off by one error in there. The whole thing was a last minute change as I had a lives system for most of the 72 hours. In hindsight it would have been better to just count the crashes. Thanks for playing!
Great job with this game! It's an extremely impressive first game ever!
The game felt extremely playable and cohesive from start to finish, and even though I cheesed the last few levels by aiming down to the left, rather than weaving through the planets, I still had fun! :)
I'd have liked a few more visual clues about gravity but honestly it was a lot of fun. After the first level I was a bit confused as to what we were doing but when the planet arrived immediately got excited. Having the angle at the top right was super useful to allow for small adjustments.
This was short and sweet. Well done on keeping the scope small! It really feels like a small complete game and the core mechanic is actually fun. Great basis to build more stuff on :)
Congrats on completing your first game! And it's a good game, I hope you continue making games :) The graphics are very cool and having to take into account how gravity influence your shots is a cool mechanic that has a lot of potential. Hopefully you implement some of your ideas in a sequel and we see Uncertain Orbits 2 in the future. Also, bonus points for including a story, it's a nice touch. PS: I've heard of P5.js from the brilliant The Coding Train channel, but I've never seen any games completed with it. It's super cool that you managed to do it.
Really cool concept, I loved it! I managed to finish in 30 attempts. The physics felt nice and it was really satisfying to pull off a 2-planet gravity assist. Only thing it needs is some music!
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The whole thing was a last minute change as I had a lives system for most of the 72 hours. In hindsight it would have been better to just count the crashes. Thanks for playing!
The game felt extremely playable and cohesive from start to finish, and even though I cheesed the last few levels by aiming down to the left, rather than weaving through the planets, I still had fun! :)
The mechanics are really well done, I had fun finishing the game.
Good job!
It was a little annoying to always click on the small gun. Being able to click drag everywhere would have could have been userful.
19 attempts.
Nice work, the trajectories worked well.
I'd have liked a few more visual clues about gravity but honestly it was a lot of fun. After the first level I was a bit confused as to what we were doing but when the planet arrived immediately got excited. Having the angle at the top right was super useful to allow for small adjustments.
Also, bonus points for including a story, it's a nice touch.
PS: I've heard of P5.js from the brilliant The Coding Train channel, but I've never seen any games completed with it. It's super cool that you managed to do it.
JK. Really cool game!