Radioactive Rocket Fuel

Just got to Vadarius and completed the game. Game has potential with secrets, more to do on planets and point of interest on the map.

When trading buy whole button would be great. Also after buying the upgrade there is nothing to do with money. There could be more upgrades and cosmetic could be added to compensate for trade system and excess of money.

Reminds me a bit of of the old mac games Escape Velocity and Space Madness. It's neat, but I feel like the movement is a bit weird and awkward; There's like some weird friction or something, like I'm piloting a boat on water rather than a spaceship.

I love the vibe from this game.
It's a bit awkward steering with the arrow keys though.
It would've been amazing to steer with your mouse cursor, and to be able to use the WASD keys as alternatives to the arrow keys.
I managed to reach the red planet :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

For me, this is an example of a game with potential, which unfortunately can't fully evolve due to the short time. However, I like the basic idea. I would like to see a more complex store system and the possibility to locate planets :rocket:

this game is really misterious and big I love it! I like how you used many layers of stars it gave a really nice effect, wish I tought about this in ld50 when I made a space game lol, the UI could use a bit more polish but the gameplay is really solid (reminds me of an old flash game where you build and use multiple rockets untill you make the perfect one and reach the moon)

I truly enjoyed playing your game! What an awesome experience. Took me a while to find the first planet, but from then on, it just got better. The graphics are beautiful, from the various planets to the ship, booster particles and the parallax stars. Good job! The trading mechanic worked well, but a bulk buy/sell system would improve it. As I reached Vadarius, I already was a Gazillionaire, but then I realized, that I could not reach another planet anymore! A millionaire stranded on a far away planet. What an ending!

Well done!

I love the trading mechanics in this game but flying around is so frustrating I could not go past the first two planets (up and right). I almost wish the flying part wasn't there at all and you could simply choose which neighboring planet to go. Maybe by having to buy fuel or something. The ten seconds thing could have been how often the prices change something. I loved the little descriptions of the planets, each having a ten seconds twist. Also you really needed to add a "sell all" button and a way to quickly set how much to buy. It quickly turned into a carpal tunnel simulator. Anyway loved travelling between the first few planets and get dirty rich!

Very nice game!

I liked how every feature in the game has an important role. You can't reach the end without an upgrade and you can't upgrade without trade and you can't trade without using the isotope collection. Very nice.

I don't know if it is my very wide monitor but for me the front row of stars disappeared from time to time. Noting game breaking just a note. :wink:

Really like the concept!
I think a minimap might be a cool addition to help with planning.

The physics felt very spacey, I like the challenge of cancelling out momentum as part of navigation.
Also perhaps the coolest take on the theme I've seen so far :))

Maybe make the fuel pellets a bit bigger, I felt like I was frustratingly close to hitting some but still missed.

Overall, nice game!

Neat little space trader game with a nice use of the jam theme. Great job!

I like the thruster controls. It's reminding me of some (retro) games I used to play. The concept is cool, although I had difficulties finding planets in time. The parallax stars background is such a simple and beautiful idea. Love it! :thumbsup:

(in a rush to test many, don’t mind the cursory style)

1. "an unstable radioactive isotope that decays every 10 seconds" -> story-wise, this is clever :)
2. "I didn’t have time to write more than 8 bars of music, so I left it out otherwise it would be too repetitive." -> when in doubt, you can let the player decide. (I should have done so for difficulty, but hey, Captain Hindsight XD)
3. I like that there is a double control mode (economy management + flight)
4. launch sound! :) Oh, but no thruster sound then?

(continued: 2/2)

Takeaway: the game feels like its own little coherent universe, with several aspects (piloting, exploration, trade, dialogue), while the theme is cleverly incorporated; this is somewhat impressive! There are other space games with resource management (such as *No Man’s Sky*), but it still has its personality. I see two main drawbacks: 1) although this can be made on purpose, is this ship HARD to navigate with such inertia!! I could barely enjoy the nicely manoeuvrable upgraded-engine version, since it allows you to reach the end! 2) The complexity of the system’s economy suffers from letting the player have a ‘dominant strategy’ of very profitable simple straightfoward 2-planet 1-resource trade, for little risk involved (although I did still die during the journey on some occasions XD). And had it not been that way, it would have been complicated, almost requiring you to take down notes on each planet, and painstakingly find a route between several planets for indirect financial speculation.

Thanks for the immersive space odyssey. :)

Afterthought: I guess you cannot get stuck because you can only upgrade once, and there may be some security so that you always have at least one unit of some resource (which should be sufficient to trade your way to the top?).

PS: I saw you have 19.875 votes(!), here is the precious 20-sesame. ;)

PPS: the planets are really beautiful. They are in contrast with the isotopes that look a bit arcadey, but why not. :) I also wonder if there are secrets and let the game running. X)

This is a very unique game mechanic! I like it very much. Its not very hard to play though, but I think its a very good basic idea for a game.

Also these are really beautifull planets!

Well done!

Fun game with a surprising amount of depth and content. The graphics fit well (aside from maybe the fuel looking a bit out of place), failure wasn't punished too strictly (keeping your inventory and launching from the last visited planet), and the chat and other little blurbs on the planets were hilarious. "Every 10 seconds... they change the side of the road on which they drive," had me dying. One small problem was that I couldn't find a way to obtain money other than trading using existing money. So, once I had upgraded my rocket immediately when I reached exactly 1000 currency, I was soft-locked. I liked how the ship went faster when upgraded instead of just holding more fuel though; fit the theme better.

Am I the only one who can't actually find any other planets? I launch off the starting planet, collect some more fuel, and.... fly off into empty space and die helplessly, no matter which direction I go in? There obviously *are* other planets, as other people seem to be able to fly to them and complete the game, but I have no idea how you're supposed to know where they are. I hope it's not just tedious trial and error. A minimap would have been better.

I hope I'm not sounding too harsh on you here. I want to like this, as it's clearly had a lot of effort put into it within the Compo deadline, but I can't actually play enough of it to make a fair judgement.

Thank you everyone for all the positive feedback! It's great to hear so many enjoyed playing the game. I had great fun developing it; it was my first time using Godot and I found it very intuitive.

I'd also like to respond to some of your feedback, as there are a few themes running through the comments.

Firstly, the flight controls. For a game like this it is common to have completely frictionless physics where every thrust and turn must be compensated for to change direction. Personally I dislike that feeling, so I put in some dampening physics (i.e. the ship's movement and turning slow down if you let go of the controls). I played around with the variables for a bit until it felt right to me, but @jackaljk and an anonymous reviewer found the controls awkward. Others, like @senover-games, enjoyed the flying. @james-joubert suggested using the mouse to navigate, and if I had implemented something like that it might also have worked for touch controls (I tried the game on my phone's browser only to find that the ship would launch and then explode).

Secondly, the trading economy. I've always liked the idea of flying around and trying to find the most profitable deals, but in practice I think that is difficult to do well in a game. As @mossieur-patate points out there are some obvious dominant strategies, but maybe the alternative would have been too boring and arbitrary. I couldn't spend much time balancing this because the entire trading and economy system was added in the last few hours of the compo. As @douwe-ravers points out the trading, upgrading and exploration are all linked, so I'm glad I was able to get one upgrade into the game, but as you might guess from the very limited UI, I didn't have time to add more upgrades as I would have liked. @deniz-aras, @zubspace and @jackaljk all mentioned a "buy/sell all" button, which would have been good in hindsight!

Thirdly, the planets. There are in fact 7 planets to visit, but they are spaced out so that you need the upgrade to get to two of them. @hneumann, @senover-games and @f1krazy found it difficult to navigate to (or even find) the planets. @3ncryp73d and @f1krazy suggested a minimap. This was something I wrestled with while planning out the solar system; 10 seconds of fuel can actually get you quite far, in terms of the number of "screen widths" you can travel in that time, so to present the challenge I had to make the planets even further apart than that with fuel collectables in between. One option is to make the ship travel more slowly and the planets closer together, but I didn't think it would feel as exciting to fly. This is the compromise I came up with: the first planet launches you "upwards" and if you keep flying in that direction, you have to deviate slightly to collect the fuel but you will eventually come across the "second" planet. On that planet the "Chat" option tells you about pressing the M key, which I implemented as a really simple camera zoom out. This enables you to at least see the planets from further away, but still get the sensation of speed when zoomed back in again (however the parallax breaks while zoomed out). When you take off from a planet, the surrounding fuel collectables are generally in directions such that, if you collect them and keep travelling in the same direction away from the planet, you'll eventually come across another collectable or planet. Towards the end of the compo I wanted to add little arrows around the edges of the screen pointing to nearby points of interest, but I ran out of time to implement them.

@douwe-ravers the parallax seems broken at larger resolutions, in that some of the stars disappear without wrapping round properly. I don't know if that's a Godot problem or just the way I'm doing things. I developed the whole game using the default window size, then only realised after deploying that the web player fills the entire browser window. @0x-void-x0 the multiple layers of stars is a technique I've been using since my early days programming QBasic - it's interesting how again and again I've been drawn towards making the same sort of spaceship flying games!

@aligator I'm glad you like the planets, I found a good tutorial on YouTube for creating them in Blender, then I could mix up the colours and the generated textures to make different ones with different atmospheres (pun unintended).

@ha1fbit you found a bug - as @mossieur-patate suspected there's a safeguard if you explode too many times; if your inventory and cash are both zero it will give you $10. However this only happens at the point at which you lose the cargo, so if you sell all your goods for $1,000 and then upgrade, you can be left with nothing. However, as @deniz-aras said, once you have the upgrade then money becomes worthless

Once again, thank you everybody for playing the game and leaving such good feedback!