You guys, a good feature for the website would be for game developers to be able to reply to comments on their games. It helps to say thanks and clarify things. I love that people play my games and I’d love even more to be able to tell them personally. This is the only way to do it currently.

C418: Brilliant. Shame I couldn’t get the Spacestation into my little space ship

I lolled. Thanks.

eli: The lonely, introspective feel is really great. Artwork is excellent, the music is cute. However, the back-and-forth mechanic was a bit tiresome for me. Overall effort: 5 stars at least.

Thanks for the comment. Music is cute? That’s different! The back and forth mechanic was kind of on purpose, the idea was that the game was forcing you to travel further to get more valuable items so you could upgrade your ship and make getting even further than that more viable. I wanted to have things to shoot, like space pirates but I never got round to it, so I would have added more mechanics eventually.

SonnyBone:This game looks REALLY NICE in motion. The pictures don’t do it justice. The game is very relaxing, which is what I think of when I hear: EXPLORATION. Everything works well together. For a 48 hour game this is incredibly polished, as others have said. NICE!

This LD I made a very conscious decision to polish things as much as possible as I went along, assuming it was viable in the time. It only takes a few lines of code for me to make something popout or fade, or highlight etc. It seemed worth it as it enhances the overall feel of the game. It seemed to pay off. (Thanks for the trophy recursor!)

refrag: Beautiful. A simple premise, beautifully executed. Well done!

Thanks! My initial idea wasn’t simple. Infact the debris sucking up and upgradinfg thing was meant to be a side thing that you could do in addition to the main game, but as time went on I decided to shift my focus to it.

madk: Good and well-executed concept, and it’s a relaxing game. However, more variation of gameplay would be nice. I got bored of just riding around and absorbing debris after a short while; some sort of enemies would be a good addition.

Go further.

Codexus: Nice little game with a good ambiance soundtrack. I would have appreciated the option to play in windowed mode, playing low-res games on a 30″ monitor isn’t too great. (with distorted aspect ratio too due a nvidia bug :/)

Jees, it’s ludum dare! What more do you want from me?! Hehe. Really this comment confuses me, how many LD games let you decide to play it windowed or fullscreen. I felt having it in a window would ruin the insular feeling  of the game.

TenjouUtena: Great game! Full of fun stuff to do, fun places to go! Great to play, will probably pick it back up after the compo.

Thanks! With luck I will too.

ExciteMike: I love the atmosphere! I played for a long time before I got down to the enemies. Form some of the other comments it sounds like many never made it that far. Two biggest problems: 1. Hold meter catches up too slowly, it looks like I still have room when I filled it, it just doesn’t show it yet. 2. The enemies were killing me before I even got to see what was shooting at me, and it’s really not easy to dodge so that’s where I stopped.

You’re not the first person to make that comment about the hold meter, I noticed it upon extended plays after the 48 hours too. I know how to fix it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. As for the enemies they are kind of meant to stop you going down there since it’s where the most valuable items are, I appreciate that their range is perhaps a little on the long side though. If you hear the pew sound then just run, you can outrun the lasers easily!

Arne: I like this. I think I’m going to write a clone, if that’s ok.

Uh, that’s a bizarre comment. Okay, I guess.

recursor: Wow. This game has an impressive amount of polish for a 48 hour creation, and it is quite fun. This is one of my favorites so far. I hope you do even more with it.

Thank yoooou! With luck I will!

localcoder A couple of things almost stopped me getting into this game. First, I pressed escape to get out of the inventory screen and the game quit.

Then on my second attempt, I collected junk because that’s what I thought you were meant to do, and when I sold it and got no money I thought the game was bugged.

But once I worked out what was going on, I really enjoyed the game. I love the creative items, both the funny ones and others that suggest the story of the destroyed fleet.

The variety keeps the game interesting and I wanted to keep exploring to find bigger and better treasures. The surprise hostilities at the end were great too. The only disappointing thing is that there is no ending, so once I had all the upgrades I was left with no reason to use them.

Yeah the escape thing is silly. I’ll mentally put that aside. Even though I had time to have a start screen, a quit screen never occurred to me.

The not really knowing what to do aspect was definitely part of the design. I intentionally didn’t say much about the game (if you notice I don’t say that you can even tractor with the mouse button, you just sort of discover these things). To keep with the theme as much as possible I wanted to make the game mechanics themselves explorable as well as the playing field.

Once you twig that the further you go in the more items are worth you end up all “Oh alright it’s on now.” and try to get to the end of the field, about half way you run into a mine and don’t know what the hell. Putting the turrets right at the end was definitely the right decision I think, the shock when they first blast you apart after there’s been nothing like it for the whole game is cool I think. Discovery and exploration go hand-in-hand.

Yes there’s no ending, I had big plans but time and all. Thanks for the nice comments!

And thanks very much to anyone who has played it but not commented!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.