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A jam submission

CombinatoricaView game page

Spaceship game inspired by Combinatorics (Math)
Submitted by luizchagasjardim — 6 hours, 36 minutes before the deadline
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Combinatorica's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay#472.7942.839
Theme Interpretation#522.9212.968
Overall#522.9452.992
Originality#543.1753.226
Presentation#572.8892.935

Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

The ships feel a bit too floaty and I'm not sure I understood the screen in between rounds. I managed to get a fleet of a few ships which was nice because I already thought it was satisfying that you could mine multiple asteroids at the same time. I wish there was some goal to work towards but otherwise nice work!

Developer

Thank you. Makes sense.

Submitted(+1)

Took me a while to get the hang of it, but I think I understand it. I like the idea and the mix of an iterative/vampire-survivor-like with asteroid-like, but I feel like the balance doesn't allow enough progression.

Developer

Thank you. I agree with you.

(+1)

This could go somewhere interesting, I think, with better UI and gameplay tweaking.

The ship-building could greatly benefit from some UI refinements such as displaying a preview of the ship you're building at all times, flagging when you have a synergy or not, and allowing viewing all of the part type lists at once (rather than having to exit out to check if you have a match).

Controlling the entire fleet with one cursor was a really interesting challenge at first, but then as the lasers got longer-range and the ships got faster, "hold still in the middle" became a better strategy.

And if the combinations somehow visibly affected gameplay, that would be cool and tie it together better. (Ghostly alternate universes with ships taking different routes?)

Developer

Thank you. I agree with all your suggestions.

Submitted(+1)

I'm glad I came back and spent some more time on this one. This seems like it could be the seed of something really interesting. Here are the thoughts I had while playing:

The controls were frustrating enough, especially when piloting a fleet with ships of different speeds, that I wondered how this would be with no controls at all, as more of an idle-game experience. Or maybe with more generic controls like "stay near this point and defend" or "go over here and mine."

The laser graphics scaling were really wonky with higher power lasers, and destroying rocks that were completely off-screen wasn't great. On the same topic, waiting 10 seconds for rocks to wander onto the screen wasn't fun.

I think that the bending of the game towards the jam theme may have actually harmed gameplay a bit.

The music didn't really seem to fit.

Developer

Thank you for the feedback and thanks for coming back. It's funny that you said "bending the game towards the jam theme". It was the actually the other way around. We started with the things that fit the theme, and then added the other elements. The main game loop was one of the last things we came up with. It was going to be an idle shmup at some point, but then we came up with these wonky controls and liked them, and then we just substituted asteroids for the enemies, otherwise it would be too hard.

The scaling is a problem. We didn't have too much time to balance it well, so the game is too hard at the beginning for some people, and then becomes very easy once you have a lot of parts. I agree that making it an idle game would have made this problem go away.

Submitted(+1)

Great game, had a lot of fun picking out parts for my ships just to watch them fly into an asteroid haha. I think the mining laser effect is really cool, and trying to keep a whole fleet of ships under control is a lot of fun. The background music is very fitting, though I feel like the game would benefit a lot from some laser and explosion sound effects and maybe some particle effects as the asteroids break apart.

Developer(+1)

Thanks a lot. Sound effects and some graphics improvements were on our todo list, but it was so priority so we never got to it.