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GMTK Game Jam 2020

Hosted by Game Maker's Toolkit · #gmtkjam

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A jam submission

Asteroids: Definitive EditionView game page

You are navigating a broken ship through an asteroid field.

Submitted by visborne — 13 minutes, 26 seconds before the deadline

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Play Perfect Work of Art

Asteroids: Definitive Edition's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Overall	#1624	3.083	3.083
Fun	#1632	2.958	2.958
Originality	#2224	3.000	3.000
Presentation	#2595	2.792	2.792

Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
You are flying a broken ship, that is "Out of Control", you do not have control over all of the systems. You can repair the ship, but you can only have two repairs at a time. DO NOT PLAY IN FULLSCREEN

Did your team create the art for this game during the 48 hour time slot?

Yes

We created all art during the game jam

Did your team create the audio for this game during the 48 hour time slot?

No

We used pre-existing audio

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Comments

dekatria3 years ago(+1)

Overall one of the most fun games I have played this game jam.

This game has a very classic visual and good pairing of music and sound.

I love the overall idea and most of the execution.

But,

- The game really needs a better way of conveying the core controls of the game. The game would be a huge turn off for anyone not patient enough to randomly try keys until something worked, you will lose a lot of player numbers because people might think it is a broken game. A simple comment with the control keys on the main game page would go a long way!

- The upgrades in this game are unbalanced as heck, most of the upgrades are worst than the meteors. I think more thought could have been placed into making more meaningful upgrade paths, ones that would make the player weigh the pros and cons of each upgrade, rather than feel scornful at getting the ability to recede backwards away from the objective. I feel this point is important, because, eventhough I found this game fun, would I have chose this game over any rip off of galaga with only various gun upgrades? I think the answer would be a resounding No

visborneDeveloper3 years ago

Thank you for your feedback.

I added the controls to the game description and as soon as the ratings are over I am going to add support for arrow keys and Dvorak, and other keyboard layouts for languages which don't use "w" or Latin letters.

I definitely agree that the repairs are not properly balanced, especially the retro-thrusters as you mentioned. I have actually already addressed this exact issue in both the game description and other comments. The weaker repairs are the results of features which were unable to be implemented in the 48 hour deadline and other changing features such as enemy ships, obstacles fit for the retro-thrusters and how the sensors and life-support ended up working. Persegan noted that the weaker repairs resulted in another interesting, albeit unintentional, game mechanic where you are not only avoiding asteroids but bad repairs. This is actually the reason I still kept the upgrades in despite the missing features. As fun as this is I still think it is unfair to have unbalanced upgrades and wholeheartedly agree with you.

I might get around to finishing this game and making it an infinite runner after the ratings (although to be fair there is nothing stopping me from starting development rn) but I have recently begun experimenting with ray-tracing in the browser so I might not find the time. However, I'll definitely keep your suggestions in mind.

PerseganSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Took me a little bit to understand how the game worked, but once I did it was fun! Some of the upgrades seemed much better to have than others, which combined with the small fov ahead created this interesting dynamic where you not only want to move to avoid asteroids but also be wary of overriding upgrades you have for ones you don't want, and making choices about the upgrades on the fly due to the time limit. An interesting experience!

Submitted

Super Raccball Galaxy

visborneDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Yeah, I definitely recognize there is room for improvement in the readability department. As for the small fov forcing you to pick up other upgrades, that was entirely unintended but it ended up working really well so I kept it in. All the upgrades were supposed to have equal value but the gameplay changed alot during development so it was hard to anticipate this, there are some more details about this in the games description if you are interested. Thank you for your comment, I appreciate it.

cpiodSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

I came for the Swordfish II, I stayed for the gameplay. But my keyboard don't use WASD and since you don't support the arrows keys, it was difficult to play :/

Anyway, there is clearly the potential for a great game :)

Submitted

That day my dog flew a spaceship

visborneDeveloper3 years ago

I'll be honest I had no idea my artist snuck in a Cowboy Bebop reference until your comment. Thanks for your comment. I hadn't considered other keyboard layouts. I had actually written my input system to allow for adding arrow key support easily, but I overlooked it. I'll be sure to add it next time around. I can probably slip it in a quick update once the ratings are over.

cpiodSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

I will probably test it again with the new controls! Thanks :)

dekatria3 years ago(+2)

As a dvorak user, I can sympathize

Ezra MasonSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Interesting game, i didnt realize you have to go forwards the first time i played it but once i figured it out i had a nice time playing it

visborneDeveloper3 years ago

Thank you very much. Yeah, that issue came up in play testing and I tried fixing it with the opening dialog in the beginning ("You must escape the asteroid field ahead"), but I didn't have time to come up with a better solution on how to communicate that to the player. Thank you for your feedback. Your game is pretty cool too, I rated it.

rcortes3 years ago(+1)

Best one I've played yet. There are so many interesting combos to try out in this game, my personal favorite being sideways movement + sensors where you can just swerve around the asteroids at full speed.

visborneDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Thank you so much! From what I've heard some people found it too difficult. Was this the case for you? If it was: Life Support is necessary to beat the game and repairs 5, 15, and 25 are guaranteed to be Life Support.

rcortes3 years ago(+1)

It was challenging, sure, but fun enough for me to keep trying until the end.

A few pointers and ideas now that I've thought about it a bit more:

Asteroids collide with the edge of the screen which is a problem when the player is approaching the edge and an asteroid gets caught in between. When this happens it'll just bounce around a bunch taking way too much health off the player; instead it should just fly off.
I've heard complaints about the default sensor range being too short but I think extending it would negate the usefulness of the sensor kit. Maybe instead, use a radial fog of war around the player which could be a bit more generous than the current forward sensor range. That way you add the extra challenge of not seeing your sides while still making the forward range a bit more reasonable without making the sensor kit useless.
I like the idea of the life support, but I'm not so sure about it only ever pausing the timer rather than topping it up. Though this adds to the challenge, I feel like it eventually forces the player to give up one of their kits for life support no matter how fast they are, which effectively reduces the player's kit capacity to 1 as the O2 kit doesn't really add anything gameplay-wise. Perhaps instead, they could work as their own pickup where the player temporarily loses access to their current kits for say 5 seconds in exchange for a top up of like 20 seconds of O2. That way they're not just freebies but they have their own risk vs reward balance. It also prevents 'safe' strategies where the player is just inching along cause they know they have unlimited time.
If you do want to take the game further, you could add more hazards and weapon types to expand the range of repair kits you can pick up (as well as increasing your capacity to maybe 3 to allow for more combos).

I don't expect you to agree with all these points, but just some thoughts for where you could take it if you decide to keep working on it. There is definitely a lot of promise here.

visborneDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Thank you for such a comprehensive list.

For me, it is important that asteroids collide with the side of the screen. In addition to that asteroids are spawned above the player and the walls force them to come down. There is another problem with the collision, the issue you described also happens when the player collides with an asteroid which is right next to another asteroid. In an earlier version of the game asteroids would actually break when colliding with the player, but I removed it because I was planning on adding a breaking animation which I never got around to. If I re-implemented that it should solve both issues
Radial fog-of-war is a bit difficult to implement because I am using pretty limited libraries (I hate using game engines and libraries so I always end up implementing everything myself, I wrote all the physics and model management for this jam myself). It is a similar suggestion to how the sensors were originally supposed to work, that being zoomed into the player if you didn't have them (this didn't work because the lack of steering by default made the game very unfair since you were always moving in a direction you could not see). I think it is probably best to move the UI elements around at the top and experiment a bit with how much you can see ahead. Maybe change the dimensions of the game border to be more vertical.
Originally Life-Support was meant to be a top-up, but I felt that might screw the player if the counter went to low and they picked up and upgrade that removed Life-support. Your idea fixes this. I actually prefer it to the current implementation in terms of functionality, but I feel it loses out in accessibility. It would be hard to communicate this information to the player, and it would be an exception to how the repairs normally work which may make people less inclined to experiment picking new things up. I'm thinking of making this an endless runner, maybe while you have life-support your timer grows by 1 second every two seconds (or some other rate), so it keeps the time stress and allows for an infinite run.
Originally it was 3 repairs, but play testing always ended with Shields + Steering + Sensors, it was further limited to promote creativity and strategy. Definitely more hazards were planned to be in the game, like alien ships that shoot at you and non-moving walls which incinerate you and the asteroids (which would serve a dual-purpose, as an obstacle and refuge). The planned walls were the reason retro-thrusters are in the game, they would make it much easier to navigate around walls. More weapon types are a good idea though I, again, am unsure how to communicate the information to the player.

Thank you so much for your time and interest.

Cringe Master 64Submitted3 years ago(+1)

I really enjoyed the game and i rated it, btw if you can try out my game and rate it that would mean a lot :)

visborneDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Hi. I was really excited to see your comment and I went to checkout your game. However, I realized that you had actually copy and pasted this message on several other games. I still played your game and rated it, but others might not. I fully trust that you did realy enjoy my game and the others, so that is why I still played and rated it. I just want to say I don't doubt your intentions but if you made your responses for each game more personal you would get a larger chance of people playing your game.

Cringe Master 64Submitted3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Ok thanks for the feedback :)

AtomicRoboticsSubmitted3 years ago(+2)

I got very frustrated after always dying to asteroids that i wasn't able to see...
Know that that is my only qualm with this game.
I enjoyed everything else.

Submitted

visborneDeveloper3 years ago

The limited range was very intentional. However, I probably would have spent more time tweaking the range had I more time for playtesting. Thank you very much for this feedback. I know that first sentence sounds a bit "brush-offy" but I really enjoyed your feedback. Thank You

visborneDeveloper3 years ago

I realize now that you may be referring to the Health and Repair status covering up the precious bit at the top of the screen. Yeah, I had considered there effects on gameplay but it wasn't too much of an issue for me myself so it was low on the priority list of polishes. In the final polishing stages this and some other things were over looked (for example the timer for 1 minute and 5 seconds says 1:5 instead of 1:05). Definitely if I had more time I would have gotten around to experimenting with the UI. Thank you for your feedback.

Dylan_Bee3 years ago(+1)

I love the concept! Only having access to certain functions of your ship at a time is an interesting twist to the top-down shooter genre. Being restricted to just two repairs at a time adds a strategic element to it. You also nailed the "out of control" feeling, but you were able tackle it in a way that was interesting and doesn't leave the player frustrated.

It's quite challenging! I haven't been able to win yet, but I'm gonna give it another try later. Steering and Shield seem to be the most useful combo in my experience. It would be Steering and Targeting if I didn't have such bad aim lol.

Thanks for submitting!

visborneDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Thank you so much! I have only been able to beat the game twice so far. But it is definitely possible. In my experience I beat it using Shields and LifeSupport or Sensors and Life Support in the late game.