I enjoyed this! Shooting the different colors was a nice touch to the asteroid gameplay. And the trail changing color was cool. Eventually asteroids stopped spawning though :( I really liked how fast your ship shoots in this. That's my least favorite thing about original asteroids. Nice job!!
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Asteron's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun Factor | #45 | 1.764 | 2.375 |
| Gameplay | #45 | 1.764 | 2.375 |
| Visuals | #46 | 1.857 | 2.500 |
| Music + SFX | #47 | 0.836 | 1.125 |
| Creativity + Theme | #48 | 1.393 | 1.875 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Not quite sure what I did wrong, but every playthrough, I'd destroy the first few asteroids (~3 or 4 of them) and then the game would stop spawning any more. This could've been intended, as a riff on permanence, as you permanently have no more asteroids lol, not sure.
I used Shift to reset 5 or 6 times and the same thing occurred. If I'm just missing something, please let me know, I'd love to give your game a fair shake!
If this doesn't happen to most players, I am that weird dude who actually uses Radeon GPUs which (for some god-forsaken reason) seem to produce completely unique Unity bugs that don't show up on Nvidia systems, so maybe it's just that. Either way, let me know :)
Submitted
Permanent MarkerThank you for your feedback. You didn't do anything wrong. The game doesn't spawn any new asteroids when the player destroys the first ones. At least not yet. When I wrote the description for the game I wrote something like use Shift for reset. Perhaps I should have used the word replay or something like that. That reset (or replay) is just a quick fix because I didn't have the time to make the game ready.
I would like to mention that in my opinion if the player gets confused by something when playing the game it's not the player's fault. It's a flaw in design. In this case the game is not ready yet. There are many things to add or fix. Right now I don't have the chance to make the game ready but perhaps in a few months time things are different, let's see.
I appreciate that you take criticism in stride, as a dev that’s one of the best skills to have. I’ll give the game another shot, using the replay feature to keep it going. I totally missed that the first time. I blame itch partially for not showing the description of games in any capacity on the jam page and allowing a direct download.
I somewhat agree with your opinion on who’s fault player confusion is generally, but I think there is a certain slack we need to give ourselves in the context of a game jam. Getting a working product up onto itch in time is hard enough, so including a tutorial, or making the controls 100% self explanatory is something we just can’t expect to be in-scope every time. Especially when some non-jam titles are guilty of that. I hope we cross paths again in a future jam, or if you make a full version of this game :)
The trail effect was nice, smart move having that be an indicator of what you're shooting instead of relying on player trial and error or a bit of text. Can't go wrong with Asteroids! If the starting positions of the asteroids are random, you could set the game to auto-restart when they are cleared to make the illusion of a "next level". Keep it up!
Submitted
A Fish Too FarI really liked the idea that you had to change colors to shoot the asteroids! Added a nice twist to the classic gameplay.
Submitted
Produce PlazaInteresting take on a classic game, the idea of making some obstacles permanent and others destructible is a neat twist. Well done!
Submitted
Shrine of CardsThat trail behind your spaceship is so cool-looking. The classic asteroids look is really sharp with a few splashes of color!
I'm not sure if the game resets correctly - the previous asteroids stayed on-screen after restarting, soft-locking the player under certain conditions. Was this intentional? I also managed to get 2 player ships on-screen at once by rapidly restarting!
Submitted
Bounty of the Pumpkin PlanetThank you for your comments and feedback. You are right about the reset feature. There is at least one bug in that feature. I noticed the twin ship bug but didn't look in to it further. Also it would probably be a better idea to clear out the old asteroids when resetting.
The reason for including reset in the first place was to give control to the player when something goes wrong or when all asteroids cleared. There's a zone outside the camera view where the rocks and the ship can fly. The objects can sometimes get stuck in that zone and this is a problem especially if it's the ship that gets stuck; there's no way the player can get back in control. So instead of trying to figure out in code when the asteroids or the ship lose themselves in that zone I figured a better solution would be to give the power of control to the player.
The problem was that this feature was the last one I added. Time was running out and it was after 2 am anyway so I didn't test the feature properly but went to bed instead :)
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