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A jam submission

Wowie Jam! Uncontrollable SpaceshipView game page

Submitted by eric81766 (@eric81766) — 3 hours, 18 minutes before the deadline
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Wowie Jam! Uncontrollable Spaceship's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Visuals#322.5343.400
Creativity#372.6833.600
Simplicity#382.8323.800
Fun#431.6402.200
Sound#441.4912.000
Topic#471.7892.400
WOWIE!#481.4912.000

Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

I can't see the ships because of some reason. My screen has an aspect ratio of 16:9 (1080p), I am not sure if it is the aspect ratio or the resolution or something else. Maybe you can upload a browser version. Here is a screenshot from my screen.


Developer

Hi Mika - thanks for checking out my game. I'm sorry you're having a problem with it. 

Here's what I think is happening because I had a similar problem showing it to my friend on his laptop:

My friend has a laptop with a 14" 1920x1080 display. Under Windows Settings - Display , it says "125% (Recommended)"
This makes the default text size large enough to read - especially as one gets older.
His screen had the same effect yours has -- the game is so magnified that the yellow lines that make the border of the playfield aren't visible. And the player's ships are off screen.

I was able to make the game playable on his laptop by going into the Windows Display Settings and changing it so that it is 100%. 
This allowed the game to use the screen properly and be full screen.

After playing the game, I went back to his Display Setting and changed them back to 125% because without that the text is too unreadably tiny.

Let me know if this helps you. I've posted below a screenshot of my Windows Display Settings with the Scale and layout section circled. That's where I'd think the problem lies.


On my laptop (low power Pentium CPU and probably state-of-the-art a decade ago) the browser version ran at about 3 frames per second and was completely unplayable. I didn't have any way to playtest it on a better PC, so I figured it was better to just make it a software download. I also ran into problems trying to make a Godot-based game show as full screen when uploaded to itch.io. Those may be technical problems I can address in the future, but not within the limits of the game jam because I didn't have enough time to research them.


This is my display settings which has 100% as the recommended setting.
I think that's because I have a 1600x900 screen that's 17" so text on my screen is usually pretty readable.

Submitted

Oh yes thank, that did the trick. The ship were a bit to uncontrollable and it was to hard to move to the checkpoints. I also got stuck in one of the triangle obstacles. Maybe you can make it more of a move from A to B game and definitely think about the controls of the ship.

Developer

I'm glad I happened to know what the video size problem was. I suspect that's something to watch for now that that's a built-in Windows option that changes how games interact with the display.

Yes, that is a common comment "TOO uncontrollable". 

The physics test I did to learn Godot where I had an "Uncontrollable Spaceship" was a lot more controllable than this contest entry.

As I have stated before - I lacked the time for fine-tuning the game jam entry and all the interactions of mass of the ship, amount of gravity, objects on the playfield, playfield design, etc made this MUCH less controllable than the physics test version.

Below is what I had before the Wowie Jam! (the version seen in the video I posted to Jonas's response) -- but I started with a blank slate for the jam because I have learned a lot more about Godot since then. Unfortunately some aspects of the tuning which were correct (by luck) in that version, I was unable to match in the game jam version    

In this earlier version I didn't even have the hand grenades - if you play carefully and avoid letting yourself get turned upside down then everything is slow enough that you can calculate how to get yourself to bump into the things you need to go any direction you want to. (The ESC resets the sandbox if you do get stuck.)

I guess that's a bit of the negative part of a game jam -- when you know that you could have made it much better if you didn't need sleep so badly. 

I will definitely watch for this as I develop the game further -- spending time tuning it so that the player is better able to control the ship is important. It should be uncontrollable, but not THAT uncontrollable. 

https://uncontrollablespaceship.itch.io/003-sandbox-to-test-racing-2-players

Submitted

I liked the game... But the spaceships are a litle bit uncontrollable... If you add more levels it would be very cool

Developer

Thank you. The ships are too uncontrollable right now - but I think that's a matter of tuning some of the gravity/bounce/thrust factors and taking the time to make a playable game level. The first demo I made of this I had tuned better, but I started off fresh for the game jam since I didn't know Godot at all when I first came up with the idea. See also my reply to Jonas for more on the tuning. 

There will be more levels - and they'll be much better set up to allow the player to use bouncing into objects to control their direction.

HostSubmitted

Lol. Funny idea and probably pretty fun to play with a friend. :D

Maybee the spaceshipts are sliiiightly too uncontrollable, though. They spend 80% of the time lying on the ground unable to get up... I assume that is mostly down to the shape of the spaceshipt. This game would work a lot better with round space ships in my opinion!

Still good job! It's quite funny!

Developer

Thank you. 

The round ships is an interesting idea for a workaround.

I think the big problem with controlling the ship  is that I didn't have time to tune all the parameters of gravity and thrust and such and the biggest thing is I didn't have time to make a good level since there were way too many things I had to learn how to do in order to make it all work.

I started coding this all fresh because I didn't know Godot at all when I made the first demo and there were all kinds of flaws in it. However, I did have the first demo tuned better and I had a better playfield design -- in the video I made for it you can see how the objects are placed so that the player can use them to turn themselves around and get where they want to go.  Just "hook" the "elbow" of the ship on a small square and use it to rotate the ship. Also the original demo everything seems to move slower, which gives the player more time to consider exactly when to thrust.

In the original one I made (in this video below) I didn't even have the hand-grenade thing because it was easier to carefully pilot and not get stuck. You can see me playing the SLASH ship and navigating all around the screen and then coming in for a nice landing. 

I will be developing this game further and making better playfields and tuning it so that the player feels like their piloting decisions matter and they're not just flopping on the ground all the time.

Thank you for this game jam.
I made the demo in the video because I figured I'd learn Godot better if I tried to MAKE something rather than trying to learn how to use it by watching videos. But to finish the game jam entry I had to really keep DOING things so now I actually know that to add another object I create the node for the object, add a sprite to it, then add a collision node to it. I can do that rapidly now whereas before I had to reread the directions each time I wanted to add something. The game jam helped a lot with getting me to internalize all those steps.