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.
Viewing post in Asteroids: Definitive Edition jam comments
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.
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.