Thank you for playing!
You’re absolutely right, that is not very clear from the in-game tutorial.
I’ve updated the tutorial on this page to (hopefully) reflect this mechanic~
I didn’t expect much based on the game image and no screenshots, but this game was surprisingly enjoyable!
I found that having the 10 second time limit meant I took way different descent decisions than I otherwise would; no time for safe maneuvers :D
Sometimes the landing pads are barely visible on the start screen, making the first second or two very frantic compared to the descent. I’m not sure if this was intentional.
I got to the dark levels, but didn’t manage to complete all of them.
All in all, a simple and effective implementation of Lunar Lander, good job!
Very polished pong, awesome!
Having all these settings in the menu is really cool (especially remapping controls)!
The game is pong, but somewhat juicier and very smooth, great!
I think either making the camera static, or zooming out the camera enough so the camera always renders the entire board would make the game even more playable.
The powerups are cool. Having them there in the first place really spices up the classic gameplay and makes aiming that much more important. I would have loved to see more, and more game-changing power-ups as well.
(Note: I’m not actually very good at pong~ :)
Very simple yet polished game. I quite enjoy spot-the-difference, so this was right up my alley :3
I would have liked to see more difficult pairs, and the limitation wasn’t super obvious until I deliberately failed a pair.
The art is incredibly cute, and the atmosphere of the game is super chill, well done!
Overall, a consistently pleasant experience~!
Thank you for playing our game~!
You’re right, the static background means your velocity relative to the ground is very hard to discern. We had some small dust particles near the ship, but those easily get lost in the hectic gameplay.
Based on your feedback, there’s now much more and larger particles that give a “feel” for how fast you’re moving relative to the surroundings.
Thank you very much for your feedback!
TL;DR
splore
is manual/opt-in, and never default or automaticAs aloeheart pointed out:
That person is actually wrong about that. Games in splore are put there manually by their creators. You can export your pico 8 game in a binary format that both does not require pico-8 to play and doesn’t show the source code.
That is to say, all carts you make can be exported to run standalone.
They’re also kept off of splore
, unless you explicitly and deliberately publish them on the BBS.
Hehe, the different systems (weather, atmosphere, etc.) sadly aren’t tied together as tightly as we wanted them to be - a number of parameters are more or less random 😅
As for running out of fuel and scooping stars - we regrettably don’t have anything in the game to indicate it, but the yellow band around the star has the best fuel-to-hull-damage ratio, so the most hull-effective way of scooping fuel is to just pass through parts of the yellow band and then let the trajectory pull you away from the star again~
I’ve added a hints section to the game page based on your feedback, thank you! And thank you for playing~!
Very happy you like the audio, spent a lot of time on it~
The controls, while fairly consistent, are not quite intuitive enough to work without a tutorial. On the very last day we managed to get in the little instructional splash screens before each “action” segment of the game, but that alone hasn’t been enough to avoid confusion 😅
Thank you for playing~!
Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm glad you like the art style, it's kind of half the tech in the game :p
As for the dot-stars, technically you are visiting individual stars that dot the sky, but there's some trickery going on with separate scales for solar systems and the starfield as a whole. With a different interface, you would certainly be able to visit any one of those dots and get a unique and deterministic solar system :)
I render 8×8×8 "blocks" or octants each with 4096 stars;
An octant is given a seed based on its integer position in the galaxy (one octant unit = 256 unity units).
This octant seed is then used to hash out three coordinates for each of the 4096 stars, roughly like
pos = uint3(hash(i*3+0,seed), hash(i*3+1,seed), hash(i*3+2,seed))
The hash functions at the core of the game all support seeds for the hash as well, meaning each seed gives you another 4 billion hash values. It's not the highest quality hash, but certainly higher quality than causing any visible structure to the starfield generation~
Each dot-star's position is then used in a 3D hash function in the same fashion to generate each solar system as you travel to that star.
The 8×8×8 grid of octants each have positions and vertices ranging from (0,0,0) to (1,1,1), and I simply scale the entire starfield by 256 at the end to throw the stars faaar away.
Finally, the entire starfield is kinda parented to the player in such a way that when the player moves right, the starfield moves with them - avoiding the parallax that would give away their real distance of maybe a few dozen metres.
(Note: the 1D hash function's seed parameter is not exactly great, so if I don't vary the value as well, structure will emerge. The 3D hash function is great with any seed and any value, though :)Thank you for playing the game, I'm glad you liked it :D
Yeah, making solar system flight also align the ship was a stretch goal I didn't get around to, sadly - as for the clipping through planets and stars, that's ... hard to fix so I'd probably just hide it with some visual warp tunnel effect instead :p
Maybe I was doing something wrong, but the horizontal velocity gets zeroed when I change the gravity so I ended up getting stuck - probably just couldn't figure out the puzzle owo~
Either way, what I did see of the game was really neat, the dialogue is quite cute, and the idea of flipping gravity reminds me of one of my all-time favourite games, VVVVVV
Also cat yay >:3c
First off, music is immediately banger, great job on that~! Also main menu is super polished and the fact that you have one with settings is awesome!
I don't think I'd call the game a bullet hell though, it feels more like a shoot-em-up, I'm not quite sure why - maybe because there aren't that many bullets and they don't go off in all directions?
The screenshake is really neat, like quite subtle for small things yet with the potential for more shake, I like that~
There is so much to like about this game, the varied enemies and shots (bombs etc.), the funny death messages, the unknown cheat code entering~ very well done.
One thing I noticed is, there is never a reason not to shoot, so binding it to a button that functionally should be held at all times is kinda tedious. You could either always fire and not use a button for it, or have firing not be the optimal strategy all the time - like slowing you down while you're firing, or something like that~
All in all, a really solid entry - thank you for sharing this with the world :)
I see! That's really awesome - I've been working myself on making ECS/DOTS (with Jobs and Burst) work in WebGL, which was an ordeal especially because the Hybrid Renderer does not yet support WebGL so I'm using Companion GameObjects for now (with all logic applied to entities and just the transform of the GameObject synced every frame).
There were a few other gotchas if you're interested, but at this point your approach seems way more feasible (also for not using preview packages~) Good work, thank you for sharing~!
It's a very hard game, probably could have used a bit more telegraphing or zooming out so you can see stuff before it hits you. Quite punishing to be sent back to level 1, too :p
As well, some of the sprites seem to have linear filtering instead of nearest neighbour filtering, making the pixel art blurry~.
Nevertheless, the game works well enough and the core gameplay loop is functional. Thank you for submitting~!
A decent idea for a jam game, and congratulations on your first successful Mini Jam submission~!
There are a few janky behaviours with the movement controller, as I'm sure you're aware, and I did end up getting cornered by a crow and having to quit the game~.
Overall, though, the game is a good entry for the jam, thank you for submitting :)
Very enjoyable and pleasing to play. The refuel scene is a really neat touch, and reminds me of Solar Jetman for the NES. The astronaut sprite is also really cute~!
I personally have gripes with linearly interpolated pixel art, so I would've preferred nearest neighbour scaling for the sprites, but that's not a big issue :)