itch.io

i like the textures on the fabric parts and i think there’s an interesting rhythm concept to it, but i agree with the other comments in that it’s overwhelming and hard to have much of a strategy. i would like:

• stopping moving for a second to catch breath, though maybe with a limit on how much we can do this
• some warning that a hazard is coming instead of just more fruit
• items moving past each other a bit more fluidly? the bag system in cairn looks interesting

maybe speak to zeta on the server about rhythm stuff too

adorable! it reminds me a lot of ISLANDERS, a minimal city builder where you have a limited set of building options which need to fit into constraints. it would be nice to cancel the placement of something, in case i decide to put something else down

played the first few levels but it's getting late, i hope i can continue tomorrow! i think the idea is great and the presentation, particularly the music, is fantastic. i love the contrast between the classical soundtrack and theme (atlas) contrasted against the bit-tune music, pixel graphics and crudely drawn text. i think the mechanic is neat and the puzzles clever, but could definitely use more variation and i had to skip some levels due to softlocking with physics bugs. of course, not much time for variation or bugfixing in a jam, and overall it's great, very fun idea and execution :) 

two more aspects of the battery behaviour:

- mars is very cold! surviving the night requires power to stay warm, so you will need to finish the day with some power left, and ideally this will stay out of the degradation zone or have a very rough morning

- batteries degrade anyway, no matter how well you take care of them, so every day you'll have a little less capacity even if you stay totally out of the degradation zone :)

re: tech tree and customisation, my design north star is everspace, which has a lot of incremental upgrades as well as some qualitative ones that give you entirely new abilities. my plan is to start with a basic rover (inspired by sojourner, the first mars rover) and then have incremental power, range, comms upgrades and unlock new instruments roughly in-line with the real history of mars rovers. the choices the player makes through upgrading the base rover and the choices the make on payload (many more instruments have been designed for mars than have ever flown to it, payload capacity is limited!) should give this range of experience.

i like multiple rovers as an idea (the latest mars rover had a companion helicopter which i would love to have) but i think one constraint i want to keep for my own sake is a single, linear plan. a real rover would not have to split its time between observing and downlinking, it could do both, or it could downlink and move, but managing multiple timelines in parallel makes the controls a lot more complicated for a game that already has a lot of complexity coming to it.

please i want to see more! the premise is splendid and i adore your writing style, particularly the description of the fire. i'm looking forward to meeting more characters and hearing the experience of characters who aren't so accustomed to darkness.

thanks for the feedback, the data one is not a bug i've seen anywhere before so i'll absolutely have to look into it! the energy one may be an interaction with another part of the UI, for example if the ui overlaps an observation target on the map then the event gets eaten. i am new to godot UI!

the scratched lines are actually supposed to represent a danger zone - if you drop that low, the battery degrades more quickly. real batteries are damaged if you discharge them too much (you might have heard advice to keep your smartphone between 20 and 80% or something along those lines), and this is an _extremely_ important concept for batteries on spacecraft. so, i wanted give the player the option to degrade their battery in the name of science, or play it more safely and keep the battery in good condition.

it sounds like you got an easy spawn with the locations of the observation targets, they are positioned at random so usually you have to move quite a bit. the range on the instrument currently is quite low, but i intend to have multiple instruments on the rover which do different things - one to look at things far away and get a bit of information about them, from which you can then decide if it's worth investigating more closely with a short-range instrument.

i'm definitely planning on having customisable rovers: i want to add different battery compounds, for example, different instruments (as many as possible, real rovers usually fly with a payload of ~10 instruments which are all fairly multipurpose), maybe different locomotion types? a helicopter would be cool. and different power sources - nuclear rovers can run through the night, but might have different disadvantages too. there's a lot of customisation that i can add, i am definitely planning on a tech tree.

yeah, the top left part is something i didn't have time to implement sadly xD it's one of the rover's instruments (i have so far designed three) which you use to make scientific observations. the idea is that since science is about discovering new things, you get a bonus for filling out each cell in the grid, and maybe something for filling out the whole grid by observing different kinds of targets on the surface. the grid (i'm calling it a novelty matrix) is different for each instrument, and some instruments depend on other instruments, and the later on the player will get to configure their own payload of instruments too. i put the texture in so that i don't get distracted by less important things.

i really like the paper aesthetic too! it's the first time i've tried it, but as it turns out, i massively recommend making assets by drawing them on graph paper and taking pictures with your phone. i wonder if i can carry it through to a more mature game, but i'm not sure how it'll go with a more 3d map view.

and yes, mars rovers are extremely cute.

yes, there is currently a time paradox, but don't worry, it is something i know about and designed in with the paper prototype ;) i figured it was a small bug that could be ignored for a jam submission to try and get as much else in as possible. it's a mechanic i am really keen on as it makes the timing of the downlink window really important - you might not be able to make an observation on a particular day because the downlink window is in the evening and your storage is full, which leads to questions about what you want to upgrade or whether you back up your observation data or risk losing it to a random event :3

thank you for the support! on first read i thought "your research" meant my research about rovers, but reading again i think you might actually mean flavour text when you discover stuff in the game, which i hadn't thought about yet but i think is a great idea!

thanks for playing! i'm not against a grid system on principle, but i have a few things pushing me away from one:

1) real rovers have a number of different instruments that operate at different ranges, so in my paper prototype i have 3 instruments that operate at far, middle and near distances. the near distance one depends on results from the far and middle distance instruments, which models how rovers select targets in reality - they do several passes to determine if it's worth getting up close and personal or carrying on to pursue strategic goals. cameras can investigate stuff nearby but also take pictures of the horizon, atmosphere, and other celestial bodies, while drills and microscopes are a bit more local in operation. so at this stage in the design i want to keep my options as open as possible.

2) i do actually really like 3d, and i would like to replace (or add to) the current 2d map with a 3d rendering of the rover in its environment, with some kind of LOD effect to show that stuff further away is unknown. a big inspiration of mine is also extrasolar: https://www.extrasolar.com/, which would render outputs of your rover on an alien planet. i'd definitely like to explore doing that, at least, which necessitates _some_ kind of 3d rendering.

at present there isn't really anything to help you plan, but high on my todo list is communicating the route planning to the player, so i think it's doable without a grid.

as for making the interruptions fair, i have designed 3 so far: cosmic rays will corrupt data in storage, solar flares will corrupt data in downlink and also your wheels can get stuck, negating movement until you get unstuck. the former two can be balanced by letting the player make backups of their observations, trading off storage space for security, and the latter i think will be a bit of a terrain hazard that can be mitigated by spending time up-front doing route planning. i came up with the backup idea after spending the rover's entire lifetime going after a high-value observation and getting hit by a solar flare, which felt very mean but would have been extremely gratifying had i backed it up, since the rest of my storage was full of low-value observations that i cared less about.

what i really admire about mars rovers is how they succeed as a result of careful, methodical planning and strategising, so i want that to be how the player succeeds in the game too!

the head movement is hypnotic, super super satisfying to play. the whole thing felt very clean, controls worked well and the level design was clear. i like how all the movement was telegraphed, ie you can't turn here because your arms are in the way, and the last puzzle took me a good few minutes to solve. love it :)

extremely cool, big fan of the puzzle design which didn't get old and had some real head scratchers. really wasn't expecting the boss at the end! the music worked super well, and it felt very cohesive. in the platformy level i found it a little frustrating that i couldn't walk up to a platform and jump onto it, rather i found i had to be already moving towards it and take a running jump. it would be cool if the cables hinted that they were about to be pulled out of their socket before you hear the pop sound, so that if you're quick you don't have to go back to plug it in again.

thank you for the kind words!!

tysm!! <3

i know! the most annoying thing is i actually had a fix for that (different background colours) but i don't think i saved it properly? super lame <<

thats what happens when you do audio integration with 20 minutes to go! ^^

he do

"you know octopi isn't the plural of octopus right? it's a common misconception..."

i loved it! a deep story for such a little game, a story well told and lots of pretty art to look at and music to listen to :)

AWWWW thank u so much!! <3

wholesome <3

thanks for the bug report! and glad you had fun :) i think it would be really cool to make procedural levels to keep it fresh, but of course that was way out of scope for a jam ;-;

you can use the airbrakes to corner tightly!

me too! i tried a few approaches to make the walls more slipper (physics materials, custom collision handling) but couldn't get anything that worked well within the timeframe. oh well, maybe in future developments :)

i managed to get the web one working in the end! just not through the itch client. it's fun!

i wasn't able to launch it :(

Awesome little game, excellent twists. Just need s Vsync support :)