Play game
Solar Crew's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Sounds and Music | #3 | 4.077 | 4.077 |
| Theme | #33 | 4.077 | 4.077 |
| Visuals | #36 | 3.846 | 3.846 |
| Overall | #67 | 3.308 | 3.308 |
| The Experience | #67 | 3.077 | 3.077 |
| Innovation | #85 | 2.923 | 2.923 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Finally found time to play your game.
Let's come to the good parts first. The music and sound effects are very good. Also the foreground graphics are nice and the theme is clearly met. I love the dialog, especially that they are different when planets die in level 2.
Now a little bit about the negativ stuff. The background graphic (this galaxy cloud or what it should be) doesn't really fit with the foreground graphics. I guess these graphics where done by different people.
The control is clear, but selecting the correct planet is really hard, at least it was for me. Maybe you could give one of the violett planets a different color and also make the orbit in the color of the planet. This could help. Changing orbit speed is slow, but I guess this is wanted to increase the challenging aspect.
Some asteroid hits in level 2 are not registered. So a planet is hit, but doesn't take dmg. This should be a bug in the code somewhere.
But, overall a nice game. Don't be fooled by the big negative part, your rating is on the better side ;)
Just one thing at the end. You were a group of 4 who worked on this project. I don't know how much time you invested or how your experience in game design is, but for my sense, you could have done more. At the end it is just 2 levels with a quite basic mechanic.
Thanks for the feedback ^_^
Well, mostly it was all about the time limit. We started on monday (with five days till the deadline), and the artist who made characters and their animations only had like one hour in the evening after the day job, and most of the work she did on the night before the deadline :) So different orbits for each character - yea, I wanted that, we didn't have time. Maybe after the jam scoring is over I'll just turn the sprite black-n-white and set the color in the editor, we'll see :)
Four days of coding for me (and one day of making music) - not sure I could've done more. There's lots of little stuff that could've been added - different character portraits for the dialogue, more dialogue variants, but in the end it all had to be cut... I'm not a professional programmer (yet?), maybe I work too slow, i dunno :)
Changing orbit speed is slow - yes, I wanted the player to feel that it's a PLANET. Even if it's little, it still should be slow and have some momentum. And yes, it helps keep the challenge.
Background and foreground graphics were indeed done by different people. We're not a professional game making studio so no art director who coulde've made sure all the art is consistent and done in one style throughout. And the 'girl' planets do have a kinda similar color palette :)
'Some asteroid hits in level 2 are not registered. So a planet is hit, but doesn't take dmg.' Umm... Are you sure? Because I've never encountered that, but there's another thing which may lead you to think that planets sometimes don't lose HP. A planet has a max of 4 hp. When its hp is more than 2, this excess hp is represented as a coloured aura around the planet. And there's a bug (and it should be fixed, I agree, I'll look into it after the jam scoring is over), which makes this aura shine bright and start slowly dimming only some time after the damage is registered. Like it has 4 hp, it got hit, and you don't see any difference right away, but the aura will change in a couple of seconds.
nice sound and voices.
feel free to try-out and rate my game.
https://itch.io/jam/blackthornprodgamejam2/rate/379449
Kris
That was a really cool one, The graphics were really good(with an exception for the main menu but ill let that slide), the music and sound of your game was really cool too, the gameplay was nice though it was kinda annoying how slow it was changing the planet's direction and it also was annoying when a planet died and you could still select it. But the important thing here was the characters and story, and OH BOY did you made it good, i really liked how every planethas a little personality and the multiple endings really increase on the replayability of the game. Basically i really liked this one wanna see what you guys come with 4/5
Congrats, well done.
I really liked the art style, it looks like HQ.
In the climax the guitar shone.
The interaction between the character was well made.
It's hard to protect Sugar =´[
In which language is the voice?
Cheers!
Thanks for the feedback :)
The language is
simlishjust some abstract gibberish :)The level of polish is quite impressive for a jam game.
In addition to the visuals and sounds, nice job playing around with archetypes for the planets' characterization without making them annoying.
The difficulty was also just right, almost forcing players to sacrifice planets on their first try, while making it quite feasible to make it unscathed on subsequent playthroughs.
Did you consider including further levels mixing both comets and asteroids ? At first I thought the game was hinting at it, but with the (well-executed) focus on narration, I'm not sure it was your intention after all.
Anyway, very nicely done.
Thank you for the feedback, I'm really glad you've liked it :)
I initially wanted to add one small episode for the epilogue (mostly just another dialogue), and make additional emotions for the planets, but we had to cut it, since we didn't have the time to make neither the coding part, nor the characters' animations for it. But further levels - no, I just wanted to make a small jam game and try my hand at some narrative stuff :)
ooo I really enjoyed this game :) ! Well done !
The visuals were awesome and really cute, each planet had so much personality !
I think my favorite thing was the dialog, and the way each character was voice acted in a super cool way (it made me think of the npcs in Hollow Knight). And of course the music was spot on ! Keep it up !
Thank you! Really appreciate it ^_^
Why is this so good I gave it 5 starts in like everything but two things. Game is a little too hard and the planets don't control very nicely but judging by the games I have checked thus far - This one deserves to win.
Thank you very much :)
Well, as I've said in one of the other answers to the comments, it does seem really difficult when you play it for the first time. It's not though, you can totally make everyone survive. After you get used to the controls and give it a couple of tries, of course. In my first iteration of the concept I wanted to make the game even more difficult, or introduce some cheating move or something, so that getting the good ending would be impossible. I wanted the game to make the person playing it feel something, experience some emotion, and if everyone survives, well, it just wouldn't have the desired impact. But then I've realised that it's turning out difficult enough, so that getting the good ending on the first try is still very unlikely. So I left it at that. :)
I understand that players struggle with the controls... This is a very vasluable feedback, I'll try to remember this next time. Like if I want to make a game that is difficult to control, I need to somehow justify and legitimize it. At the very least, mention it in a dialogue (along with a tutorial, yep).
This is a fun game with multiple interesting endings to see. (nice jacksepticeye reference)
It's very hard to control multiple planets at once, so I was always left with one at the end :)
Be sure to rate my game and leave some feedback too :)
https://itch.io/jam/blackthornprodgamejam2/rate/379272
Thanks! I'll be sure to rate your game!
This game seems very hard at first, maybe even unplayable. Well, lots of difficult to control planets with momentum and stuff, and you have to switch between them in time, and so on. But after a couple of tries, if you get the planets to the max in the first stage and then in the second stage after some of them get hit, be really careful and sometimes maybe even shield the wounded ones with healthy ones, you can even make it so that everyone survive. It's not an easy task, but completely doable.
Huh... I've looked up jacksepticeye, and no, it's not a reference to him :) It's just the character looks kinda British-gentleman-style, so I've used the only British-sounding phrase I know :)
The way the end state of the game reinforces the character you put into the planets is very satisfying and adds some replay value.
The effect of the controls aren't as clear as they could be. Aside from naming the movement to be clockwise or counter clockwise maybe the ring of the orbit could show the direction the player would move when inputting that direction? Or the planet itself could have a way to show the direction.
Looking forward to seeing what other things you might include in a larger version of this game.
Thank you ^_^
If It's allowed to make updates after submission deadline (is it? I'm not sure), I'll definitely update the How to play section. Other than that... I'll try to keep that in mind for my next game. In-game tutorials and other stuff that teaches you how to play while you are already playing are really great, and I've never made anything of the kind yet.
And Solar Crew was designed as a small game... I'm not sure I can see a way or a reason to make it into something bigger...
After 2 weeks your game can be updated it says on the jam, your team still did great work either way.
Ah, I see. I'll make the update after that then :)
Thank you )