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A jam submission

Solar PanicView game page

Warp time, teleport and play with gravity to destroy the evil sun!
Submitted by Kooky (@KookyHuman)
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Solar Panic's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
The Experience#183.6673.667
Innovation#233.5003.500
Sounds and Music#413.3333.333
Overall#613.3333.333
Visuals#893.1673.167
Theme#923.5003.500

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I see my game is not the only game about destroying the evil sun. This game looks good, and has some good sound. It took me quite some time to destroy the evil extreme sun, but I knew I could not let that evil sun live, so I had to destroy it no matter how long it took.

Submitted

Ok so the gameplay was really fun and it was fairly enjoyable, i really liked the sun dialog and thought it was funny. The graphics were not good, but they were not bad either just meh. I enjoyed the sounds and stuff but music was bad in my opinion. So basically i thought u have a really good and fun gameplay but bad graphics and an ok sound my final grade is a 3/5

Submitted(+1)

I loved the game! The extreme mode was fairly buggy because everytime I teleported, it would stop planets from going towards the sun.

Developer

That's wonderful to hear! Thank you for giving it a try and providing feedback!

Oh! That's interesting. Thank you for letting me know. I just gave it a playtest to try and figure out what's going on.

I'm wondering if maybe it's because when the sun is nearly defeated in Extreme mode, it gains the ability to move, and once it's travelling rather quickly, the camera ends up having to zoom out really far to keep it onscreen, and then when you teleport towards the sun to catch up, the fact that the stars in the backdrop barely scroll at all (combined with the zoomed-out camera) makes it difficult to tell exactly how far you've teleported (really far!)--thus leaving your mini planets way far behind you, making it seems like they're either teleporting backwards or disappearing! Phew, I hope that made sense.

Unless it's a mistake in my programming that causes the planets to lose momentum when you teleport (I couldn't find one so far), or unless you're teleporting in front of your planets and getting in their way... but I got the feeling you weren't saying that, so I'm thinking the camera zoom thing is a more likely cause.

If all of that sounds completely wrong, maybe I missed something, and I'll need to keep investigating! Thanks very much for the feedback! :)

Submitted

That could be the case. I hope it goes better :D

Submitted(+1)

I wanted to like it, but I couldn't get my shots to hit the sun. Maybe I'm missing something. I ended up with a massive flock of little planets orbiting the sun.

Developer

Oh dear, sorry about that! I know there's certainly an issue with shots gathering on the sun's surface instead of registering as a hit, and it's also certainly very possible to end up with a bunch of shots orbiting the sun.

Originally, I had the shots gradually melt down in size while they sat on the surface of the sun, slowly causing a small amount of damage to the sun while melting. However, then I decided the game experience would be less messy if the shots just immediately got destroyed on contacting the sun, and caused immediate damage. Unfortunately, I never managed to get my physics and collision detection to work properly with this idea before I ran out of time! In the meantime, I think firing the shots from farther away from the sun causes them to land with a higher velocity, and increases the chance of registering a hit instead of just landing harmlessly.

As for the flock of little planets orbiting the sun... yeah, that can happen. Depending on how big the sun is, the best strategy may change, especially if the sun is tiny, and even moreso towards the end of Extreme (when the music starts). Firing shots from farther away (from the sun) in general might be helpful, so they have more time to gain speed before hitting the sun. Oh, and I'm not sure if this will be of any help, but the farther away (from Earth) you click your mouse, the faster the speed your shots are launched at! I'll add that to the description. Thanks for reminding me about this!

Ideally I would certainly have gone back and playtested both modes a LOT more thoroughly. I was trying to fix a bunch of newly-uncovered game-breaking bugs at the last minute, so unfortunately I ended up neglecting some (still pretty important) stuff.

I'm still really glad to hear that you wanted to like it! That's great feedback to hear. I'll certainly try to smooth things out, and update the description to be a little more helpful in the meantime. Thank you for giving it a go!

Submitted(+1)

WTF  was that extreme mode :D  Great INTENCE game :D

Developer(+1)

Hahaha, thank you so much! :D I love your reaction to Extreme mode! Honestly I found it so much more fun to test Extreme than Normal, that I kept playing on Extreme. :) I didn't wanna make Normal mode TOO hard, in case players never completed it and unlocked Extreme! ...Though I think when I uploaded this, it may have been bugged, and Extreme may be unlocked by default. Oh well, that may be for the best! Otherwise people might not even realise it exists!

I wanted to make Extreme mode something different than just a 'harder' difficulty. :D That's why I specifically avoided calling it a 'difficulty'; and instead just made some changes to make it more intense than the regular mode. :) I'm glad you found it intense! That's what I was hoping! :D OH, speaking of difficulty... originally, crashing into the sun was going to kill the player... which is why I decided to add the whole time-slowing mechanic to be like, "Hey, look out, you're going to crash; here's your last chance to change direction quickly!!"... but then I was like, "Wait, dying and restarting the game would be no fun... that's just gonna get annoying, and make people lose interest. There's already hopefully enough fun stuff going on in the game that we can just give them a SMALL penalty to teach them that 'Hey, no, crashing into the sun is bad! Don't do that!', and let them continue on with their progress." :)

Anyway! Thanks so much for the excellent feedback, I'm really glad you enjoyed it! :D

Submitted(+1)

You are so passionate about this game. That is great.  :D Just you know, I did have only normal at first but when I finished it, the extreme mode stayed unlocked even when I reloaded the web page.

Developer

Hahaha, yeah, I suppose you're right! :D I'd prefer not to be making things that I'm not passionate about.

Oooh! Thank you for testing and confirming that for me! I tried to figure out how to use local storage in order to keep Extreme unlocked after reloading the webpage, so it's great to know that it unlocked correctly and stayed unlocked!

Submitted(+1)

That's a pretty fun game ! The dynamic camera and animations as well as the powerful sound effects really make the fight intense ! I have to say though, I think the screenshots doesn't quite capture your game's quality, that's why I really recommand you to put some gifs on the page, I'm sure the great camera work will grab people's attention much more efficiently. The animations on the title screen were also really neat x) I had some trouble with the framerate when there were a lot of projectiles in extreme mode (but that could entirely be my potato laptop's fault here)

Overall the fights were intense and fun ! And congrats for your "first ever" everything !

Developer(+2)

Thank you so much! :D That's some really kind and detailed feedback!

I'm flattered you describe the camera movements as dynamic and the sound effects as powerful. I didn't know if I'd be able to pull off effective camera movements, but I wanted to use an engine that at least allows for the possibility of scaling the zoom, and then I was SO pleased when I actually figured out how to get it to zoom in and out in the way I wanted. I was not expecting it to turn out that well. I kept tweaking how far it zoomed out, so that it zoomed out enough to be useful, but didn't zoom out unnecessarily far. :'D But the objects were super small when zoomed out, so I came up with those crosshair thingies--at first I just couldn't get them to position correctly, but then some other thing a couple of days later gave me a breakthrough realisation on how to get them to work, so I brought them back in. I nearly had to leave them out, which would have been disappointing to me!

I also wanted to add mousewheel zooming, while still keeping some helpful degree of automatic zooming, but I figured that would take a bit too long to implement and balance at the last minute, haha, so I left it out for now. I didn't want the player to manually zoom in while far away from the sun, only to be automatically zoomed in SUPER far when going closer to the sun again. It'd be easy enough to limit the zoom, but time was running out and sadly I had to prioritise fixing other stuff first. :')

As for the sound effects, I'm so glad you like them! I spent quite some time tweaking them in Bfxr (which I've dabbled with briefly before, but never used extensively), trying to figure out how all the different slider bars affected the sound, until they were just right... ish. I have to stop myself from getting too perfectionistic about things sometimes, especially when there's a deadline. So I'm really glad to hear they worked well!

What you say about the screenshots is wonderful feedback. Thank you so much. I agree; I'm certainly not much of a digital artist, and I deliberately kept my time spent on the art fairly short so I didn't waste too much time. I didn't even think about the possibility of adding gifs! That's a great idea; I'll see if I can do that! Thank you again, and I'm thrilled to hear the camera work was so effective! :D I love when throwing some mathematical formulae together makes something super cool! And it makes me happy you refer to my game as having quality that is better than the screenshots show. :')

Hahaha, I''m so glad you iked the title screen animations! I spent kind of a silly amount of time on those; I may have gotten a little carried away. That definitely led to me running into Construct 2 Free's limitations sooner than I otherwise would have. I just started off being like "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the planet was part of the title? Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could click on it? Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the sun passed by and was glaring at it?" and... I won't say any more. :') I'm not sure how much you discovered there, but I love adding little tweaks and extra things, just for the player to have fun noticing and discovering!

Ah, that's great information to hear about your framerate! I kind of threw together some code to TRY to manage the performance, but it hasn't been tested out very thoroughly. I've never made any code to do that kind of thing before; I was just like "HEY maybe since I can measure the frame rate and count the total number of objects, maybe I can throw something together with some variables to kind of maintain a decent performance". I'd love to optimise this for when the jam is over! Right now, it's not super smart; it just destroys the oldest existing projectiles (one at a time) as long as your frame rate is below 20 frames per second, and increases the projectile limit if your frame rate is higher than that. It also has limits for how many projectiles it will allow to exist at once; I set that to a minimum cap of 50 and a maximum cap of 1,000 for now. It starts at a cap of 100 and will decrease or increase from there, depending on how your frame rate fluctuates. Maybe I need to lower the minimum from 50, or maybe 20fps is the wrong target (it should probably be player-adjustable anyway), or maybe I need to make the frame rate adjust more quickly, in proportion to how off-target your frame rate is--but then again, that could cause erratic object purgings if you have sudden frame rate drops, and I wanted to avoid that! I certainly get pretty poor performance in my web browser. I was testing this game in Firefox on my laptop. It was a bit painful. :') Had to restart my web browser quite often! I need to revive my desktop.

I'm so glad you found the fights intense and fun! I didn't want to do something too boring or predictable, that people would have likely seen before. I know it's nothing super original, but I tried to avoid making it too... generic, or repetitive, or stretch it out longer than necessary without enough content or gameplay to justify it. As for "Extreme" mode, I actually kinda added that as an afterthought--using features that I was initially using to cheat at the game during testing. I was like "HEY, this teleporting cheat is actually pretty cool--maybe that should be a feature!! But let's not give them it right away! And maybe autofire should be a thing! Clicking can get boring after a while! Oh, and it'd be cool if they no longer get limited by fuel!" Oh, speaking of fuel, one change I made towards the end after testing Normal mode and getting quite bored (when comparing it to Extreme), was that the longer you play in Normal mode, the faster your fuel starts to regenerate--just in case the player is struggling with their fuel being eaten up by moving and shooting, while being stuck far from the sun. Hopefully it's a gradual enough change in regeneration speed that the player won't really notice, but will hopefully still be quick enough to make a difference to the flow of gameplay. :') Hopefully! I didn't have time to test or finetune it much!

Thank you so much for the congrats, too! :D I've been wanting to publish some kind of game for aaaages, and I'm really glad I finally did something, even if it's only small. This is the first comment of feedback I've ever had on a game, so yay for that too!!