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A jam submission

Black Hole in OneView game page

Mini golfing with the stars!
Submitted by Jldevictoria (@jldevictoria), ayaface, Pangean — 3 minutes, 37 seconds before the deadline
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Black Hole in One's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Theme interpretation#413.7653.765
Innovation#1582.8822.882
Graphics#1902.9412.941
Gameplay#2532.3532.353
Overall#2572.4712.471
Audio#4121.2351.235

Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/Jldevictoria/BlackHoleInOne

Theme interpretation
We decided to take the moonshot theme literally and give you a chance to play golf with the planets.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Really nice concept!

I don't think I've ever played a game that combines golfing with orbital mechanics, but I think this game proves it can be a really great idea! I played about 5 levels or so before getting stuck, since my moon landed on a planet that was rotating around the star so fast that I could no longer click on it, which judging by the other comments is something other people also struggled with. Making sure that doesn't happen should be very easy to fix though, just make the hitbox of the moon super big (or allow the player to click and drag from any cursor position, since you are showing the 'guide line' anyway). 

The second common point of criticism the other commenters have, if I have understand the game correctly, is that the guide trajectory is calculated under the assumption that all other celestial bodies remain static, right? That's why some players feel misled, because as the moon follows its trajectory, it is experiencing a different gravitational field at each point in time, instead of the original trajectory previewed when time was 'frozen'. This point is a bit more tricky to fix, and I think there are two extremes: Either your original way (minimal assistance), where the player has to predict the path of all celestial bodies and guess what the gravitational influence on the moon is going to be at each point in space/time, or  (fully assisted) your preview calculates the actual 'dynamical' trajectory and the player only has to find the correct alignment of bodies, pitch, and amplitude. I think neither of these two options are ideal, since the fully assisted mode only requires the player to predict the ideal point in time to click and can then obtain the trajectory through trial and error without using any tries (and thus makes for a less compelling game). A compromise would be to convey additional information to the player, e.g. by drawing notches on the guide line indicating the moon's velocity (the player can count how far the moon would get in x frames) as well as notched guide lines predicting the orbits of all the celestial bodies (so the player can judge how far they will have travelled in x frames). Finally, you would also give the player some visual indication of how strong the gravity of each celestial body is (e.g. by drawing concentric circles at certain threshold values). 

I think this game definitely holds promise and is worth working on in the future (if at least to fix the controls, such as by making the camera movement much smoother/more responsive) and I hope that my ramblings can be of some use to you!

Developer(+1)

Some great advice there! Thanks for leaving such a detailed response!

Submitted

cool idea just didn’t understand how to play it.

Submitted(+1)

Great idea! Keep working on a post jam version, it has a lot of potential. 

I think you should focus on the controls, camera and feedback to the user (the trajectory curve is great for example, but things like winning or losing are really hard to understand).

Submitted

The graphics are pretty cool :)

The controls are super hard though, when you move the camera back, it's quite tough to click on the moon since it rotates around the planet, also, the trajectory doesn't properly displays when it's too far

Submitted

I found by chance that I could use the scroll wheel to move the camera back, but it wasn't obvious.  And until I did that, I couldn't see the moon.  Once I could see the moon, I had a hard time clicking on it precisely enough.  Finally, the projected course for the moon was not the course it actually followed.

Submitted

Great idea. But controls need a little improvement

Submitted

Nice idea. also liked the graphics.

It was a bit hard to grab the moon to shoot. Maybe you could use different mousebuttons for panning the camera and grabbing the moon and make it so that you can click and drag anywhere on the screen to charge the moon.

Submitted(+2)

Great art and concept. Feels really nice to swing the moon around the sun

Submitted(+1)

I managed manipulating the moon after a while and even shot it around quite brutally! Fun warp.

Submitted(+2)

As a previous commenter said, some feedback when you shoot would be cool. Also if you make the camera snap to the ball when you go out of bounds that would improve the core game loop. This kind of gravity based golf is a fun idea. Slap some numbers on there and I can see it being used to teach people physics.

Submitted(+3)

Art looks good. Levels are interesting, but the level with the 2 wheels of planets was a little annoying and i gave up there.

Developer

Yeah that was our take on an asteroid belt level but we were missing the asteroids haha!
Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Submitted(+3)

Interesting idea. Some audio-visual feedback for making the shots would have been nice. I also had some issues with the camera zooming in and out.

Developer

Thanks for playing it and for your feedback! Your submission looks and sounds great!