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Stardust's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Sound | #62 | 3.617 | 3.617 |
| Aesthetics | #93 | 4.085 | 4.085 |
| Music | #99 | 3.702 | 3.702 |
| Mechanics | #171 | 3.489 | 3.489 |
| Story | #178 | 2.979 | 2.979 |
| Fun | #183 | 3.489 | 3.489 |
| Theme | #506 | 2.511 | 2.511 |
Ranked from 47 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How many people worked on this game total?
1
Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
music by Osmic, SFX from sonniss and KenneyNL, space texture by screaming brain studios, fonts. All are credited in game.
Link to your source?
https://github.com/2nPlusOne/Stardust
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Comments
really cool space athmosphare. but i coudnt get used to the controls
I released a patch that fixes the inverted controls. If you get the chance, I'd love to hear your feedback on the game with the more intuitive controls.
oh yes, now its much easier to navigate! good update :)
First of all, I suck at controlling the player in this game xD I knew the controls were inverted but somehow I still couldn't put myself in the correct headspace lol. It was a little difficult to control and even at times frustrating, but man did you nail the atmosphere on this. I love the stellar visuals and the music you used enhanced the experienced. The scrolling text at the beginning set the mood for the rest of the game, with really good writing. This was very well polished, with only the controls holding it back. Great job! :)
Thank you so much for the excellent feedback. The controls have now been revised and a menu option to invert steering added. Let me know what you think about the game with these fixes if you get the chance!
Really fun game, great work
Really nailed the space vibe, its fair to say I would not get my space driving license and the upgrades did not really help with that, its like giving someone who can't drive, a bigger car!
Even after I'd realised the right and left were inverted, my brain would not accept it.
I did think the collider on the little one should have been a smidge bigger. It took me a really long time to collect the bits to get bigger and even longer to get the first upgrade. I also thought the collisions with the bigger asteroids could have been a little more forgiving, I made it to huge and in a couple of knocks I was back down to medium and at that point I gave up.
I did think the first layer of parallax looked more like dirt on a lens but maybe intentional? The story said something about a telescope?
Didn't really get any connection to the theme but a reasonably fun and relaxing game.
Thanks for playing and for the great feedback! The muddy-looking splotches on the background parallax layer are from the texture being blown up. I'm afraid there is not much I can do about that without manually erasing them all, which would take a while. Thank you for pointing it out tho, though I might take the time to do that in the future.
As for the theme, I went with "the death of a planet" being the beginning of the game. The game is set in the debris field surrounding the collision of two planets, as briefly described in the intro sequence. After all, the mass ejected from an exploding star or a destroyed planet will eventually reform into something new and continue the cycle.
Really good game. I really like the sound and ambience. Very chill game. It was fun collecting and dodging all the space dust and rocks.
Such a wonderful experience! There is a lot polish here. Sounds and art direction are spot on. I really like your writing in the intro sequence. It's almost poetic with your vocabulary and sentence structure. I also liked Katamari gameplay and just because you're bigger, doesn't mean you are any safer. You just become a bigger target to be hit. I think this is a game I could come back to and play.
Thank you for the kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed the game. I did have some fun writing the intro sequence, so I'm quite pleased you noticed the attention I put into it.
What an absolutely beautiful experience. Gave me Interstellar vibes. The multiple background layers and the way they moved differently each, with respect to the player gave a surreal effect. Didn't want to stop playing. Bookmarked. Will definitely come back to this again and again.
Fun fact, I recently released a game with the same name on the google play store. 😄✌
It means a lot to hear how much you enjoyed it! Getting the difficulty right has been tricky. I just tweaked some of the settings a bit, hopefully, it isn't too easy now. If you do try it out again let me know what you think. The difficulty is a bit of a moving target (pun intended)
Congrats on releasing your game on the Play Store btw!!
The idea is pretty cool and the visuals are amazing, but I wish I had more precision with the controls and the direction. It really felt like I was drifting on space, which is nice, but it was really hard to get the small things
I tweaked some of the settings a bit. If you get the chance to test it out again let me know if I overshot or undershot the difficulty curve. I mostly just upped the number of smaller things that spawn to make it a bit easier and lowered the damage collisions deal.
Wow, it feels much better now! I was able to grow faster and at the same time the game still has a challenge that is more fun and less frustrating.
I thnik this is the first game that hold me for a really long time, the atmosphere, audio, visuals (good Parallax scrolling btw). Yea, the problem was that the progress is quickly undone by accidental collision:( well, will try my luck a bit later again!
Glad you enjoyed it so much!
I tweaked some of the settings a bit. If you get the chance to test it out again let me know if I overshot or undershot the difficulty curve. I mostly just upped the number of smaller things that spawn to make it a bit easier and lowered the damage collisions deal.
The music and art makes for such a calming, beautiful atmosphere, for such a rage inducing game! XD the inverted controls, with the inertia of the player, trying to pick up those teeny tiny little pieces, which are also moving... Oh man. I rage quit x) I felt like maybe the game would get easier if I was bigger, so I wouldn't keep flying past what I was trying to pick up, but it's a bit odd for a game to start at maximum difficulty and get easier with time. Anyway, it really does look very nice, and it has a good level of polish. I did play around in it a while anyway, and I think you did a really excellent job with the environment.
Thank you so much for playing! I tweaked some of the settings a bit. If you get the chance to test it out again let me know if I overshot or undershot the difficulty curve. I mostly just upped the number of smaller things that spawn to make it a bit easier and lowered the damage collisions deal.
I like it, I just wish it weren't so easy to lose all my progress ;_;
Thanks for playing!
I tweaked some of the settings a bit. If you get the chance to test it out again let me know if I overshot or undershot the difficulty curve. I mostly just upped the number of smaller things that spawn to make it a bit easier and lowered the damage collisions deal.
I think you got it! At this point I think you could adjust again slightly to lean towards difficulty or meditation depending on what you want the game to be. I did notice the pace slowed down a lot once I reached gigantic size due to dust not counting for as much and a lack of small enough meteorites, but since that's the endgame, I can understand if that was intentional. An additional idea: since metal stops being useful after upgrading, maybe it could contribute to mass at a similar amount to space dust at that point. Anyway, good update :) I've boosted my rating too if you were wondering haha
I'm glad the update helped. I since released another fix that inverts the default controls and adds a menu option to invert them back if you so desire.
Ah that's good to hear too - I didn't bother mentioning it since I saw others commenting on it already but I did agree the default turning directions were unexpected ;)
I really like the feel of this game, you capture the spirit of it well. Like others though I really wish I could use the mouse to pick the travel direction (but keep boosting with w).
I found myself getting angry with my own inability to steer properly, totally user error of course.
One of the strongest cases of allowing custom keybinds I've seen.
The game is too good to be missed just by struggling with the controls.
I appreciate the feedback. I'll be switching it over to the new input system after the jam, so I could try to implement re-bindable keys. Never done it before but it shouldn't be too hard.
Excellent music ambience, pixel art, overall just great creative and simple gameplay. I really enjoyed myself in this! I put a good 30 minutes into it, I think it's the longest I've spent on a game this jam. Really good job on this! I'd love to see it develop and grow.
Thank you!! Glad you enjoyed it :)
I spent more time than I expected playing this. Probably over 30 minutes and reached Gigantic and around 250 mass with max rocket upgrade. Very fun!
Got big KSP vibes from the thrust control on the meteor and managing the velocity difference between the meteor and my target. It was a bit hard to control as the thruster moved the opposite direction from what I expected. It would be nice to have a setting to invert controls!
Art is fitting and music is really nice too.
Great game!
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you picked up on KSP vibes. The engine names were directly inspired by KSP engines. The control is tricky because it depends on where in the rotation the engine is. It would be super easy to implement inverted controls, so I'll mark that down for the future, thank you for the suggestion!
I released a patch that inverts the default steering controls and adds an invert toggle.
I might have played this one a little too long and I might have a sweet spot for space games but I absolutely loved this one, a tip though for new players is to not upgrade until you have more mass because having max thrust and 0 mass can be really annoying to control, I got to maximum mass where it gets a lot easier to get resources compared to being really small, you should add a hit box to the thruster so that early game is easier, everything about this game is so perfect I love it.
Congrats on beating the game! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Your feedback has been noted.
One of the stretch goals was being able to switch between unlocked engines, but unfortunately, it didn't make the cut. I've been pondering on various ways to make the early game easier, but hadn't thought of adding a hitbox to the engine!
Love the sounds and visuals of the game. runs smooth and looks great. Biggest issue I had was with the controls, I feel like steering with a joystick or mouse would have been a much more fluid way to control, I'd want the steering to not be trivial but man maybe I'm bad but its super hard to pick up the items.
also I'd say a faster progression to larger and upgrades would be nice.
But besides that, the game is one of the best looking and sounding games I've looked at so far. Congrats.
Thanks for playing, I'm glad you had fun with it! Your feedback has been noted. I agree that the controls can be a larger barrier to overcome. Controlling with the mouse is a great idea, I'll play around with that after the rating period ends. I'll eventually switch the project over to the new input system and build controller support.
The game was fun and looked awesome. Great Job!
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed playing it.
Congrats on completing the jam! I really like the concept of a chill growth game but I ran into two issues - when you're really small it is pretty annoying to try and pick up the dust, and getting hit by another asteroid is absolutely punishing. When I finally managed to get to a large size I immediately got hit by another asteroid and knocked from a mass of 23 back down to 10, losing several minutes of progress instantly. Given a couple tweaks I could see myself losing quite a bit of time to playing this!
Thanks for playing! Yes, I wholeheartedly agree the game is too difficult early game, and the collisions are too punishing. I'm not sure if this is something I would be allowed to tweak before the rating period ends...
I made a few tweaks, so if you decide to come back to this, I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on the new difficulty curve :
I gave it another shot and I found it much better this time around! A lot less punishing to get smacked. Was a lot of fun and I made it all the way to max size. If you kept developing after the jam, it'd be awesome if you could grow larger and larger and transform back into a planet.
Nice game. Have to spend more time with it. Just noticed the upgrade system when I had to stop.
Awesome game