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Adrift: First Contact's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #2948 | 2.436 | 3.444 |
| Presentation | #3614 | 2.278 | 3.222 |
| Overall | #3698 | 2.278 | 3.222 |
| Originality | #4305 | 2.121 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The primary mechanic is using your tractor beam to simultaneously fling yourself and your target through space.
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
No
We used pre-existing audio
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Comments
I love this game. This game is better than every game on here that I have played so far. I absolutely love the tractor beam mechanic. How it is both your weapon, your form of movement, and your form of collecting materials. It does everything. The fuel in the game seems to be more of help than actual necessity and I love that. The main down-side of this game is the art. It works for what it is, and I don't expect more, however if the art were better, with better sprites, this game would be an absolute great. Other down-sides are the luck dependencies of the items, however as you only had 48 hours to make this, and judging from other comments that you've made, it seems like you are making it better. I'll keep my eye on this game for a while. Well done!!
Thank you so much for the praise! The fuel system was actually even more restrictive during most of the development weekend because I wanted the tractor beam to be the primary focus. I slowed the leak down a few hours prior to release because I was worried about difficulty being too frustrating. The art is definitely the biggest weakness, I agree. It is, at best, serviceable. I hope you get more gameplay out of it after the update. I will definitely be looking to do this with a partner next year who can take the lead on art to shore that side of things up.
You deserve the praise, and I am really happy that you are thinking of updating it with a partner. I hope it goes well for you, and that you are able to make it into an actual game. Good luck!
I like the game a lot. My success in the game seems to be very luck based. Sometimes I start and immediately run into a lot of resources and other times I'm traveling for what feels like minutes while only seeing asteroids. I notice that sometimes there are resources below asteroids, maybe I'd find more if they always float above them, although I like the idea that you sometimes need to dance around an enemy and an asteroid while waiting for fuel to come out the other side. Maybe a good future improvement would be some kind of radar to point you to the nearest of each of the three resources - I think that would help reduce some of the random swinginess a lot.
Excellent game. I found it to be very intuitive and a lot of the mechanics (saving gas by using the tractor to fling yourself around asteroids) feel like a natural extension of the tractor function. I've already spent a bunch of time on it and I really like the music.
I'm really glad you liked it, I loved slingshotting through narrow gaps during my testing. A radar was something I considered adding and probably would have if not for the time constraints forcing me to pick my battles. I'm planning on updating the game after the game jam judging period is over to fix a couple bugs and adjust the luck factor downward a bit, so I may also add a couple of the features I had to scrap to meet the deadline. The spawner currently uses a weighted table to randomly select asteroids, aliens, and salvage when spawning things in front of you with the only restraint factor being a cap on the number of aliens that can spawn based on how many repair kits you've collected (capping out at 5 while waiting for the hyperdrive countdown).
Nice work, I like the art for the asteroids :)
Thank you! The asteroids were almost entirely the work of Photoshop's Bevel & Emboss and Distort filters, my two favorite tools as I am not particularly gifted with art in general.
Had a bug where my ship hit seemingly nothing and was damaged. It was repeatable by just holding W.
Interesting concept, feels a little empty as a game but hey you only had 48 hrs!
Interesting. Were you near an asteroid but not actually touching it when the bug occurred? I wonder if I maybe had a collider bounding error somewhere that I missed in testing. I want to update after the judging period to remove a couple other bugs I caught past the deadline as well as get a couple features I had to cut due to lack of polish time in, so I hope I can figure this one out and add it to the list.
SPACE GAMES!
Wow you had time to add options? (Except music volume at 0% still plays music, just makes it a bit quieter lol)
The controls feel really good! I really liked it.
Just yesterday I watched a movie called "space sweepers", it's a South Korean movie, quite good u should watch it. Anyway, the movie is basically about people who work in space fly ships to collect scrap metal and space junk to sell it as salvage basically, and well, i imagine that's how it feels sometimes for them, flying through fields of space debris.
I really enjoyed the simplicity of gameplay and the nicely tuned controls. Really felt like a space game.
I also liked using the beam to maneuver myself around other asteroids.
Plays good, lots of fun, nice menu!
only 1 thing i'm unsure about is, how does this fit in with the theme, could you explain?
Darn, I tested the sound effects at 0% but not the music, because not being able to disable sound effects in a game is a deal breaker for me. Space Sweepers is my favorite movie I've seen this year (though without spoilers I'll say I think it would have been more powerful if it had ended just a little bit sooner) and was a big inspiration in the theming of the game after seeing the mechanical theme. If I trusted my ability to make the cord on a javelin look good in the time constraint it would've been that instead of a tractor beam. That particular action scene near the end of the movie was the visual I was going for with how you kill ships within the game.
As for how I feel it fits the theme, a grappling hook was the first thought that came to my mind after watching the theme announcement and I wanted to put a twist on it by putting it into an environment where it could really act on inertia and shine. Every object has a mass set as a percentage of your ship's mass and the tractor beam maintains total momentum between you and the item you are grappled on. When grappling a large asteroid which has 500% your mass you will accelerate towards it 5x faster than it accelerates towards you, for example. The "chain" concept is most clearly visible if you fling a small asteroid and then hold a beam on it as it flies past you; if you maintain the beam you and the asteroid will fly through space in an orbit together around a point between you as their mass is identical to yours. Which, incidentally, is a pretty decent strategy as the number of aliens increases though you may need to use the maneuvering thrusters a bit to avoid crashing especially if blaster bolts hit the asteroid and alter its trajectory.
I'm really glad you liked it and happy to see another Space Sweepers fan. After the judging period is over I'll be updating the game with a few fixes including the music one you found, thank you!
totally agree that the movie is great but could've been a bit better if it ended slightly earlier.
but ha! i knew it made me think of Space Sweepers for a reason.
the grappling hook would be quite complex to implementation , the tractor beam is a great alternative. That action scene you're referring me to was so epic! also just realized the similarity between your enemy ships and the battle drones from movie :D
yeah your physics and movement really are nicely tuned. never managed to make smaller asteroids orbit me :o gonna need to try some more
now that you explained it, the theme does make sense.
looking forward to seeing the updates :)
and cheers for being a fan of Space Sweepers :D