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Celestial Rescuers's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Polish | #2 | 4.667 | 4.667 |
| Visual/Audio Design | #5 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Overall | #10 | 3.650 | 3.650 |
| Innovation | #14 | 3.167 | 3.167 |
| Fun | #14 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
| Theme Interpretation | #38 | 2.833 | 2.833 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
What new engine or tool(s) did you use?
Godot (Game), ASP.net/EF Core (Server)
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Comments
The game even has logo splasharts at the beginning, it looks really professional! And the music reminds me a lot of Metroid's OST, one of my childhood (and still is) favourites. I think your game is the first one I've seen with an actual options menu!
The tutorial is really good! And online highscores?! Mechanic-wise, your game is really complete! I couldn't play for long since I had to finish some stuff, but overall your game feels really polished.
What I missed is a pause button! I had to stop playing but there weren't any so, I just crashed myself against a planet (that was really fun ngl).
Maybe it needed a little bit more of variety since the game felt a bit repetitive after a while. Like being able to improve your ship's cargo or recollecting speed, but those are just pet peeves of mine. I understand that'd have been too much for a jam. The gathering resources and travelling from planet to planet reminded me of Spore's space stage. Fantastic work, good job to all the team!
Cool game! It was quite fun boosting from planet to planet while gathering resources along the way. I do think that the gameplay could have a bit more to it since it does get a bit repetitive after playing for awhile.
Really nicely polished with a cohesive and very professional presentation. The gameplay is a good basis, but I think it needs a bit more vareity to keep it engaging long term. Beatifull graphics and art.
Really polished and cohesive game you have here! I love the sounds you guys used and the thrusters feel awesome. It's thrilling to take the risk of boosting your way everywhere. I like the idea for the game. Cool having online scores as well. One issue with that specifically, I was entering Captain Void as my name but the space key submitted it before I was done typing.
I did feel that eventually the game felt repetitive, unless I didn't play long enough to find more. Perhaps having alien enemies that try to hinder your missions would add another fun layer. I did live stream the game if you want to see my reaction. Great job!
Yeah I agree, if we decide to push an "AfterJam" version of this game, it would need more events, maybe even space combat where you have to defend planets from space pirates. At some point in the development, I had to focus on the core loop so it can be properly polished.
- Laura
I've just checked out your stream, thank you so much for playing the game! I've pulled some levers behind the scenes so your name displays correctly in the leaderboards and we'll definitely provide a fix for whatever happened to you while entering a username (the code DOES check if you are in an input if you hit space, but oh well).
- Laura
Right on! Thank you.
I'm so mad - I got wayyyy too carried away boosting around that I crashed after a measly 7 planets saved!
In all seriousness - this is one of my favourite entries so far - potentially my favourite. The audio, polish, art, movement - aaah, it's all perfect. There is so much I want to pick your brains about here, but in the interest of keeping it brief, I'll only ask 1 question! The subtle pixel differences in the spinning planets/moving spaceship. Were they done using shaders? I find it super endearing and it really fits the art style well!
The only nit-picky thing I found a bit unengaging was that you could just stay at a planet to max out on that resource. It means the winning strat is to just permanently hold E as you fly around.
Overall, really glad I downloaded this. Congratulations, hope this steals the show!
Thank you so much for your comment!
For the planets, we have multiple spheres (one for the base color, one for the "clouds" with a transparent texture) that are randomly placed in a 50 x 50 grid with 50-30 units between and random traits (name, available element, whether the planet has a moon/clouds, scale multiplier and rotation speed). The rotation is applied to all three axis (with slight variations), making them spin in a way that is not giving you the feeling of a looped animation. The player spaceship is only rotated on the Y axis. Our Scene setup uses a SubViewport with a scale of 640 by 360, giving off this clean pixelated look.
I agree that the game can be somewhat easy with some techniques. Initially, we wanted to have a full on inventory where you would need to manage the elements you collected and potentially throw some out to make space for a big distress call, however in playtesting it showed that it threw players out of the gameplay loop too much.
I think if we'll touch this project again for an "After Jam" version, it would be great to have some modifiers (such as a slower ship speed with bigger inventories) and maybe some sort of combat. Instead of just losing health when colliding with objects, maybe the spaceship could also lose some elements on impact, to make it harder to hoard elements.
- Laura
Thank you for sharing! That’s a smart way to give planets good depth and variation, and I appreciate you breaking that down for me. The SubViewport I think is the key for me here! In the absence of Unity’s pixel perfect camera and workflows, we built our whole game with the project scaled down to our reference resolution (320x180), which ended up causing us endless issues (like with the UI, for example). I had a play around with SubViewport and wish I’d thought of that sooner.
Thanks again for sharing. Feel free to add me on discord (picopau) - we’d be thrilled to work with you in the future. You are super talented peeps :)
Beautiful, works smoothly, beautifully executed, very polished. I'm Celestial_Rescuer_1337 btw lol
I've noticed you're only asked your nickname once. I also don't see anything getting stored locally. How did you go about making that persistence and generating that unique ID?
It seems they're generating a GUID on registering an account and storing that in your local app data. see: %LOCALAPPDATA%/CelestialRescuers
Disclaimer: not the creator, could 100% be wrong!
We don't save any meaningful data besides game runs, so on initial start, you request a unique ID from the server that is stored in a JSON file under appdata. This unique ID is not exposed through the API and used as an identifier in case you want to update your username.
It's semi secure, but good enough for the data stored and has the neat side-effect that you don't need to sign up or login or anything, without having to collect or store a device ID (which also has all sorts of data privacy hassles connected).
- Laura
Thank you!
Amazing game! Really fun, and great graphics, the leaderboard was a great touch too, congratulations!
Really amazing visuals! Great work! :)
Super polished game, congrats!
How we implemented the topic:
- The galaxy is stronger when we help each other. The Celestial Rescuers program is an inter-planet humanitarian organization. If one planet is in need of materials, another might be able to provide them.
- This game features online leaderboards. The more people play, the more planets can be rescued. This is also reflected in the main menu that will always show you how many planets have been helped globally.