Really smart concept ! You manage your time well to create this game in 3hours good job
Play game
Warp Traffic Warden's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #6 | 3.584 | 3.778 |
| How well does the game fit the themes? | #7 | 4.322 | 4.556 |
| How do you rate the game overall (you can consider fun, dev time, etc.)? | #12 | 3.268 | 3.444 |
| Audio | #13 | 2.846 | 3.000 |
| Visuals | #20 | 2.951 | 3.111 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How long was your dev time?
3 hours, 1 person
Comments
This game helped me understand why I'm not an air traffic controller! The pathing mechanic is really cool, its impressive how well it's implemented given the jam timeframe. Very well done!
Submitted
Your Future JobThank you for the kind comment! In truth, when it became clear that 'Future Jobs' would win as the theme, I did a bit of pre-planning for the jam. The overwhelming majority of that was ~10 hours or so of getting deeper into vectors and arrays to figure out how I could implement the mechanic, including a quick test project. Freshly implemented everything in a new project for the jam, but I would be misleading anyone to say I figured out the central mechanic within the jam's 3 hour span.
I believe that's why planning isn't included in the jam timeframe, it would be too difficult to research, learn and deploy new mechanics in the 3 hour window. I'm curious how you implemented the mechanic, did you create a list of points by tracking the cursor at short intervals following a mouse click?
I fully agree, for me I'm liking Trijam as an achieveable game jam, but where I can aim to learn something new everytime!
And of course, it basically works as follows, apologies for the incoming essay but I hope it's interesting for you and/or any others:
It's a list of Vector2d points appended chronologically into an array, but the criteria for adding to the area is distance, not time. As I wanted the spaceships to move at a consistent speed and be able to still move in a consistent manner when a set of directions run out, I decided having each point in the array be equally spaced was necessary.
Once the mouse moves over 50 pixels from the origin point (either the spaceship itself, or the latest addition to the array) I minus the vector values of the current mouse position by the vector value of the origin point. The vector resulting from this calculation is then clamped, so that none of the values can exceed [-50, 50], which is done to avoid any variation from mouse speed, frame rate, etc. The clamped value is then added to the vector of the origin point and appended to the top of the array.
I'm working in Godot, so I used a Tween to set up the movement between the points itself, to keep the spaceship movement smooth and consistent. I can set the speed the spaceships will move without player input (itself set within a random range up spawning) and the Tween movement speed = distance to next array point / speed. Once the spaceship reaches the oldest point on the array, it is deleted and it focuses on the 'new' oldest point. If no points exist, it instead continues moving in the direction it is currently facing.
There are two places this currently falls down and I didn't have time in the jam to fix:
- For the very first point, when the spaceship is being used as a point of reference. Once the player clicks on a spaceship, the reference point is saved, but the ship keeps moving. As such the player can wait a few seconds and only upon moving their mouse again wil a path be drawn, creating quite a long wait time for the ship to reach the first point and a gap between the lines being drawn. This also demosntrates point number 2, in which:
- Once a path is set, the spaceship currently must reach the next point in the array before it can receive new instructions. As such, occasionally the player will create a new path for a ship to follow, but there will be a delayed response as the ship's Tween fulfilfs the final request it received from its previous path
My best score is 20 ships (I should point out that I'm color-blind and it's really hard to tell the difference between the two portals on the left, pink and green I think. But I compensated by using my graphics tablet to make the ships make nice curves on the way to their portals :D )
Anyway, the game is great, the concept works very well, the path mechanics are very clean, and the music and sounds are indeed a little plus (which didn't break my ears at all :D). Well done!
Submitted
Intergalactic TaxiOh my word, I hadn't even considered the impact on accessibiity such as colour blindness! :O 20 is an impressive number regardless, each ship colour has a unique shape (same as the portals) but the sprites are small enough that I didn't think it worth drawing attention to...
Thank you very much for the feedback, can't tell you how much I struggled with /how happy I am in the end with the pathing code, so it's really nice to hear that the effort paid off! And also that the audio isn't ear-splittingly loud - sadly I won't be able to take part in the next Trijam, but week after next I'd like to really work on & understand the audio side of things!
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.