Post by RealOfficialTurf in Asteroids, Inc. comments

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I ran out of asteroids :(

Since running out of asteroids are an inevitability (and mining them only makes the world a worse place), the only way you can progress this game indefinitely is by using the money gained from investors. The investors are pretty happy throwing money at you, even if you're doing absolutely nothing, so long as you give them at least 50% shares. At this point, you might as well rename the game to "Investors Inc."

Also, I managed to accrue 90% tax rate from deliberately not bribing politicians.

I guess the message of this game is that the only winning move is not to play.... Pretty unconventional mechanics for idle games.

Reppo Games3 years ago (1 edit) (+3)

Your observations are pretty astute – we made Asteroids Inc. as a parable about the oil industry, and to a lesser extent corporations in general, so it's good to hear a lot of this came through in the game itself. I* can confirm that pretty much everything you wrote about here was by design.

For example, many oil companies' stock values are based on how much oil they have found, but they can never sell all of that or it'll be enough to destroy civilization several times over with global warming and whatnot. So the stockholders are investing in this "carbon bubble", as it's often called, even though it can never actually make them money in a practical sense. In Investors Inc. – erm, Asteroids Inc. – we designed the investment system to reflect this. Your business has a natural limit – number of asteroids and quality of the world, which actually gets destroyed here if you don't quit and close your business down – but the real money's in fooling the investors. So that's the sort of thing that guided the game design process, unconventional mechanics and all.

If you have any more feedback about how Asteroids Inc. turned out, it'd be great to hear it so we can incorporate it into future games and projects. (But even if you don't, it means a lot just hearing what you said already, and knowing that you played the game through – even if, as you said, "the only winning move is not to play".)

*Aidan Andreasen, the game's designer, by the way.

RealOfficialTurf3 years ago(+1)

I also learned that the investment gains are capped, since public relation is capped at 100%. Since everything costs exponentially, this means that it's impossible to keep up with the game from investors' money alone. I gave up on playing the game after few in-game years waiting. The game also doesn't really go anywhere without mining asteroids, as I no longer receive new logs from this new way of playing.

So I guess the "mining and destroying the world" part really is the only intended way to play the game.

And for my feedback.... I got somewhat terrified (and a bit disturbed) when the gradual world change is also accompanied with the gradual "darker" music change. It really gets to me when that happens, all the way until the last stage of environment destruction! So I guess that musician of yours have accomplished their task on trying to stop me from "progressing" any further. Now I don't want to mine asteroids anymore lol.

The game also lacked the ability to save, but judging from the finite gameplay, I guess it's fine, since I don't plan on replaying the game anymore.

One last thing to note, change the splash screen. It's not even difficult to do that from Godot itself, so please do it in the future.

Reppo Games3 years ago (1 edit)

OK, I'm facepalming seeing that splash screen now that you mentioned it, lmao. As director I take full responsibility for that – most of the work on this was done in a three-week timespan, but that's the sort of thing I should have noticed when playtesting, then gone back in and fixed a long time ago. We'll probably release a small update soon with stuff like that sorted out – I can probably jump in and change that no problem.

EDIT: I tried making bigger changes when I did this and I'm not sure if I want to push out a big update or just revert back to a simple splash screen fix yet. Eventually some update will be uploaded, but I don't know when, depends how large it winds up being when we either upload it or scrap everything and just change the splash screen as originally intended lol.

Also, it's great to hear the evolving soundtrack had a visceral impact like that. I'll definitely keep that in mind for future games.

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