Post by chici studios in Celestial Rescuers jam comments

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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!

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indiegesindel261 days ago(+1)

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

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chici studios261 days ago

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 :)

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