Hi. I work at one of Russian youtube channels dedicated to videogames and movies, and I often stream games there. I haven't streamed in English before tho, but I'll try my best. Here's the channel I've made for this - https://www.twitch.tv/daromaru
Put your submission here in this thread, if you want to see me play it live on stream. I'll start today at 14:00 UTC and will probably stream for a couple of hours.
Camera size is relative to your resolution. It shows the exact number of pixels the sprites in the scene are set in, which allows to easily move the camera in intervals that are made of whole screen pixels only, not fractions. And thiss is the only clean way that I know of to remove the artifacts that appear on 2D sprites when camera is moving. The downside of tis technique is that your resolution actually dictates how much of the game area you can see. This is bad of course, there need to be several settings for the camera size depending on your resolution, but I didn't have time to think about that during the jam. As with lots of other things apparently )))
-- POSSIBLE SPOILER --
The four buttons puzzle is a 'repeat the sequence' puzzle. But with a twist - since the game is lying to you, in each sequence you need to push the buttons it highlights in reverse order.
This is unbelievable. How the hell did you manage to do it in a single week? :)
'Unreliable tutorial' - I suppose, many ppl went with this for the theme. :)
The one issue I had is when the character gets damaged, he starts blinking, and that actually makes controlling him rather difficult, because, well, half of the time you can't see him. I'm not sure this is a suitable effect in this case.
What do you mean by adding gravity? Is it about the character being too floaty? There actually is a gravity increase during the jump, it applies after he starts falling, but I probably should've moved that to an earlier point - this slow moment in the jump curve when the character reaches the highest point of the jump is what makes it feel floaty I think.
The keys are hidden. There are a couple of clues in the narration, as with everything else. Kinda vague, but still. One is above, one is below :)
It's like Trap Dungeons, but with a more 'silly comedy' approach. Camera is too fast IMO, adds to the overall difficulty, but other than that it's really funny and really fun - makes you want to try again and again to beat the game.
Wow! Great game. I liked everything, it plays nice, sounds nice and looks awesome, especially the visual effects. And the character - how he looks is a cool narrative clue.
I got stuck at the puzzle pieces - didn't notice them activating when it was time to use them. Reading your devlog post helped tho. :)
It's quite unusual and fresh - marrying space invaders and a dungeon shooter like that. Great idea! You've put the story and credits inside the game - it looks awesome, too.
I liked it overall. A planet fighting aliens in a dungeon is kinda weird, but still fun )
Really nice! Lots of different planets to visit, cool models, cool physics and everything. And I loved how music changes when you visit a different planet, that's awesome! The only flaw I can see is that it's a bit difficult to see whether you're going to successfully land a jump where you want it, or not, because the character doesn't have a shadow, and platforms have too soft edges - it's hard to see where the platform ends sometimes.
Nice submission. Don't see anything wrong with the controls. It gets real easy when you save money and buy those huge laser-waving walls. But for such a small game it's enough I think.
Visually outstanding! Overall kinda nice simple arcady thing with lots of levels and cool variations on the basic mechanic. Difficulty is very inconsistent though. Some early levels are really tough, while some later ones are very easy.
Well, mostly it was all about the time limit. We started on monday (with five days till the deadline), and the artist who made characters and their animations only had like one hour in the evening after the day job, and most of the work she did on the night before the deadline :) So different orbits for each character - yea, I wanted that, we didn't have time. Maybe after the jam scoring is over I'll just turn the sprite black-n-white and set the color in the editor, we'll see :)
Four days of coding for me (and one day of making music) - not sure I could've done more. There's lots of little stuff that could've been added - different character portraits for the dialogue, more dialogue variants, but in the end it all had to be cut... I'm not a professional programmer (yet?), maybe I work too slow, i dunno :)
Changing orbit speed is slow - yes, I wanted the player to feel that it's a PLANET. Even if it's little, it still should be slow and have some momentum. And yes, it helps keep the challenge.
Background and foreground graphics were indeed done by different people. We're not a professional game making studio so no art director who coulde've made sure all the art is consistent and done in one style throughout. And the 'girl' planets do have a kinda similar color palette :)
'Some asteroid hits in level 2 are not registered. So a planet is hit, but doesn't take dmg.' Umm... Are you sure? Because I've never encountered that, but there's another thing which may lead you to think that planets sometimes don't lose HP. A planet has a max of 4 hp. When its hp is more than 2, this excess hp is represented as a coloured aura around the planet. And there's a bug (and it should be fixed, I agree, I'll look into it after the jam scoring is over), which makes this aura shine bright and start slowly dimming only some time after the damage is registered. Like it has 4 hp, it got hit, and you don't see any difference right away, but the aura will change in a couple of seconds.
The idea is interesting but the gameplay is too difficult for me. Too fast. Even at the start I can't juggle both portals, I can put one of them and then try to catch the meteorites as close to the planet as I can by clicking the other button (if it wouldn't go straight for the planet, obviously). But then the speed increases, and it gets impossible. But the idea is cool :)
A really cool card-crafter. Got me instantly hooked, and I spent about 30 or 40 minutes and died to the final wave on my second playthrough. There definitely are some things that could be polished (what adszads here says), but for a jam game it's awesome!
Nice submission. Some levels seem to rely more on luck (no way I can predict so many player movements if I can't even see them most of the time), but it's an interesting puzzle game nonetheless ^_^
Wow. A really awesome and polished game with a cool concept, couple of interesting mechanics, great visuals, nice sound and music. Some rebalancing and problem fixing (when the balls get behind a whole cluster of planets, there's not much you can do other than hope, maybe some way to blow up the balls would help), some additional stuff and monetization ways, and it would be a great mobile time-killer!
Thank you for the feedback, I'm really glad you've liked it :)
I initially wanted to add one small episode for the epilogue (mostly just another dialogue), and make additional emotions for the planets, but we had to cut it, since we didn't have the time to make neither the coding part, nor the characters' animations for it. But further levels - no, I just wanted to make a small jam game and try my hand at some narrative stuff :)
Really good! Nice art style, unique bosses. Most of all I liked how you've made the attacks of Uranus and the sound they make. Like ahaha Uranus - that made me laugh XD
Quite nice :) Fix the bug, maybe rebalance and polish the spawn mechanic, add some sounds and graphic effects, and it might work as a full-fledged 2048 mobile clone. It definitely looks more appealing that the original )
Huh... I've looked up jacksepticeye, and no, it's not a reference to him :) It's just the character looks kinda British-gentleman-style, so I've used the only British-sounding phrase I know :)
Well, as I've said in one of the other answers to the comments, it does seem really difficult when you play it for the first time. It's not though, you can totally make everyone survive. After you get used to the controls and give it a couple of tries, of course. In my first iteration of the concept I wanted to make the game even more difficult, or introduce some cheating move or something, so that getting the good ending would be impossible. I wanted the game to make the person playing it feel something, experience some emotion, and if everyone survives, well, it just wouldn't have the desired impact. But then I've realised that it's turning out difficult enough, so that getting the good ending on the first try is still very unlikely. So I left it at that. :)
I understand that players struggle with the controls... This is a very vasluable feedback, I'll try to remember this next time. Like if I want to make a game that is difficult to control, I need to somehow justify and legitimize it. At the very least, mention it in a dialogue (along with a tutorial, yep).
This game seems very hard at first, maybe even unplayable. Well, lots of difficult to control planets with momentum and stuff, and you have to switch between them in time, and so on. But after a couple of tries, if you get the planets to the max in the first stage and then in the second stage after some of them get hit, be really careful and sometimes maybe even shield the wounded ones with healthy ones, you can even make it so that everyone survive. It's not an easy task, but completely doable.
If It's allowed to make updates after submission deadline (is it? I'm not sure), I'll definitely update the How to play section. Other than that... I'll try to keep that in mind for my next game. In-game tutorials and other stuff that teaches you how to play while you are already playing are really great, and I've never made anything of the kind yet.
And Solar Crew was designed as a small game... I'm not sure I can see a way or a reason to make it into something bigger...
A nice mechanic. It's a bit tedious having to remap the controls all over again on each map, but if it's a necessary part of the gameplay... if the game was larger, there should have been some solution to this. For a game made in three days this is a great submission )
