Nice work! The premise is quite deep, and will take some time to explore. The sound-visualizing is a nice gag.

Thanks Matthias :) Let me know if you have any suggestions, I want to keep working on this after the competition's over.

Ah crap, quick note - the UI gets messed up at a resolution lower than 1280x720 just in case anyone is having a tough time reading the interface text. Is it too late to submit fixes for stuff like that?

So many options, love deep games! Bit of a busy UI though

AlwaysGeeky - Agreed, I threw a lot of the UI together last minute without much thought. Should I put some background UI images in to separate the UI from gameplay? I kinda like the alpha/cutout aspect though, so the UI doesn't obscure objects ingame. Maybe just repositioning the text in a more grokkable manner would help. If you have any suggestions let me know!

I liked the asthetics and the audio track modulating the ship and sun. The controls seemed broken though - having the mouse rotate the view AND select planets was awkward - the mouse cursor could have been bound to the screen centre or rotation could have used a seperate control. As a result, it wasn't as fun as it could be. It would be cool if something more happened when you save humanity as well :)

I was playing a bit of Planetship and hope i can give you some constructive critic.

* The sun and the Planetship are changing/flickering in size all the time.
* The UI is at some points a bit messy, it looks like the numbers are "cut off".(might be resolution)
* The combat are a bit weird I don't know how I should attack a hostile planet.
* I would like to see planet-formations be more solid- one planet per orbit -
* I also would like it if i could click on the small planets a bit more easier.
But so far I have enjoyed your game.

Here is just a few ideas/suggestions i have come up with.
* More options to do other than scan and so forth.
* Be able to create an army of ships but with your planetship(kinda like an Aircraft carrier) as your base they will defend you and your allies. (to spice up combat)
* Asteroids, gas giants, gravity, moons, spacestations, nebula's, Dyson spheres, black holes, Supernova stars and binary starsystems.(To make adventure more interesting)
* Terraforming of planets to make room for the ever growing population. ( The game have some uninteresting dead planets)
* Diplomacy, the galactic council, different factions, space bandits/pirates.
* Ancient civilizations that have died out but have left things behind...

When it comes to the UI i have no idea what to do.

p.s How should I do when encountering a hostile planet?
p.p.s Love your game and hope to se more. Feel sad what i cant vote.

Wow! I really appreciate the feedback everybody :) As for shooting planets I didn't want this to be a pewpew type of game, more exploration and discovery. The ship and sun's scale are being modulated by the audio peaks in the background music, so if you have your sound turned off it's going to look like they're flickering for no reason.

D.man - great ideas!! I'm going to try to implement all of that and put you in the credits! :)

When you encounter a hostile planet, just stay away from the missiles and if shit gets too real just hop through a warp gate and hopefully you'll get sent to a safer system.

Here's a how to play / commentary youtube post I made for the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/planetship-how-to-play-commentary/

<a href="http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/planetship-how-to-play-commentary/">http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/planetship-how-to-play-commentary/</a>

[Comments and ratings from this account come from various team members]
The idea for this game seems pretty cool and the sounds were good, but I couldn't really get into this game at all. I even restarted a few times to read the controls screen to see if there was something I was missing. The controls themselves seemed awkward with the mouse being used for look and the cursor at the same time. Hope this doesn't come off as too harsh as I do like the idea and think it could be cool with a bit of work.

Excellent name. Fantastic visual aesthetic.

Pretty good, kinda baffled by the goal or anything related to it though. Could really do with a tutorial

Jack - I posted a how to play video 3 posts up from your comment.

As has been said, the mouse controls are a bit awkward, but this game is a neat idea. I feel like it would be better with more kinds of things populating the universe than some planets that increase stats and some planets that make you die and some planets with health refill- erm, intelligent life. Exploring games are better the more stuff there is to find.

VDOgamez - I agree, I have a huge unfinished todo list that I wanted to knock out but I only had enough time to get the basics going.

It is my solemn vow to finish the rest of this game. I had so much fun making it, putting polish and real content in would make it ROCK!

I played this for like 3 hours. Ran out of years once, got fried by the sun a couple times, and finally made it. Good fun!

Kharza - Right on! That's so cool to hear :) Thanks for the high praise, I'm glad you got some good runs in!

Looks cool, sorry to say I skipped it for not having a web version.

It has an interesting execution. I found it a little confusing, but maybe I just didn't read the instructions properly. I thought the planets could have used some variety, maybe using procedrual mapping would be a good thing?

Had a BSoD, but I'm not sure of it was this. The game is really neat and original. The gameplay felt a little empty, just scanning, occasionally mining, until a green planet pops up. Perhaps with some more polish or content it could be a more robust game.

Awesome entry overall! The audio, graphics and mood were all great. Liked the sun and ship moving to the beat.

It took me a couple of plays to figure out what was going on. I thought the game was too long. A habitable planet doesn't spawn often enough. Precision clicking gets tedious after a while. Although, I did manage to save humanity w/ 35 years left.

Good job!

A bit too much going on for how briefly I can play each game, but on the other hand--that is ridiculously impressive! I might have to play it some more when I have more time.

Really interesting concept and impressive work for 48hrs! Very stylish, very atmospheric, didn't entirely fathom what I was doing (sending off the thorium probes and away teams didn't seem to really do anything?) but thoroughly enjoyed pootling about the universe. Hope you continue working on this post-contest, it's got real potential.

Great feedback y'all, I have a lot of work to do before this thing is primetime.

Jedi - 35 Years left? That was a close shave! I think adding more content between start and finding a habitable planet will make the exploration more fun. It takes 5-20 minutes for me to find one and I've been playing non-stop so I could see it taking a while on your first time.

Jeffalisk - The shuttles pick up crew from populated planets and the miners pick up thorium from the blue text planets. The stats in the upper left will increase when you successfully land the correct one. I have a few ideas on making that more obvious, I'll give them a try!

Love the look you've got going with the graphics & the audio is really good too. The gameplay was a bit confusing (to me) and I died pretty quickly - I think there's just so much going on on-screen that it gets a bit overwhelming!

Great game concept. Unfortunately the mouse-look doesn't work when running in Wine so I couldn't get very far.
The game UI was a bit confusing. Its good you made a gameplay video.

Sounds like a cool idea! I'm going to download it tomorrow when (hopefully) my Internet connection is working faster than 100 bytes a second.

I liked the graphics, you used well the components of Unity.

I could't find an habitable planet :P
I'd like to have feedback when sending survey teams and mining bots.

Oye Beto - I also wrote a medium sized pile of code, I included it along with the game if you want to check it out.

There are probably too many factors for finding a habitable planet (atmosphere contents,vegetation,water,near earth scale, uninhabited), I'm thinking of making it easier and easier to find one as you scan and hop through systems but that would detract from the pure chaos of it all...

What do you guys think?

I like this game a lot! It's very deep for a LD game, and quite addictive. The graphics are nice, especially the planet trails, and they add to the gameplay too.

Since you are going to work more on the game, I have some critique.
The control scheme was a little bit annoying, the ship often got in the way of a planet I was trying to click, and the mouse sensitivity was too high. I think holding the right mouse button to rotate would be better, so that you are free to move the mouse.
All the scan text cluttered up the screen after a while, perhaps you could mark scanned planets with just a circle or something like that, and show info when you hover them with the mouse.
Also, a web player link would be nice for rating. Sometimes I can't be bothered to download games when rating. Some must be installed and stuff which is a hassle. This one looked interesting from the YouTube video and I saw it was in Unity so I downloaded it.

It's a very good game, I'm interested to see what you will do with it!

Crap!! I really wanted to play this one, but it crashes when I try to run it. ;(

Danik - Thanks for the advice, I might use icons instead of giant text blocks to fix the clutter and the latest version I put together lets you hold spacebar to cut out camera rotation which makes picking stuff with the mouse much easier. Wish I had thought about it during the 48 hours!

As far as the web player goes I tried it last week but my game always loads super slow and either looks awful with the graphics settings turned down or doesn't run in half the browsers I tested with the graphics settings turned up so I'm sticking with native platform builds. If I had focused on the web player to begin with I think it would have worked out ok though. I'll keep it in mind for next time :)

Thanks again for the suggestions!

Yay, I saved humanity! Great game, you should totally make an extended version where you can make colonies and then start wars with hostile planets!

Neat game. Exploring was actually pretty fun. I found it a bit difficult to select planets, since moving the mouse changed the perspective simultaneously. Maybe add an option for a selection mode, where maybe holding escape stops the mouse from changing your view.

The screen also got cluttered rather quickly through exploring dense galaxies.

Neat concept! Needs a little more work to make it fun though ;) Searching for a habitable planet just tends to get tedious real fast. I guess it's kind of the same way in real life, but...xD

Excellent work, dude! Supercool what you've done in the compo, fun to explore :)

Shame that the texts are really small on high resolution, The game itself was funny

Thanks everyone for being honest and helpful, I'll post a video of my progress so far in a bit. You were all super rad for playing and giving me important criticism, it will be a much better game because of it!