A Rift in Space by Erik McClure

[raw]
made by Erik McClure for LD22 (COMPO)
You are stranded alone, in an asteroid field, and must gather parts to repair your warp drive. However...?

This was heavily inspired by the amazing Metrojd mini-game by Daniel Remar. I wanted to do a lot more with it, and explore the concept more deeply, but halfway through I had to fix a broken audio engine and then realized my shader pipeline was much more broken than I had initially thought.

This game uses OpenAL for sound.

UPDATE: No more crash on exit or alt-tab breakage. I've fixed a couple of bugs in the graphics engine, optimized the physics and turned off vsync and yielding by default (although you can still change the settings in config.ini). I've also made it so you can turn off the audio and enable small nebulas, which makes run a lot faster on integrated GPUs.

Ratings

Coolness 30% 443
Overall 3.00 186
Audio 3.69 17
Community 2.63 277
Fun 2.93 132
Graphics 3.43 122
Humor 1.22 603
Innovation 2.36 370
Mood 2.86 184
Theme 2.64 345

Feedback

Cell
19. Dec 2011 路 15:19 UTC
Cool :), also nice textures :D
newton64
19. Dec 2011 路 15:20 UTC
Okay, some genuinely terrifying moments in there. Well played.

Were there plans to have more in the way of breakables/enemies or some such? I basically didn't shoot at all in the end.
eld
21. Dec 2011 路 11:43 UTC
What I liked the most was the absolute removal of both screen and audio at the event horizon, it made it even more scary.
Shigor
21. Dec 2011 路 14:23 UTC
I had to turn of postprocessing (at least I guess post=1 means that) - otherwise screen would show anything for just about half sec and then get all white.

Quits when I get swallowed by the black hole (i got tired of running away from it, so I tried what's going to happen) - is that intended, or bug?
馃帳 Erik McClure
21. Dec 2011 路 22:14 UTC
That's a weird bug with the postprocessing, I haven't seen that anywhere else. It seems similar to the other bug I had but it wasn't caused by postprocessing. The game is supposed to quit when you get swallowed by the black hole though.
AyCe
28. Dec 2011 路 01:19 UTC
I tried so hard to find all parts, but each time that black hole swallowed me :( Why does it follow you? That's unfair! ^^
Anyway, really good idea, graphics, audio and mood. :D
Hazard
30. Dec 2011 路 14:56 UTC
Nice game! The black hole is scary, but easy to get away from once you know what to expect. Could be more challenging.
caranha
02. Jan 2012 路 14:15 UTC
The music for this game was great. The controls were smooth as well! The game felt a bit on the easy side, though. Maybe if the enemy was more aggressive, or you removed the regenerative shields.

You should add timing score, to add some re-playability :-)
Ian Morrison
06. Jan 2012 路 19:13 UTC
I really liked the black hole, it was a neat audio, visual, and gameplay effect. However, the game as a whole was pretty straightforward and easy. You get the first core, freak out when the black hole first appears, and then the rest of it is just a leisurely stroll through the asteroid field to collect the remaining cores. It'd have been nice if there was something steadily ramping up the difficulty as you played... like the black hole getting bigger or faster, or more of them spawning nearby... or even just spawning the new cores close to the black hole.

The ending was also rather abrupt... a victory screen would have been nice, because getting kicked out of the application as soon as I won was pretty jarring.

Overall, though, I really like this entry.
Jeck
06. Jan 2012 路 19:16 UTC
The giant ball of doom was an awesome touch- it added some drama to an otherwise simple game.
bentosmile
07. Jan 2012 路 08:49 UTC
Eep, it crashed on start, sorry. No error, just stopped working. Using Windows Vista :)
馃帳 Erik McClure
08. Jan 2012 路 01:54 UTC
If the game crashes on startup, I recommend double-checking you have openAL installed.
Canyon
08. Jan 2012 路 10:52 UTC
I really like the parallax effect of the nebula interspersed with colour.
Canyon
08. Jan 2012 路 10:53 UTC
Also the music is fantastic