World Keep-Away by dracominer

Info and Links
Link to Itch.io page: https://dracominer.itch.io/world-keep-away
Presented by The Budgie Birds!
The premise of the game is that the Earth has been shrunk down to the size of a ball. Astronauts on the moon think that it is a soccer ball and want to use it as such. You play as the astronaut who sees it as the Earth. Help the earth to escape and make it out alive yourself.
Source code for the game is hosted on GitHub here: https://github.com/dracominer/ludum-dare-38-World-Keep-Away My game library I made and am using for this is here: https://github.com/dracominer/DNA-Game-Builder
Screenshots:

Ratings
| Overall | 699th | 2.721⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 494th | 2.952⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 592th | 2.714⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 342th | 3.523⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 598th | 2.822⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 438th | 2.628⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 69th | 3.756⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 499th | 3.024⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 110🗳️ | 85🗨️ |
The turrets sometimes felt a little weird because when they shoot an astronaut it spawns again ahead of you and then its harder to dodge his shots.
Few bugs I encountered: Sometimes an astronaut spawned inside a wall. You can do these "super jumps" when you are close to a wall (intended or not?). I never finished the game because in the 3rd level (I think it was the third, maybe final level?) I got outside the map or something and the game crashed.
I didn't really understand why the background was static and the platforms were the only thing moving.
But the game is fun, and the turrets defending yourself is a really nice touch.
Congratulations on this entry =)
Graphics could have been bit better but overall game is fun
Concerning the music, I got a picture in my head of you trying to clean a piano and recording it by accident. Later finding the piano-cleaning-song and thinking to yourself “That will do”
I had a hard time getting to the tutorial-screen due to the buttons being a bit offset, when I got to the tutorial i was kind of confused. I think there was some lack of information, bigger and brighter text might do. By the time went by I learnt how to play. And it was fun!
Overall the game was kind of challenging but on the same time pretty balanced.
I’ll give you some extra credit for developing this game in java!
Have an awesome day, and hope to see you in the next jam!
// Isak (one half of [LiquidBrain](https://ldjam.com/users/liquidbrain/))
The control is a bit clumsy, and the physics doesn't feel realistic - though I've never been to the moon, what do I know?
I'm a bit irritated by the um, background music though. I'm giving a 1 stars for audio and 5 stars for mood because the bad music *did* make me feel the panic & stress equivalent to someone running with the fate of the world in his hands.
The slow fall was fun to play with. I found a secret tactic to abuse: the jumps can be stacked. You can stand touching a 1-high block, and jump but hold the jump key down. You will do your normal jump from the ground, but then as your feet pass the height of the 1-block, you get a second impulse applied, and you rocket upward. Kind of cool, I definitely used this.
If I could change something here it would be the bullets. They are very small and when they touch you there's not a real big effect, so they kind of feel wimpy. I wish they were bigger and nastier.
The music is gr8.
:clap: :clap:
The jump/run part was a bit clumsy, but overall I'd like to see a concept with turrets as defense mechanism in a platformer expanded.
I liked the premise of getting people to stop doing sports with things you care for and have to run away from them and I didn't really mind the glitches in the controls that terribly where sometimes I got some mega-jumps that shot me far up. Neither that the jump felt rough. It was fine that the sporters just kept spawning around even if there was no real reason withing the game world why they were allowed to do that and kind of fun when they got stuck in blocks. It was a bit unfair when so much time was falling and enemies spawning that it was really hard to not be shot by them, but on the other hand life was really plenty.
However, to really make the game stand out, I think these issues would need attention. One thing that could be cool would be to give the player a sprint (with cool-down) followed by shorter slower than normal speed.
Good work.
* It's not clear to the player what the goal is (the tutorial doesn't actually have a green 'goal' area, so even the player makes use of the tutorial, they still won't know what they're trying to do)
* Even once you've beat one level and have seen a goal, it's really hard to know _where_ the goal is
* I played for a fair while and _never_ figured out why I could sometimes jump really high, but most of the time couldn't.
* The enemies are crazy unpredictable.
* The turrets don't seem to help at all, as far as I can tell; they shoot the enemies, but that never seems to actually matter.
* The health meter is actually not super obvious; Besides being somewhat hard to read, the fact that it's in the lower corner and has a decimal point made me assume for a long time that it was an FPS counter. Now, of course, in a sense that's my fault for making unwarranted assumptions, but that's how it is with UI design.
* The levels are _reaaaaaally_ big! Really, really, really big! Too big! Like I suspect many others did, I ended up falling for long periods of time in level 3, assuming I was falling down a bottomless pit waiting for the game to realize so I could die and restart the level. But eventually, I hit some blocks. Later, I fell again, for at least 20 seconds, and then still hit more blocks. This happened often enough that eventually I was trained to just assume there would be more blocks. That was the point I was finally wrong, and died. Good level design generally means that the player can tell what's a hazard and what's not (in most cases, there are exceptions but I don't think this is one of them).
* When I died, I was returned to the main menu, instead of starting the level over. With levels as long as this, actually, even starting the level over wouldn't be that great, you'd need a checkpoint system.
All that said, I do think this game has promise, and the premise is super cute. It's gonna take some time, though, if you want to polish it.
And the big levels are amazing ;)