Your website link is broken for me. I get this error:


@togis try now, it should work

@togis, ok now should be fix (don't know why embedded worked yesterday..), thanks for reporting ;)

Very nice atmosphere. Music and graphic suits the game. There is definitely room to expand on the idea.

Nicely done.

I filled the dome! Really liked the graphics and music. I felt the gravity was too strong (didn't feel like space). There didn't appear to be a terminal velocity - this led to death as it also appears you do not collide with the ground if falling faster than a certain speed. Possibly intentional, but if not maybe put a check for a max velocity.

Thanks for feedback @anarbitrarymustache! Yes we had some bugs here and there but we believe is more correct to let them there. Maybe I'm wrong but this is our first jam and we think code should not be touch after the time end. And there was plenty of other great stuff lay in our TODO list.
Hope you enjoy the final scene ;)

Hey I tried the game! I like the atmosphere (the music helps). Initially I didn't know how to collect gems but I worked it out. I think the gravity/movement speed is a bit high both upwards and downwards, which made it a bit frustrating to collect the gems. A bit of a weird thing to take notice of: intuitively I kept pressing SPACE to jump, but that's not actually the jump key; however, it does make the page scroll down to the bottom and made me fail a couple of times (not sure how to fix this but thought it was worth mentioning). The graphics fit well.

Good job:)

If you get time, please check out our game as well! :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

@deck @HomineLudens I saved it in my list, will give it another test :)

Cool game ! I liked the atmosphere of it, plot, music and visuals are great ! I found it a little bit too difficult though, essentially because I had the impression that filling the dome was going too slow and would take me hours to complete with this simple and in the end a bit repetitive task. Anyway I spent a long time playing and appreciated the moment. It's rated <3

The sound really added to this, great atmosphere! I found a controls a little fiddly, having to tap the jetpack button all the time, and the fx around the laser kept playing even if the laser was out of juice. The lower part of the world added a great sense of mystery to what you were doing, but was a little bit of a red herring as I kept going down there to poke at it, before getting back to my gem collection duties and seeing the final reveal. Good work.

Pretty cool game, though it took me a second to understand what I needed to do. The graphics look good :)

I like the atmosphere and fill of the theme! Collecting gems feels a bit frustrating but still playable.

Very atmospheric, and nice graphics too. My only complaint is that the mining laser is really frustrating to use. I often couldn't tell if I was making any progress in lasering gems.

Atmosphere was great, resource collection could've been juicier!

Took me a while of mining into the ground to realise you had to walk off the edge of the asteroid and fly under it. Apart from that fun little game, could have been more indication that the laser was working on the gems though. Currently quite hard to work out what you are mining.

cool graphics and audio, nice idea. Gameplay was a bit repetitive and too long in my opinion. In the beginning I didn't know what to do. Took me a while to understand that i have to go to the side to get under the surface. Nice game anyway!

If you want, you can try out our game here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/42-mikronikus
Feel free to leave some feedback :)

Very good atmosphere and graphics. Music fit perfectly too. The gameplay is good but repetitive a little bit too fast, and little more feedback when collecting gems would be very nice too. Overall, pretty good game with a lot of ways to expand the gameplay. If thats really your first jam, you guys have potential :)

Cool graphics and theme use ! I felt frustated by the laser range but maybe it was meant to play with a controller ?

Anyway, nice work !

**Thanks you all! :relaxed: I'm touched to finally receive some feedback, and yours are all welcome. **

Mostly we run out of time and where all exhausted to clean up the gameplay, to be honest we play it just a couple of time to be sure it could be finish :grin:

**Next time we'll do it better, promise!**

Nice game! Had fun playing it to the end.
I like the art, music and gameplay.
but it feels a little bit repetitive.
loved the space physics. nicely done!
Though it would be nice if there was some kind of feedback when you managed to collect a gem.

Very fun. The graphics are beautiful. Great work!

I filled the dome! I would tend to agree with others' comments that the gathering was interesting the first couple times but got old quickly. I *did* like the mechanic of trying to stay afloat and mining at the same time... I wonder if some environmental hazards would have made it more dangerous/interesting?

The graphics were excellent, especially for a jam! Nice work! The audio was also good, it fit the mood but I did expect some sort of audible indicator when gems were collected (a "schwing" or "schwoop"?). For the UI, I always think it's useful to imagine how you'd communicate the same information to the player without bars and labels--could the dome have an animation of filling up over time? Could your backpack denote how much of a crystal type you collected? That kind of thing--the less HUD the better usually. It also adds some nice juice to an otherwise static environment. Obviously in a jam/compo it can be tough to polish every aspect of a game but if you want to take this beyond LD, think about some ideas!

The controls were pretty good, I also had trouble at first figuring out how to get down or where to go--I repeatedly tried pressing Down or Space to no avail. If a player presses down when standing on the ground, maybe you should drop below, similar to a lot of platformers. Space was probably the most obvious choice for jetpack but I eventually realized it was the Up arrow.

Great job for a first jam, guys! Keep it up, you definitely have the skills to make some good games!

This was nice. I have no complaints. Make more. :)

Overall i liked the game, but there are some points which i did not enjoy, too. The fire radius seems pretty small, the collecting radius, too and it takes a pretty long time to collect gems. It's hard to stand still in the air while performing the collecting. I think the mouse is pretty unnecessary, mining in four directions plus jetpack (space?) would have been enough, in combination with a bit more firing/collecting radius. The music is very good and creates a space mood. The sound effects are fitting (i missed a 'motivating' sound for returning gems). I did not play to the end, because i was mining for some minutes, some progress was made but still no gem loading bar was fully charged. A minor thing: i did not like the Star Wars font and HAL cameo, because your graphics are good, you could have used something original instead. This is meant to be constructive, like i said, overall i liked it. :smiley:

I've played till the end, but cannot tell that gameplay was cool, it's not challenging or relaxing, it just takes time to collect those crystals.

I like that you put a lot of work into it, so I'm giving you an honest feedback :)

issue no.1 - it's not intuitive how to begin. Since the game takes base mechanic from 'MotherLoad', I expected that with laser I could drill the asteroid and get deeper, but couldn't. Only after accidentally falling through ground when I was checking how high I can get I discovered, that player is supposed to omit the 'grass' layer and use jetpack to get deeper.

issue no.2 - that accidental falling through ground - hitbox check fails if velocity is too high

issue no.3 - you cannot die when getting too far up, only down (getting too far away shoul mean game over regardless of direction)

issue no.4 - feedback on gathering the crystals. It's not really clear if I'm doing anything with the laser, so i just fire it near the crystals - sometimes gauges in my backpack show that somethin'g gathered, sometimes they don't.


All that said, It's a neat idea and it's worth developing further, but you should be wary not to end up with MotherLoad clone. The mood sets in pretty quickly, so I expect you'll manage to do it :)

The mechanic which involves balancing of hovering and gathering is fun, and really could be the central point, just make the feedback more pronounced and throw in some variations, monologue or something to make it more alive.

Cheers!

Again thanks you all for constructive feedback!

Special thanks to @kamranicus @zorg and @takusan, We really appreciate yours effort to improve our gameplay.
Your deep review show us what we should have make better, next time our prioritization will focus more on this. Your precise suggestions fit perfectly with our feelings about our "game" (except we didn't know about MotherLoad) so I'm sure next time will be better.

Right now Team is not in the mood to keep on developing this entry, but we sharp our knifes for LD39!

Good luck with your entries too!

Although not entirely scientifically accurate, it was a nice experience ;) The soothing soundtrack and simple graphics definitely contributed to that.

Hi guys. I really like the mood of this game - I think it's very relaxing and the music goes very well with the game. Also just a minor detail but I really like how's the asteroid shaped. Good job!

By the way, i wanted to check your source code but the link you provided gives me a 404 error.

Javascript ftw! Nice little game! I filled the dome ^^

Hi @jaimuepe , just fix the source code link. Thanks to point this out!

Cool game, made it till the end.

But I missed some challenge. The tasks are easy, but time consuming. Maybe you could add some new mechanics, like enemies or the need to discover the minerals before extracting them.

Great pixel art!

Cool graphics, good atmosphere (particularly liked the chill soundscape and stars in the background). Movement was a bit funky to wrestle with and I feel like it felt a bit grindy mostly because the mechanic didn't have any secondary challenge to it because it was quite difficult to run out of oxygen. Overall really good though!

Thanks @eric-florio and @sleepystudios .
@deck made a great job with pixels. He's really good at drawing. Believe it or not it's just a couple of months he start sketch something..
And also our sociopathic musician Roby gift us a great sound track. He was also the only one who wake up at 3 o'clock in the night to see the theme (and send us a message towards 4 AM to keep us updated..)

Everything is working nicely, so if this is your first game jam - congratulations! I especialy love the mood, there is a good feeling of being lost alone in space. And sci-fi movies references are also nice;) Gameplay could be a little more intense, more challenging.

Its a nice game, its so entertaining ^^
Its a little bit dificult know how to play without a tutorial or something. But i had fun playing this game :3

Great entry! Was really fun and I was able to beat it. Really cool idea and executed perfectly. Only things I didn't like were the awkward radius for the cursor and the lack of instruction so I had to figure things out for myself, but it wasn't too complicated so it wasnt much of a hassle to figure out how to get stuff.

Nice job! It was quite relaxing and a great entry overall. I loved the ending. It could use a bit more of a progression. Currently the story arc was only in that the resources got more scarce, which was interesting, and you generally had to go lower (and more dangerously) towards the base of the mountain to get the last of it. If you had more time I think it would be awesome to add something more to the rising action. Maybe pieces of the asteroid are starting to chip away.

Controls felt pretty good. Maybe limit the acceleration so you don't zip past the top quite so easily. Also it would be cool if the landing had to be gentle, like in Lander.

Reading your post mortem, i expected a very unfinished game. But it is very nice and moody! The sound delivers on the loneliness of the small world.
It seems you already got most feedback, i agree on: The start is not intuitively clear and the grind is too long. i would have liked to play it to the end, but it seems this will tak 15 minutes doing the same thing i did in the first 2 minutes. It is fun in the first minute, but after that the slow progress without a intermediate reward is kind of disheartening. Overall, a very nice entry!

Ah, forgot one: From a gameplay perspective, having oxy+booster+laser makes no sense. All 3 sever the same purpose, it could just as well be "energy" or something, getting depleted over time a little and when using the laser or booster faster.

Nice, nice pixel art and the soundtrack was great and gave the required space atmosphere, sadly it didn't play for the whole game, maybe some problem with the looping. Was pretty fun, and I played till the end just to see the ending, but was a little bit repetitive and of lack of challenge apart from keeping an eye on the jet fuel. Anyway overall still pretty good, congrats for your first jam.

As many have said, the pixel art is nice, as is the ambient soundtrack. A bit more variety/challenge would be good, and less of the "get stuff, go back to base to refuel" would be nice for continued development. I like the flying mechanics, it feels like lunar lander.

Nice little game with good sounds and space themed music. Cool little hal reference also lol. The gravity acceleration is a bit high, as sometimes I will go flying up or down which makes it kinda hard to collect gems. The game could maybe use some more ways to collect gems and potentially some hazards to make the game feel more interactive. Nice job for your first submission though!!!