Terraform by Hi Im Greg
Made by Aaron Baumbach and Greg Lee.
Special thanks to Steve Banks and a heap load of caffeine.
The desktop build (just below the webplayer on the itch.io page) looks much better and runs a lot smoother. If you have the time, I recommend downloading that rather than playing in a browser.
This was our first jam in UE4, and although we hit a few hurdles along the way ranging from rigging problems to windows deciding to aggressively update for an hour and a half, we had an absolute blast.
We plan on doing a bit of a breakdown retrospective at some point in the future to go through some of the successes and failings in this jam.
Hopefully we'll get a bit of time and do a post-jam version too, which will hopefully contain some of the features we had to drop and have more progression, especially later in the game!
Thanks to everyone who took the time to check out Terraform!
Creative Commons Audio
Music from https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/track/deep-blue
SFX from Freesound.org
Post Jam Changes
- High quality light map bake
- Html5 optimisation
| Source Code | https://github.com/Almax27/LD42-Running-Out-Of-Space |
| HTML5 (web) | https://almax.itch.io/ld42-running-out-of-space |
| Windows | https://hi-im-greg.itch.io/ld42-terraform |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/terraform |
Ratings
| Overall | 44th | 4.095⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 82th | 3.875⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 229th | 3.595⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 37th | 4.3⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 30th | 4.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 233th | 3.556⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 2🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
What I like:
- The mechanics were pretty fun to toy with.
- I really like the aesthetic. It's not the best but it has a certain sense of harmony among the elements.
- It was a pleasant surprise to see the 2nd island (is there a 3rd?)
What I don't:
- I think the biggest issue of the game is the camera. It's too hard to see anything after some kill, and you always end up in the south corner of the island defending.
- The death block thingies is cool aesthetically but not cool when visualizing exactly *where* the death zone is. One slight mistep and you're death T_T
- The art / graphics
- The concept/gameplay
Possible bugs found
- When the enemies get close enough, they burst into a big block w/out me shooting them. Is this normal?
Suggestions:
- A health system as oposed to a "one-hit-KO" system.
- more UI and GUI
- Experiment with first person camera
Overall, was really enjoyable to play.
BTW, What engine/framework did you use. I'm interested.
Enemies generate blocks no matter how they die, via self destruct or you shooting them. This was to ensure the level fills up with blocks quickly and gives you a reason to run away from them, it's effectively their "attack".
We agree with the one kit KO being frustrating, though more due to the fact that there is little to no feedback and can feel very unfair. We have an idea for a 3 strike health system with rag dolling that might work. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
What GUI do you feel was missing?
The game was made in UE4, and the source is [available on github](https://github.com/Almax27/LD42-Running-Out-Of-Space)
Ultimately I had fun with it though :) 
However, right now it lacks a sense of closure. Some kind of objective on each island and a boss at a third island would be nice.
It also feel borderline punishing since there's no way for the player to clear the blocks. Some sort of block-destroying blast that needs to be recharged by killing enemies would probably keep the game going longer and also reward the player, giving some incentive to keep killing the enemies.