Exponential Maintenance Engineer by nintendoeats
A horrible sound behaviour under certain physics situations has been removed by limiting how often boxes will play their drop sounds.
Oh no! Our planet has far too many squares and cubes on it. We are running out of space for all these objects which have an area that can be described by the length of any given side to the correct power. Your job is to get rid of them. We are firing rockets at the junkyard world to help blow up the garbage, but our military aren't very good shots and always seem to miss the planet's surface.
There are 5 kinds of boxes, which drop faster as the game progresses
Just Boxes: They're just boxes.
TNT: Explodes when near another explosion.
2-part Explosives: If parts one and two touch they will explode.
Decay: If these are destroyed they are worth no points. If they stay on your planet for 15 seconds you will get many points.
Points are gained in powers by blowing up boxes. Squares give you their length squared, cubes their length cubed and decay objects their length to the fourth power because they also have a lifespan in the time dimension (unless they blow up, in which case you cause a nuclear disaster and get no points).
You lose if an object lands outside of the circle!
360/XBONE controller and keyboard are supported. Both are good but I prefer controller.
360/XBONE controls
start: pause and play
left stick: vertical and horizontal rotation
right stick: vertical and roll rotation
B: revert the sphere to the starting position
Keyboard controls
escape: pause and play
WASD: vertical and horizontal rotation
direction keys: vertical and roll rotation
Space: revert the sphere to the starting position
Alt+F4 to quit (at least in windows, for whatever reason the quit button wasn't working.
These are add-on modes and make the game a bit more difficult.
Crazy rockets means that the rockets can cross anywhere over the planet's surface.
Crazy boxes means that the boxes will come from any side of the planet.
Leave a thoughtful comment and I will respond in kind!
Ratings
| Overall | 388th | 3.222⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 283th | 3.25⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 137th | 3.556⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 649th | 2.111⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 435th | 2.938⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 206th | 3.167⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 272th | 3.083⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 34🗳️ | 42🗨️ |
this felt really nice to play. i can see you taking this in many new places. thank you for the lovely game :)
(also, I liked the music)
### What I liked
- Placing blocks in the paths of the stormtrooper-accurate rockets was a lot of fun.
- Calculating my score before hand was also great. I'm a bit biased towards games with numbers.
- The soothing music.
### What could use some improvement
- The art didn't seem to fit in well to me. I would have preferred a the objects had flat textures.
Thanks for a fun game. I'm looking to ~~steal~~ be inspired by the core mechanic.
The graphics look kind of unfinished and I also got a sound glitch on Mac (induced by a small physics glitch, with object bouncing around a bit). But it's still a very original and good game. :)
I like to play without reading out-of-game instructions. Which maybe was not the best call here... I was confused by many things, notably how to make the - and = commmands work, as I don't think they seemed to do anything. "Where are my crazy rockets?" I wanted to know. And sometimes items were cubes, but other times flat panels. Regardless, I sure liked swinging the planet around to ram a nice tall stack of blocks into a rocket and blast them off into space!!
The calm music was a nicely juxtaposed with the explosive mathematics.
I played on Windows and experienced no sounds glitches.
OK I just read through the instructions and tried again - but I did worse, not better! A fluke? Or is that I became too distracted by stacking in a certain way, and lost focus on making use of the rockets??
An interesting entry that drew me in, nice work.
I've found the sound glitch. It will not be fixed, because it requires new sound-playing or physics code which I expect would be outside the rules.
I really liked the mellow groove of the music. It definitely helped take the edge off the learning curve. Had a ton of problems with the physics just pushing stuff everywhere. I absolutely adore the analog dial digit display.
Something about the presentation/interaction of the game makes it really hard to play. It could be that the lighting of the planet makes it sometimes difficult to see what types crates are. It might also be because the items fall from the top and so you don't know exactly where they will land. Perhaps if the camera were top-down (and so things fall from the 'front') it would have been more intuitive. :shrug:
That said, I like the mechanics of matching/timing the boxes for explosions and score. There's something great here. :thumbsup:
The physics are super hacky. Gravity is turned off for all the objects. There is a list of objects being pulled towards the planet, and another of the ones being pushed away. Every fixed update a force is manually applied to each object that pushes it towards or away from the sphere.
When an object is falling initially, it just moves at a standardized rate. When it collides with an object, it is parented to the sphere and enters a mode where it is on the gravity list. It checks periodically (I think I set it to 0.5 seconds) if its velocity is less than a particular amount. When that returns true, the object is taken off the gravity list.
Every time an object hits another it records that as the object it is sitting on. When an object is moved or destroyed, it tells the rest of the objects about it using BroadcastMessage() (easy since they are all children of the sphere). If an object has recorded the destroyed object as its support, that object goes back into gravity mode. I tried doing this with parenting, which was a better system, but it caused weird scaling issues.
Kind of like a 3D tetris?
I will admit, though, I tried a few minutes of gameplay and never really got a feel for it. Like, I know the 1s and 2s are supposed to match, but there were so many white boxes I never managed to get very far score-wise because I'd be out of space in no time.
**EDIT:** It works now :)
A very strong time killer overall, might get back to it later!
Quite a bit of fun, trying to fit in as many blocks as possible, aiming to blow up the TNT and not to blow up the plutonium. Good stuff!
Using escape to start is pushing things too far though...