Space Is Dark by Peter Jonsson
A rather fast-paced game that sets you on a killing spree to survive. You are stranded on a ship inside an asteroid field. You have turrets that will protect you. There is, however, also an internal threat with attackers beaming in taking shot at you and your ship.
Your suit is losing power and you must scavenge batteries from the bodies of your slain foes. On death, you are presented with a glorious screenshot of your demise. This can easily be uploaded to your favorite social media for bragging rights.
Controls are WASD for movement (ENTER and SPACE in menus), and the mouse is for aiming. Shoot with left mouse button and heal ship systems with the right mouse button.
Your ship has consoles that will allow your turrets to fire. If they are taken out, so will you. You also have a basic life support module that will give you more power/health when approached. Furthermore, you have engines that will add to your score when operational. Finally, your ship has a generator that will disable everything if taken out. Failure to protect it will be punished.
Difficulty is your score and is calculated in a somewhat advanced way. Potential difficulty is given by distance traveled (ticking score) multiplied by a factor, but this is most often not the actual difficulty. True difficulty is given by the potential difficulty minus a fraction for each enemy alive, lowering it significantly and resulting in fewer spawns when you are in trouble. The maximum experienced difficulty is recorded for bragging convenience, but you should know that this can be no greater than 10.
Updates: [2017-08-07]: Fixed bug where randomness caused few enemies to spawn and enemy FoV to prevent them from finding the player.
| Windows | https://digitea.itch.io/space-is-dark |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/space-is-dark |
Ratings
| Overall | 155th | 3.795⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 134th | 3.692⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 345th | 3.179⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 322th | 3.641⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 318th | 3.795⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 195th | 3.526⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 310th | 2.656⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 287th | 3.472⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 62🗳️ | 11🗨️ |
Hello!
I like idea, music and art it's pretty good. I think you should make the game a little difficult. For example spawn more enemies or make them more powerful.
And I wish to reach some space station or planet (have some end of the game)
Audio and art are good, but there were a background track that feels to be a little bit annoying
After couple of minutes of exciting gameplay it seems like gameplay becomes flat, I think a more steep difficulty rise could possibly solve this
Great entry anyways!
Like the others have said maybe it gets stale maybe a bit too quick, but i still enjoyed it a lot!
Great entry!
My only issues are just regarding the graphics. Different sprites for the enemies rather than the protagonist with another color would have been better, and the should be an animation for climbing walls.
The introduction is simple but cool.
I think the difficulty does not increase fast enough. There is a little time I was wondering how long will I be playing.
Really impressed you put together such a tight package for a jam. Great work!
There is way more going on than one would anticipate from a LD game! Well done!
Also really cool to see someone working on AI and more detailed systems.
The screenshot function at the end is also a super great idea!
Thank you!
Probably my largest recommendation would simply be to expand on the existing features. More enemy types, maybe some sort of ship upgrade system, etc. Space Is Dark is a great framework that could and should certainly be expanded upon.
I do have my doubts about the algorithmically generated music, though. The sound design is otherwise solid.
- The game seriously needs to be able to be full-screened. Clicking outside of the game into another window happened multiple times, and is seriously detrimental to gameplay.
- The difficulty meter seems pretty meaningless. At the end, when there were about 7 guys shooting at me and I had no ability to recharge my health, the difficult registered at 3. When I was fighting just one guy and there was nobody else on the ship, it registered at 7. It doesn't really make sense.
Also, there was barely any challenge up until the very end - it went from a maximum of about four guys in one place to about seven. So it seems like the spawn rate gradually increased for most of the game, and then just shot up at the end. Which was a bit silly.
As it were, there should probably be more than 10 levels of difficulty as 10 is pretty easy to reach. (And, as previously mentioned, apparently I lost during a difficulty of 3, which seems a bit strange).
I can expand a bit on the difficulty thing; it is a modifier that determines how often enemies and asteroids will spawn. This is capped at 10, but even at the cap, the value may be above 10, still resulting in a difficulty of 10. When enemies do spawn, this modifier is lowered to allow for some time to tackle the enemies that are already there. It makes sense to have a cap, and I found 10 to be a pretty solid maximum previously. Otherwise, enemies will spawn everywhere all the time once you progress a bit further. The current system means that the actual difficulty will be increasing with time, but the number might still seem rather small - this is due to spawned enemies present in the ship.
Display settings and support for full screen can be found in the settings menu at the start of the game. Full screen is recommended as it is easy to click outside the game window without it.