Asteroid by cheetah
Description
You are the head of research group, based on asteroid belt. Finally you and your group reached perspective asteroid, and prepared to set up camp. Maybe you made a mistake in the calculations or something else happened, but the surface could not stand the landing of you ship. You have few resources, some scientific equipment, but land is literally falling down. Help will arrive in about 10 days. Can you survive and save your crew and scientific data? You have to build buildings, gather resources and make decisions, but remember, at any moment everything can collapse.
Tips
- Events appears randomly, so you can be hit by bad rng.
- From the start focus on oxygen production. Biodome requires gas, so you need to build some harvesters and refineries first.
- Oxygen tank capacity is 1000. All excess oxygen will be lost. Be sure that you have some spare oxygens tanks in case of desctruction.
Gameplay

| HTML5 (web) | https://cheetah.github.io/ld42/ |
| Source code | https://github.com/cheetah/LudumDare42 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/asteroid |
Ratings
| Overall | 720th | 3.266⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 930th | 2.875⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 624th | 3.141⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 509th | 3.594⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1037th | 2.682⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 745th | 2.286⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 776th | 2.919⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
@enver-arco, really good suggestion, adjacency bonus definitely will reward careful camp planning.
@lisa, as you correctly noted, UI needs heavy improvement.
@goda, I'm not satisfied how text looks too, in many ways due to wrong font choice, i think. Balance also needs polishing, I made most of events in a rush, and I just didn't have time to test it properly.
- `You have a few resource` => `You have few resources`
- `But the land is literally falls down` => `But the land is literally falling down`
- `Use alpha keys` => `Use number keys` Alpha keys are letters, numeric/number keys are exactly that, alphanumeric are both...
The FTL like events were cool but it would have been nice to be able to select the options also with mouse since the whole gameplay besides them is mouse based. Loads of typos in these too. And there should have been random possible outcomes and more of them overall. It was kinda boring to get same one four times in a row and you already knew the correct answer.
The font was also quite hard to read. The look was otherwise pretty clean. I'm not sure about the color choices though. Blue and green, specifically seemed very close to being pure colors which don't look that great at least in my opinion. A great tool for getting nice looking color combinations is https://coolors.co/app which I actually used myself this jam.
The gameplay is quite confusing and demanding at first. It throws a bit too much at the player right from the get go. And so much text everywhere. I think using icons for the resources etc would have made it less of a read fest and everything would have been faster to figure out with a quick glance.
See how much easier stuff like would be to make sense of in a quick look (obviously adding tooltips etc would be necessary too). And that "can be placed on" text was extra filler too that was already more clear from the color.
---
:walking: 5
:meat_on_bone: 65
:wind_blowing_face: 10
:gem: 50
:fuelpump: 20
:radioactive: 55
---
30 :gem: 10 :fuelpump:
**Biodome**
Produces :meat_on_bone: and :wind_blowing_face:
---
Also you should dim or somehow make sure it's easier to see that you can't afford a building, it was way unnecessarily tedious to looks at the prices from the wall of text and then check my resources from the other side of the screen. I'd also highlight the newest message on that log thing somehow when it appears for a while to make it easier to notice. Something like bold text, differently colored background and even a sound effect. There were also needlessly lot of entries on that log.
It was also quite annoying to have to click the building again if I wanted to build several of them in a row. And it was very easy to missclick while placing buildings. I wouldn't have made the building follow the cursor, just made the button for it seem activated (more so than that blue border) and focused the tile I'm going to build on with like a white outline or something.
And once gotten the hang of, it was way too easy. On my final (and successful) run, I had pretty much already beat it few days in and then just had to wait around for ages doing nothing (except for those infrequent prompts which I had abundance of resources for) for the inevitable victory. I actually tabbed out of the game and started writing this post while waiting.

And as expected...

Anyways, good job!
At first i'm sorry for all the issues with texts, i'm not an english speaker at all, and i don't have anybody near me who can readily help me with texts. I wrote most of events in a rush by last 3-4 hours, so I did the best I could, but texts are still very clunky.
I had to replace icons with text because of i'm not an artist at all. I have spent couple of hours just to figure out how to draw this isometric landscape, and gave up. I also agree with all the issues with UI, there was a lot of things I had to sacrifice just to finish on time. All the UI and graphics was done in first iteration, and i just had no time to return and tweak it. Also i tried to change font in the middle of last day to make text more readable, but with the new font i was forced to change positions for the most of elements, and i left everything as it was.
The same problem is with the balance. Randomized events outcome initially was the core idea of the events, but again, i had no time to implement it.
Anyways, in many aspects this game was first for me. This is my first experiment with SDL2 + Emscripten, first more or less finished game, first Ludum Dare submission. Developing it was really inspiring, as receiving reviews is. I think that after a while i will make post LD version of this game, and surely return in december with the new, more polished, ludum dare game.
That is exactly what I thought happened with the texts. Your english was great overall but there were those errors that seemed like typos or brain farts made in a rush. Maybe next time (if you do a text heavy game) write your texts a bit earlier and reserve some time to go through them later on with fresh eyes.
Yup, totally understand the time management issues. I'm sure you'll get better with that and other aspects as well with more experience. LD and other jams in general are mostly about the learning experience anyway.
Welcome to the LD community and see you on December!
