Airship Engineer by ryte2byte

Welcome aboard the SS Crimes Against Nature! Try not to kill everyone.
Man the engines and burn all the cats in this arcade action bonanza. Maintain three uniquely cantankerous steampunk engine contraptions to keep the travel schedule of this experimental, animal-powered, luxury zeppelin. Arrive at your destination late and you'll be fired. Push the engines too hard and you'll blow up the ship. Do your job right and your boss is sure to be promoted.
All a day in the life for the Airship Engineer!
Controls
- Movement: WASD, Arrows, or Gamepad left stick
- Pickup/Drop: Left Control, Left Mouse, or Gamepad button 1(A)
Creator Notes
- This is a COMPO game made completely from scratch by one person in 48 hours.
- Play time: 3 minutes. Estimated runs to mastery: 2
- There are NO random elements. Victory is determined solely by player skill and strategy.
- Title image cropped and edited from The New Student's Reference Work, edition 1914 (Public Domain)
- Airship Engineer was actually my toughest game yet as I elected to scrap my original game and begin this one about 16 hours into the competition. No assets were suitable to be reused from the first game in this one.
Known Bugs
- Pushing the tool cart all the way to the bottom, standing directly above it, and picking up a wrench will cause the cart to drop through the floor and vanish forever.
Ratings
| Overall | 317th | 3.346⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 476th | 2.846⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 363th | 3⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 204th | 3.731⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 152th | 3.731⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 96th | 3.577⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 50th | 3.615⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 302th | 3⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
Unfortunately my red/green colourblindness pretty much makes this impossible. I simply can't tell the difference between the yellow and green lights (yes, red/green makes distinguishing yellow/green hard). I did figure out that if I could play it the trick would be to keep picking up animals and dropping them next to their target machine so that they will be nearby when needed.
Graphic assets are great, and the audio is a nice mix of fun/relaxing. The opening dialogue is also pretty humorous. My only gripe is that there doesn't seem to be an actual "fail" state - all the machines died on me, but the game continued on it's merry way :)
Other than that though, congrats - this is a well-made LD :)
But overall its a good game ;)
@nintendoeats : I'm delighted you thought my walk cycle was passable! I consider myself a fairly terrible animator. It's nice to know I might have made a little progress over the years.
I am extremely sorry about the color blindness issues. It was not a thought that occurred to me. I shall endeavor to keep this in mind for the future.
@RootPew : There are actually two fail states: A) Not 'beating the star' and B) Blowing up the ship. An engine component can take a 3 damage points (indicated by smoke) before catching fire. Afterwards, it will catch fire and the game will be lost if is not repaired after a (perhaps too gracious) period of time. Sadly, my time crunch didn't allow a ton of balancing and I erred on the side of keeping the game winnable.
@Thorneto and @Peredom : I have a known problem with wordy tutorials :wink:. I keep trying to cut 'em down, but always fail out of fear of leaving things unexplained.
Again, thank you for your time and feedback!
@Justashadow : Make sure 'windowed' mode is unchecked and you should see your full screen resolution. Windowed mode is enabled by default to make life easier for folks with multiple monitors.
First the bad things :-)
There is a wall of text right at the start of your game, blocking people like me from seeing the well crafted game itself. On top of that the font type is almost illegible, you could have chosen a better font for it.
I tried skipping the text and playing right away but was not really able to deduct what I had to do so I had to go back and actually read the text, most of which is a cute backstory, kind of obfuscating the actual instructions. Maybe a little comic at the start would have been good instead, this would not need to be too fancy, just still images. This way you could convey your story and controls much better and it would probably not take too much longer compared to writing the text.
Trying the game without instructions was confusing to me because I did not realize that you could grab animals from the boxes on the sides. They look like unimportant filler objects because they are half way out of the screen. You could put them more in the center to focus the player's attention on them instead.
That's it with the complaints.
The graphics are awesome, the cat and chicken are really cute! Very good job on that and on the main character animation. The walk cycle looks very good, impressive for 48 hours!
I also like the sounds the animals make, your voice gives this its game jam feel ;-)
The gameplay is solid, once you figure out what to do it is actually easy to make the guy do what you want, the controls don't get in your way.
Overall a very good job, thanks and keep up the good work!
First the bad things :-)
There is a wall of text right at the start of your game, blocking people like me from seeing the well crafted game itself. On top of that the font type is almost illegible, you could have chosen a better font for it.
I tried skipping the text and playing right away but was not really able to deduct what I had to do so I had to go back and actually read the text, most of which is a cute backstory, kind of obfuscating the actual instructions. Maybe a little comic at the start would have been good instead, this would not need to be too fancy, just still images. This way you could convey your story and controls much better and it would probably not take too much longer compared to writing the text.
Trying the game without instructions was confusing to me because I did not realize that you could grab animals from the boxes on the sides. They look like unimportant filler objects because they are half way out of the screen. You could put them more in the center to focus the player's attention on them instead.
That's it with the complaints.
The graphics are awesome, the cat and chicken are really cute! Very good job on that and on the main character animation. The walk cycle looks very good, impressive for 48 hours!
I also like the sounds the animals make, your voice gives this its game jam feel ;-)
The gameplay is solid, once you figure out what to do it is actually easy to make the guy do what you want, the controls don't get in your way.
Overall a very good job, thanks and keep up the good work!
The only downside I found where the menu, who looks blurry sometimes and the font which is hard to read.
Well done! :) (Glad to be able to play with my gamepad!)
Nice game, congrats on the graphics that are great (3D animation is sooo hard according to me).
A lot of text in the beginning that maybe could have been sumed up a little bit more. But cool game, really. Enjoyed it :)
The instructions were good, but the font was quite hard to read.
This was a funny and enjoyable game. Well done!
I found it too hard to win, but it's a good, well-executed concept.
I think that you could have let the player experiment how to fire the engine, it should be a very amusing (and maybe shocking) experience.
The game is really fun and well thought out. Being able to decide to generate more energy at the cost of the engines taking damage is a really awesome idea. And those sound effects are just hilarious. I beat it on my first try, it was really close and intense.
But try to put more information into the world, as somebody else already said: put an icon of a cat on the barrel and over the engine. And just like that, the wall of text will be one screen shorter.
Overall very well made!
What I think would help cut-down on the tutorial length (or necessity) is to label both the boxes/crates/etc. and the machines with a picture of the animal resp. produced/needed. (But maybe I shouldn't complain given the state of my own meager help-screen... :sweat_smile:)
Maybe place the grab-hotspots a bit closer while you're at it? Seems fine for 'experienced' players, but you could maybe get some extra mileage for the 'first-timers' if you allow the 'fuels' to be grabbed from the side of the barrels and whatnot (also pickup things I dropped on the ground accidentally from a wider radius).