Spaceships Must Explode by Maksim Chugunov

This game is turn based. You control a spaceship which consists of modules.
Modules
Any flying module that hits the ship will be attached to it. Only if module is reachable from Main Module it can be attach to the ship. A module can't be reached through a Block Module.
There are few types of modules:
- Main module. If this module is destroyed you lose
- Empty module
- Engine module. Allow you to move.
- Block module. Other modules can't be reached from it.
- Swap module. Allows you to swap 2 modules at the en of a level

Movements
You move by turns with burs fires from engines. You can only move in a direction if you have an engine facing opposite direction. E.g. if you only have 2 engines facing left, you can only move right 1 or 2 spaces.
Enemies
Your enemies are orange asteroids that fly around. If they hit any of your modules, they will be destroyed along with module.
Engine blast
You can destroy enemies (or flying modules) with blasts from your engines. Those explosions will also destroy any module underneath an engine, so be careful.
Sacrifice
You can sacrifice any of your modules in order to overload your engines. This will last one turn and each engine will be able to move the ship 2 spaces instead of 1. Click on any module to sacrifice it.
Swapping
For each Swap Module at the end of a level, you can swap two modules. Simply click modules to swap them. You can swap a module with an empty space to just move it.
| HTML5 (web) | https://maks-c.itch.io/ships-must-explode |
| Source code | https://github.com/makscee/SpaceshipsMustExplode |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/spaceships-must-explode |
Ratings
| Overall | 235th | 3.451⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 238th | 3.293⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 16th | 4.073⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 216th | 3.573⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 357th | 2.907⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
- Graphics (They always can be imporved, you might aswell ignore that)
- Stabbility (I had a couple of bugs, i think)
- Content (Same as Graphics, there is always more)
- And nothing really beats a start screen, decent control descriptions and so on. The game feels a bit barren.
The user interface is cleverly designed to accommodate movements of multiple moving bodies in a grid. I can think of a few small improvements though. Showing movement vectors for incoming modules would be good and removing the unclear hit detection would be an improvement too. Asteroids and ship parts should always land in their designated positions without hitting the ship on the way. This way they sometimes fly through the ship for sure, but UI clarity beats *"realism"* any day. It is supposed to be a 2D representation of a 3D space after all.
The sacrifice mechanic works, but it took a long time before things got heated enough to really require its use. Additionally speeding forward in one direction, turn after turn, does break the asteroid spawner; really easy to not get hit at all.
The graphics are ok, functional. I do like the movement *"animation"* with ship parts jiggling around. Some audio would go a long way. Either an ambient loop in the background or simple, generated, sounds for movements and hits. It only takes ~30 minutes to find and implements something rudimentary; you can always disable the audio category when using third party assets.
Good work! Could be extended, this one?
Overall: *Good (4.0)*
Fun: *Above average (3.5)*
Innovation: *Good (4.0)*
Theme: *Good (4.0)*
Graphics: *Above average (3.5)*
Audio: *N/A*
Humor: *N/A*
Mood: *N/A*
A few elements frustrated me, like during a swap, the game didn't tell me beforehand which parts would I lose.
Other than that, the game feels balanced and interesting. Good job!
I see now that my biggest mistake was not working on level design as much as I should, I just threw in some random generation of asteroids and modules, thinking that people only need to understand the concept of the game, but most of them don't even get a situation where you would need to sacrifice a module.
And yeah, for some reason I thought that realistic movements of asteroid would work better, even though I spent some time working on that algorithm and in the end it kind of confuses the player when asteroid actually hits the ship.
Also, in future jams I will for sure work on sound :)
Again, thank you for an awesome detailed feedback, I really appreciate it!