Space Out! by Wattumartti

Space Out! is a cute strategy game about managing the quickly growing human population by exploring and populating other planets!
EXPLORE

RESEARCH

EXPAND

The human population is ever growing. In order to prevent it from collapsing, your goal is to expand to other inhabitable planets. As the population on a planet increases, it generates more money, but having overpopulated planets will make the planets deteriorate, and eventually, they will die.
Keep the human population within healthy limits and don't let any of your planets get destroyed.
Music by thiefinger
(we weren't able to test Mac & Linux builds yet)
Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ZvFpvsFEk
| Windows | https://jushiip.itch.io/space-out |
| macOS | https://jushiip.itch.io/space-out |
| Linux | https://jushiip.itch.io/space-out |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/space-out-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 70th | 4.019â | 28đ§ââī¸ |
| Fun | 272th | 3.577â | 28đ§ââī¸ |
| Innovation | 212th | 3.615â | 28đ§ââī¸ |
| Theme | 159th | 4.019â | 28đ§ââī¸ |
| Graphics | 80th | 4.352â | 29đ§ââī¸ |
| Audio | 74th | 3.962â | 28đ§ââī¸ |
| Humor | 465th | 2.826â | 25đ§ââī¸ |
| Mood | 241th | 3.538â | 28đ§ââī¸ |
| Given | 25đŗī¸ | 22đ¨ī¸ |
The visuals are pretty great! The music is also pretty nice
There were some balance issues but those can be ignored due to the time constraints of this jam. It's hard to believe such a well polished game could be made within 3 days, since i've seen many more early access titles having less polish than this.

Good graphics, good music, procedurally generated gameplay. Should make a great mobile game.
Good Luck!
Excellent work!
Very nice and super polished entry! This was my best run...

The look was very clean and interesting, some planets had that kurzgesagt wibe. My biggest graphical issue was the text scaling with the zooming which made zooming out far enough almost completely useless. The text size could have been the same regardless of the zoom level. As everything else was done with mouse, I think the panning should have also been. Like for example if you click and drag on the empty space or when you do it anywhere with right mouse button. I know there was that RTS style edge of the screen panning but it was awkward to use back in Warcraft 2 days and is still.
One other super minor thing was that the line/ship only appeared after you had already dragged to the destination planet. I think it should have started as soon as the player starts dragging. The line could have also represented if the target planet was in range to get rid of the need to drop it there and use that awkward dialog. It already showed if I had enough space bux to build there but it didn't update when I kept the line dragged to a planet waiting for my bux to accumulate.
As I've already stated, the UI looked cool but there were some placement/UX issues. First of all, those popup dialogs with are you sure and not enough cash could be removed completely in my opinion or at least make them able to be accepted with keyboard shortcuts. The tech thing had a similar issue. The following workflow isn't the best of designs UX wise:
- Click on a planet around the center of the screen.
- Move mouse all the way to the right to pick a thing.
- Move mouse to center to agree to building.
- Move mouse back to right for using said building.
- Guess what, back to center to pick a shuttle or agree or whatever.
- And if you want to cancel at any point, the back button is all the way on the bottom left corner of the screen, as far as it possible can be.
I think the better way would have been to not rob away the map control, just center on the planet and show the building options somewhere near it. And the cancel button could be if you just click anywhere else than the use/build. And yeah, those agreement popups were unnecessary here too and if not enough resources, it's enough to just show that information, not require the player to interact on it. It also would have been nice to be able to pan the map when selecting where to evacuate. It resulted on some almost unsolvable situations when I could pick from whatever happened to be visible.
The cash, population and planet icon tooltips were also quite weirdly placed but that wasn't a huge issue because I only had to check them once.
Anyways, very good job! A great game that with some UX improvements and balancing fixes could be awesome.
I liked the drag and drop to create spaceports, very elegant way of expanding. Great job overall, only thing I'd like is a bit more variety/depth to the gameplay, but that's understandable in a game jam setting.