Planet Jumpers by Adrenallen
Planet Jumpers is a game about exploring a randomly generated, never ending, universe. With minimum fuel you must make it as far as possible, overcoming everything the universe can throw at you.
PLAY HERE
Gameplay
The game is split into multiple "phases".
Crash
You start off, having just run out of fuel, careening towards an unknown planet. You must avoid debris and ground obstacles to make it safely all the way to the surface.
Explore
Once you reach the surface, you step outside of your ship, and must explore the landscape. Your goal, to obtain enough fuel rods to launch your ship back into space. You can also find other items, such as ship repair kits while exploring!
Launch
After launching back into space, you pick a direction and start flying. Be careful to not be sucked into the gravitational pull of hazards such as stars, and avoid any other untimely visitors! Keep an eye on your fuel gauge, when you run out you will float until you hit something! Use the gravity of planets to launch yourself further and maximize fuel!
Death
When you die, your journey is not forgotten! An online leaderboard allows you to submit your jump results. You can also view the top 10 most legendary jumps that have been completed!
Tips
If you are having trouble, use _Explorer Mode_ to make the game significantly easier (Found on the main menu). You won't be able to submit to the leaderboard, but you may be able to see more content in each run.
Planet gravity can be used to speed yourself up without wasting fuel, allowing you to travel further.
Planets with the worst atmosphere are darker and tinted green. Planets with "bad" atmosphere are slightly dark and tinted red. Planets that are bright will have the best atmosphere. The better the atmosphere, the less O2 you use on the surface.
Smaller planets actually have smaller landscapes to explore, this can make finding fuel on them easier at times (Although less fuel is present overall on these planets).
Some planets have "air pockets" that are planet colored squares on the ground. These will refill your oxygen.
Features
Fully procedural universe. Every playthrough is different. Every galaxy has a variety of planets at different distances/locations. Every planet has a variety of properties that affect things from size, air quality, gravity and more. Every planet landscape is uniquely generated based on properties from the planet.
Tutorials! Play new game with tutorials to see a tutorial before each phase of the game.
Aliens! After exploring so far, you may encounter alien ships. Avoid their missiles or your ship will take damage!
Six unique planet biomes, each with their own surface and hazards.
Four unique ways to die!
An online leaderboard, compete for a position on the list of Legendary Jumps!
Explorer Mode! Is the game too tough? Do you want to just see what the universe has to offer? Turning on this flag at the main menu means that you will not die from lack of oxygen, and your ship still works with no fuel! You won't be able to submit your journey to the leaderboard though.
Adjust the music and sound effects (or turn them off!).
Quick transition mode, for skipping the interim messages (I know it can get old).
Development
Everything in this game was created by me alone between Friday (10/4) 6PM and Sunday (10/6) 6PM. Here are the tools I used!
Code
Art
Sound Effects
Music
Leaderboard Development
The leaderboard server was created by me using an Amazon EC2 instance. It is being served by a NodeJS application.
Cut/Unfinished Content
As with every Ludum Dare, there are a handful of things I unfortunately did not get done in time! - An intro cinematic. I wanted a quick scene showing the ship's dashboard flashing warning signs, then cutting to an empty fuel gauge. This would only show at the start of a new game, to set the mood a little. - Aliens on planets! I really wanted this one to happen, but I wasn't even close to having enough time. This is why you can look around with the mouse on the planets, I had plans to give you a gun to fend off creatures! - Better animation for the "air pocket" sprites. Right now they look like little squares, hard to tell what. I wanted them to be weird growth on the ground that spurted bubbles out that gave you oxygen. - Black holes. I wanted to add blackholes that would damage you in some way, but would teleport you to a new location. - Asteroid fields. The point of these was to just force the player to either use fuel to go around or attempt a flight through. Not sure if this would have been another sequence like crashing or just obstacles in space. - Unique sound and music for each biome. I thought it would be cool if each planet had its own sort of mood via music and ambient sounds. - Unique sky obstacles for each biome. Really bummed this one didn't make it in, I think the space debris is okay but unique sprites for each planet would have been way cooler. - A thruster animation for the player's ship in space. I put this low on priority because I thought it looked passable without it. Never got back to it. - Alien ship death animation. - Animated tiles for relevant planets (i.e. gas planets). This is not straight forward in Godot at the time of writing, and would have required some extra work to spawn sprites in over top of the sprite map. I was closing in on the deadline and thought the static tiles would suffice. - More animations for planets such as lava planets.
Post Submission Changelog
- Removed alien ship present on first launch (this was for debugging whoops).
- Fixed a bug causing the "easy" starter planet to not be first planet after the first playthrough.
- Fixed wording of "sun" to "star" in tutorial for launch phase.
- Fixed a rare bug in the explore phase where world generation started out of bounds, causing a tunnel to lead out of the map.
- Changed player starting fuel from 0% to 20% so that you only need to find one fuel cell on the starting planet to take-off.
- Increased the spawn rate of fuel.
- Tweaked explore phase world generation parameters, this should result in more open landscapes and less maze-like tunnel systems.
- Fixed a bug where the player could accumulate more than max fuel.
- Fixed a bug causing distance to not reset between runs.
Ratings
| Overall | 177th | 3.574⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 102th | 3.63⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 68th | 3.87⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 412th | 2.87⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 237th | 3.333⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 241th | 3.04⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 148th | 3.462⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
I really like the re-entry effects as well, when you hit a planet with an atmosphere, you have reentry, but when you hit a planet without atmosphere there's no re-entry effect. A nice little touch (I only saw it was missing on the first crash though, so not sure it it's truely as I saw it to be)
I finally got shot out of the air by the alien, it would be nice if I could outrun them, or accelerate away from them. I found the only effective defence to be a hard spin which would throw the missiles off because they can't turn as hard as I could.
Overall, pretty cool game, nice idea, seems pretty solid too. Well done.
The crash phase background and effects are triggered by a few things such as size of the planet, sometimes you start all the way in a space kind of background with no ground obstacles!
Originally I had the rockets slow enough to outrun, but I changed them to be faster. The reason is to combat the strategy of just floating as far as possible for max distance. You can lead them into planets/stars to cause them to explode. You can also lead the alien ships into stars to kill them.
If you found the game too hard, I added a last second "exploration mode" to the main menu. If you toggle this on, you cannot submit your score at the end, but you do not die when you run out of O2. Additionally you can continue to boost your ship in space once you are out of fuel. This lets people see the full game when the RNG isn't being kind to them.
If I had more time I definitely would have tweaked the RNG more, it can be brutal!
If you are having a hard time, I recommend trying out the "explorer" mode, you will not die from lack of O2 and your ship works on no fuel. That way you can see more of the game without worrying about the RNG! You can toggle this from the main menu. It does make it so you cannot submit to the leaderboard, but it allows everyone to see the game in full.
I like the idea of having different phases. The tutorial is a great plus as well. The reentry effect made me laugh. Great small touch. On the contrary, I didn't really enjoy the controls during the re-entry phase as it felt a little bit clunky to me. However, this could be a personal preference as I prefer to have a fast moving vessel for those kind of games.
Overall, good job. I'm sure the game will get even very good if you keep working on it.
The controls on the re-entry phase are definitely a little sluggish. It changes based on the gravity of the planet, so if the planet has high gravity the ship takes longer to go back up, which can make it feel clunky. In theory it was cool, but I agree it didn't really play out as great in practice.
Thank you for the feedback!
On one occasion opening the leaderboard from the main screen crashed the game. The audio sometimes stuttered/droned a bit during scene changes. I also landed in the initial crashing phase at about 2k ft as opposed to 0. Otherwise I think you've got a solid foundation going!
Edit: Yeah the leaderboard was awesome. It was really cool to see a multiplayer component.
@stephenwhoskins The scope was larger than I have done in the past, it was a crazy 48 hours!
@lex Thank you very much!
@corrade I'm glad you found it replayable, I was really aiming for that with the leaderboard especially. I have also noticed a few little glitches with stuttering, I think it is just the web port unfortunately. As for the landing at 2k ft, I have also seen that and I think it is a result of me using ticks based on frames for some of the objects as opposed to the phsyics engine ticks, simple mistake! Thank you for the kind words!
@erin It was a _crazy_ 48 hours, I think I only slept for like 30 minutes on Sunday morning haha. The scope was much larger than I'm used to for this competition, but I think it came out okay! I'm glad you enjoyed the music changes, I really wanted different ambient noises and music for each planet biome but I ran out of time! I settled for different music in each phase instead.
There is a windows exec download available worst case, but the HTML link should work!