MiniDrone by Rewzu
Images:

About:
MiniDrone is a Compo game made for Ludum Dare 46.
It is about a small drone left alone on an alien planet. Its task is to collect resources from meteorite craters. However, its battery needs to be recharged quite often.
How to play:
- Explore millions of unique planets with different shapes, sizes and colors.
- Wait for meteors to hit the planet's surface.
- Extract resources from meteorite craters.
- The drone has a battery charge level indicator on its top.
- Recharge drone's battery at one of the charging stations.
- Acquire helpful upgrades to improve your movement speed, battery capacity, extracting efficiency and more.
- Extracting more valuable resources drains the battery faster.
- Use camera zoom to your advantage.
- Do not get hit by meteorite.
- Do not let the battery to discharge completely.
- Have fun!
Default controls:
- Left Mouse Button - Select position to go to
- T/G - Camera zoom
Have fun! :star::star::star::star::star:
Ratings
| Overall | 442th | 3.515⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 760th | 2.985⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 783th | 2.971⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 548th | 3.647⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 155th | 4.015⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 252th | 3.484⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 850th | 1.741⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 299th | 3.5⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 80🗳️ | 14🗨️ |

If the player moved faster and had a larger battery, and charging stations ran out after they had been used, then it would encourage the player to move around a lot more.
I love the aesthetic, and with a little tweaking the game would be a lot of fun!
@jonasmumm Actually, in the early stages of the development, the idea was that there always were some disabled charging stations, but in the end I thought it could be too confusing/annoying. Maybe in the future I'll bring this feature back (with some improvements). :)
@cmalk Just stay around one of the charging stations for a while ( these white towers that electrocute you ;) )
@all Thank you for the feedback! :D
After learning that the drones power is shown on its top it was clearer. Gathering minerals drains your power.
Nasty: The higher the mineral count is the faster is it drains! Which helps keeping play time down, but also kills you way faster!
Still, looking great and plays pretty well!
The look and feel, ambience, mood and aesthetics are gorgeous. Nice entry overall!
@endurion More valuable minerals drain the battery faster. It isn't based on the amount of the resource, but the type of it. :)
@sndr @random-thoughts Yeah, I'm aware of that. As said in previous comments disabling power stations over time could work. On the other hand, as it is now, playing safely takes much more time to get all the upgrades and high score. More valuable resources are much more rare and to extract them, you usually have to move away from the safe spot and look for them around the planet.
Thanks for the feedback! :D
The energy bar on the drone was not obvious to figure out at first, but it looks mighty athentic.
Maybe, some duplicate energy bar on the UI would be helpful?
Also, how is the difficulty increasing during the game? While your own progression is very nice and gives you motivation, I'd enjoy being able to face harder challenges as I progress :)
Low-poly graphics are super sleek and nice (while the drone could be a little bit bigger for convenience reasons - or maybe, it could grow over time in order to increase the difficulty?)
Nonetheless, very nice entry, thank you for creating this!
It's something I could honestly sit and play for hours if it was a little more fleshed out. Sure watching a meter go up is fun for a few minutes, but man just imagining all the possibilities if you took this further makes me really excited to see what might happen next! Scale the planets up, add more stuff to find and do, and maybe slow the pace down a little bit, and I would adore this game!
Great job!
@firellon Thank you for the suggestions! :D
@tom-robson I'll see what I can do about it. :)
@kuiefs Well, patience is a skill after all. :D
@week-of-the-agents Sun does not drop shadow. There is moon orbiting the planet and it can cause a solar eclipse. :)
If the different resources each improved different areas of your ship, then you could start to introduce a hunting mechanic in the players own head. The choice over do you mine the slow irons or fast gold and platinum then become important choices.
I would definitely take a look at the core mechanics of improving your ship and see how you could tweak them to make the core game loop more entertaining. With some improvements I think this could be a really good game.
A very nice game with truly great atmosphere. It took few tries to get a handle on things but once I did, I had fun with it. For example, it wasn't immediately apparent that the droid has a battery on his back (I didn't zoom in from the start and it wasn't visible at the distance).
Graphics are pleasant to look and the soundscape is also nice. The background music bets repetitive after a while. Gameplay gets repetitive after a longer while but it's really to be expected in a jam game.
Overall, it is an extremely impressive job for a compo! Hats off to you, sir or madam :smile:
The core game play was interesting at first glance but had some major balancing problems. The main issue was the battery. Some of the metor drops just straight out killed my battery when I ran over it. I couldn't wrap my head around why I was always dying the instant I started to harvest some points. The game really just disencouraged me from actually playing it and getting some points for upgrades :D And depending on how far the energy towers were apart from each other and/or away from the good resource spots, it felt like a hassle to go back and forth for some measly points.
The game still looks and feels really promising and with a little work, this can be a really enjoyable experience. Like I said, still a great entry, especially considering this a compo. Keep it up!
I think the power charge bar should be visible in the on-screen UI, the tiny bar on the drone is really difficult to see. It's especially difficult at the start of the game, when your power reserve is so small. The player shouldn't have to play the entire game zoomed in to be safe. I'd also move the first battery size upgrade to be the first upgrade on the list, since the starting power amount is really small.
I'd make it so you don't mine just by standing over the mineral spot, I'd require the user to either toggle mining with right mouse button or to have them hold the button to mine. Right now it's easy to lose all of your power because you're standing on a mineral field.
Oh, and on some planets it's really difficult to see the mineral text on the day side - perhaps adding a black border to the text wouldn't be a bad idea.
Overall it's a really fun game. The visuals are great, sounds and music worked well. I had a lot of fun with it. ;)