Rogue Planets by Roboolet
An asteroid with a passion for destruction, touring the skies and knocking out every planetary body out of their stable orbits, and sending them careening through the galaxy, or letting them be swallowed by their host star.


| Link | https://roboolet.itch.io/rogue-planets |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/rogue-planets |
Ratings
| Overall | 39th | 4.273⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 136th | 4⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 88th | 4.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 561th | 3.739⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 75th | 4.5⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 26th | 4.435⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
Good job ;)
What a great job - i hope you get some more ratings as this is clearly a hidden gem right now.
Your game is unfortunately less-than-playable under these conditions:

Switching my desktop resolution to 1280x720 (sigh...Unity, when will you learn to run games at aspect ratios that don't match the desktop resolution...) resolves this, though the mouse coordinate calculations seem to be slightly off as result.
Anyways, this is pretty nice and the visual style is simple but clean. The simple chiptune music is just fine, but I wonder if something more ambient would have worked nicely (check out the Osmos OST?). I'd echo the other sentiments that the gameplay does feel a bit slow-paced at times.
I played until the level with two orbiting planets on opposing sides -- that one is a toughie!
One last minor critique, I'm not sure the screen transitions up and down always felt like it made the most sense. Particularly for resetting the level -- it works, but honestly it felt a bit jarring in terms of the vibe established by the rest of the aesthetic. Having both ">" and ">>" options on the main menu might not read clearly for some users. YMMV though, of course!
Good job overall :)
https://youtu.be/EWJKsLF4MMg?t=5365
I'm quite impressed with this game's effective use of [`Physics.Simulate(float)`](https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics.Simulate.html) that really helps remove ambiguity and guess-work from the player. In doing so, it helps make the game feel deterministic and more puzzle-like. Paired with some excellent graphics and audio design, it was really easy to get into the groove of this methodical game.
That said, I did think this game has some flaws. For one, you can only launch one asteroid. I don't really like it when a game demands perfection like that. It would have been nice if, like *Angry Birds*, the player is given more than one asteroid to launch. Second, as a commenter above stated, I did find the game rather slow, and would have liked a fast-forward button to quicken the pace of the orbits. It's also not immediately obvious how far a planet has to move away from the star before it's considered de-orbited. I also didn't like the "fast-forward/reverse" icons, as it wasn't really clear what they do on first glance. Lastly, it would have been nice if the game detected when a planet/asteroid would fall into the star during the shot-aiming phase, so I wouldn't have all those, "the game tricked me into thinking this would work" moments.
Excellent work!
I wanted to quickly adress @omiya-games ' comment
We purposely chose to limit the amount of asteroids you can shoot to 1, these planetary systems are very delicate and it would be pretty hard to invoke that feeling of being pin-point accurate. That aside, setting up levels gets harder with each planet you add.
The trajectory of a planet does actually stop when going into the sun, but the radius where it stops is just a tiny bit smaller than the actual radius of the sun, so apologies on that one.
P.S: We didn't actually use Unity physics, our team member @mjex wrote a custom physics system for this game, so the Physics.Simulate guess was decent, but we just happened to have taken the long way around this time