Critical Mass by Parker Nalch
Arcade-style endless runner where you play a ship with an unstable fuel core. As you fly, you pick up energy but be careful! Too much fuel and your ship will go into overdrive. Manage your fuel properly and avoid the debris to travel the longest distance.
https://youtu.be/74ly-HjtGNQ
controls:
Left and Right arrow keys to move left and right
Shift to toggle overdrive
| github | https://github.com/parkernalch/ld49-critical-mass |
| Web(HTML5) | https://parkernalch.itch.io/critical-mass |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/critical-mass-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 282th | 3.463⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 247th | 3.444⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 379th | 3.06⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 273th | 3.574⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 234th | 3.556⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 158th | 3.481⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 404th | 2.048⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 297th | 3.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
I love the music, sound effect and the retro feel it has.
2 things I think could be improved:
1/ Sometimes I feel like there is no way to past a wall of debris that's a bit frustrating.
2/ The same way you have a sound indicator when you go override I would add a sound indicator for when the fuel is very low and you need to stop using some.
Also, I found a bug where I can infinitely increase score by activating overdrive when dead.
@ghoulean loved the feedback and I agree with you that asteroids would fit the environment better than construction beams. I ended up choosing beams because their colliders would be more straightforward than what I would inevitably want for asteroids. Also thanks for the bug report! I'll try to squash it after judging concludes
@qthree I feel that. I had to cut power-ups for time and I think they'd go quite a ways toward breaking up the straightforwardness
Boosting away the debris is a "blast". 😎
That being said, I really, really like the gameplay. The balance between going fast, but needing to control your fuels is superb. I think you did a great job in that regard. Buuut, it was really difficult, and some of that seemed to be due to too tight spacing of obstacles.
Also, collecting the fuel pellets was really satisfying
The music was nice but the graphics were kind of an issue. Not that they looked bad, but I think you should have varied the size of the energy dots, because playing for a while seeing those dots scrolling by at highs speed made me kind of dizzy.
I loved the fake 3D on the vessel. The sounds were cool too (maybe just a tip for your next games, think to make the volume like at 50 or 75% because it was like super loud even with my PC at 20%, but that's a minor issue, don't worry).
Great work!
It took me a while to understand hot to play it, but then it got pretty good. It's a really cool idea to make the thing that keeps you alive (fuel) also make you unstable. Fits the theme pretty well too -- it's really hard to manage unstable speed and fuel and incoming debris at the same time. Though sometimes it feels overwhelming.
Pretty clever to combine speed boost with "attack"! It also looks very nice and polished. Soundtrack is pretty cool too. It's a nice touch that it changes with the speed of the ship! Good job all-around!
I was streaming and recording my playthrough of random compo games. Yours was on the list... but... uhm I was using new software and didn't check if everything was ok so it recorded like 2/3 of my screen :sweat: I saved recordings of games where you could still understand what's going on. Unfortunately in your game I recorded only incoming debris :sweat_smile: I hope the detailed feedback above makes up for that :slight_smile:
(btw, there's a glitch where you can increase your score after you die by mashing overdrive lol)