Space Haulers Inc. by apoly

Your goal is to establish colonies on both Moon and Mars. To achieve that goal you will have to build new bases around the Solar System and create delivery routes for each of them so you can gather all materials needed in a shortest time possible.
We took completely new engine (again!) and decided to fight with how UI works in UI heavy type of game for like 2 days out of 3 :) We are still happy with how it turned out at the end, though, it could be so much better.
Special thanks to our daughter Ivetta for marvellous icons she managed to create!
Credits:
Audio/Programming/Spacecraft art - Alexander Polyakov
Design/Balancing - Nika Khudonogova
Mini Icons for a produce - Ivetta Polyakova
Icons for buildings/Start and End screens - Stable Diffusion
Changelog
- Added HTML5 and MacOS version on itch after figuring out how to embed it properly.
| Link | https://apoly.itch.io/space-haulers |
| Link | https://apoly.itch.io/space-haulers |
| Link | https://apoly.itch.io/space-haulers |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/space-haulers-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 286th | 3.853⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 365th | 3.662⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 242th | 3.765⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 222th | 4.25⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 867th | 3.206⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 623th | 3.03⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 571th | 3.559⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 68🗨️ |
the icon from stable diffusion are cool, but it's too different from the simplistic map :)

Nice entry !
Maybe the music loop is a bit short for a game that needs a lot of time to complete
I really enjoyed watching the ships trying to swerve to land on the fast-moving planet.
the fact that it does not show much is very interesting, makes it feel more realistic somehow
I think you could show the name of the icon when you hover them, it took me a while of experimentation to learn what was what ... or maybe I missed something
its been 14 years and I still do not fully grasp what produces the elements on earth
I built some stuff on mars but I cannot find where it shows something is being produced there ... mars producs silicon but the silicon number does not go up unless I set an earth rocket to take silicon there, which seems to be magically produced on earth
ok it would be great to have a speed up time, I am almost creating my first colony
ok my first colony took almost 48 years, got really distracted moving things around in the planets
it is a beautiful thing when you get to make the rocket dance work

We definitely need to communicate that better, thanks for feedback!
I could probably do it faster, but I was just eating dinner - so no rush. The game mechanics is nice, once the lines are setup it works properly. The UI was understandable, although I was a bit confused with FROM/TO and the row under it (it's what's loaded at given station). Sort of space transport tycoon.
One improvement I can think of - the rockets are going in straight ways, that's inefficient (and if properly simulated, MUCH slower). Using orbital mechanics and Hohmann transforms would be a great improvement.
Either way - it was nice and chilling to play.
Keep up the good work.
Great speed, by the way!
Reminded me of a space transport tycoon concept we once had as a plan - but scrubbed it for simple Mini-metro style (with airplanes) around 3D planet instead at the time.
Good job!
It was fun to route the resources around. This was not so hard since there were only one place of production for each. But that was enough for a jam.
It works nicely. It scratches the organisation itch :p
Very solid entry and I would love to see this idea more fleshed out.
OpenTTD in space!
I thought first, that building all that stuff wouldn't be necessary since earth already has all ressources, but spreading to the other planets made everything so much faster and I didn't even you Silicium and Gold.
I could've used some quality of life features such as ordering your rockets or zooming the map, but that's probably not in scope for a 72h jam. Art Style could've been more consistent.
All in all I enjoyed this entry very much. Good job!
Excellent work!
Woo! That was really fun! Really felt like a lot of gameplay and depth, and everything felt pretty balanced. I figured out everything pretty quickly, only thing I kept getting a bit confused by was the cost to build rockets, since they only showed up in the tooltips, I had to keep looking. I would have liked those (and the factory in/outs) to be more accessible, maybe just replacing the cost to build the factory after it's done (though, then I'd complain it was hard to see which factories I hadn't built ^\_^)). Only other thing I wanted was a way to see where a specific ship was (so I knew if it was just finishing up a delivery, and I can repurpose it, or if it was just starting, etc), maybe just highlighting when mouse overing the ship list. This caused me to, perhaps, make more ships than I needed, but maybe that made for a more chill experience in the end =).
Music wasn't much special, but didn't get annoying, which is pretty good, considering how long I spent tinkering in here =).
I like that there is no failure condition, and I could just keep working on building the colonies.
The only issue i have is rocket list, because every time i want to change my imports/exports i need to read information about every single rocket.
Would be better to represent routes more graphic like in a table or a spreadsheet. Something like that:
| From | Export | Rockets | Import | To |
| ------- | --------- | ---------- | ------- | ------ |
| Ceres | | | | Mars |
| | Gas | Rocket 1 | Water | |
| | | Rocket 2 | | |
| | | | | |
| | Silicon | Rocket 3 | Food | |
Rockets 1 and 2 hauling gas from Ceres to Mars and come back with water.
Rocket 3 hauling silicon from Ceres to Mars and come back with food.