Constellations is my 4th entry into LDJam and a game about "connecting stars until you run out of space". It's a pretty chill game, and I scrapped most of the content from Friday the next morning to get what we have now. The following's just a blurb on the game's development (WITH GIFS!) so please consider giving it a read. If you just wanna play click here.

Technical Stuff

• Game Engine: Gamemaker Studio 2
• Art: Photoshop
• Music: Garage Band
• Total Dev Time: 18 hours 26 minutes, and 49 seconds

Theme Interpretation

The interpretation for the theme I went with was "space" being star space not physical space.

Friday

With that theme in mind, I started out working on the game with the idea of connecting stars or planets or something with rope. At one point I thought of the player character as being a cargo ship or something like that which would connect planets with each other. That would mean that the player was a ship, and you would control it like a twin-stick. You would head towards planets and connect them all together.

It sounded good, but in actuality it was extremely frustrating to play. It was hard to head towards the planets, and even though I added gravity to make it easier to hit them it didn't help :joy: So Saturday morning I scrapped it.

Saturday

I wanted to keep the "connecting space" idea but I wanted to make the controls, well, not frustrating. I ended up making a game about "connecting stars" instead of "connecting planets", which means we got Constellations! :tada:

The idea was "looking up at the sky" and "connecting stars" with your "hand". This was significantly easier to implement, but then there was the issue of how was I going to do the constellations?

https://www.freevector.com/uploads/vector/preview/20131/Zodiac-Constellations.jpg

Constellations have a very specific form. When you look at them they are very angular, they don't have crossing lines, they have a tendency to connect stars very close together rather than ones REALLY FAR apart. So, I had to put that into the game.

I then started to work on figuring out art and making a generated field of stars. I didn't want to have people make predefined stars since there's no creativity in that and I wanted a chill game, so I didn't want a timer where you had to make X constellations in Y time.

And then I started on more art stuff. Such as the dotted line between stars.

I changed the color palette and then started to go full-on with art making.

One thing I had difficulty with was figuring out what the background for the game would be. I had a generated star field but I wanted to have a nebular or something in the background. I made this image, but ultimately it was too busy behind the stars. But I still really like it!

Ultimately I went with a more cartoon-y feel with a gradient and a moon. It was hard to figure out how to generate the star field and the moon location. Note for anyone who wants to generate a this stuff in the future: Always generate the huge object before the many tiny objects.

And then I made the cursor and updated the other images. One thing I was trying out for the first time was making/using vector art instead of pixel art. I made that cursor and I'm rather proud of it. I'm also proud of the coloring I used for the moon and so on.

This was the first (and final) pass for the UI.

This was a gif taken after I added movement to everything. It's very subtle but I think everything came more alive.

Sunday

I managed to get a lot of work done on Saturday. Which meant Sunday was left for final details and the scoring system.

Before going into the scoring system, you'll see in the first screenshot of the dialog I had the dialog "Your constellations are worth" and in the final version I have "Your constellations scored". It's a very minor detail but "worth" gives a more negative connotation than "scored". It's hard to put it into words, but "worth" implies that "what you've just made has value I've arbitrarily decided" versus "what you've just made has a score according to this preset criteria". "Worth" feels like a very personal assessment versus "score" being a very detached assessment. Behind the scenes it's the same either way, but it gives a different feeling to the people playing the game based on the text.

Another note is that "scored" can feel very robotic and may still have a negative feeling like "you could've done better". I added "a WHOPPING" after "scored" to enforce a positive feeling. It also gives the dialog a little bit of personality.

This probably seems unnecessary, but when making a chill game one of your biggest priorities is for the player to feel relaxed, not frustrated, and having a very positive play experience.

Now as for the scoring system, as I mentioned earlier constellations have a very specific form. I had to convert that form into a "score". So that the more constellations you made that were constellation-like had higher points than just a random connection of stars.

Your score is a combination of all of the scores of the constellations you have made. Each constellation gets points as follows:

• 10pts for each star
• 10pts for each line
• 2pts * 500 / distance of each line (i.e. shorter lines get more points)
• 0.1pts * the angle between two consecutive lines (i.e. the larger your angles the more points)
• 10pts for each loop

And from this total value, you lose 50pts for each star that could’ve been in a constellation but wasn’t.

And this was the final gif before upload! I made a small tutorial level with a limited number of stars and constellations so people could explore figuring out how to make the constellations. I also added some animations to the dialogue box.

Music

As I said earlier, I wanted to focus on not making a game with pixel art, but another key thing was trying to make my own music for the game. I have never really done it before and it was my first time using Garage Band to do it. Hopefully it ended up sounding alright!

Final Notes

I ended up writing a ton so if you read through all of that, thanks for reading! In the end I made a pretty chill game about "connecting stars to make constellations to fill up space". It was my first time using vector graphics and trying to make music for the game.

I hope everyone enjoyed reading about it's development! You can play here!