[Prototype] Grav!

Hey peeps!

Here is a prototype of a short, week long prototype project that me and @Timothy worked on. (Taking a short break from a larger scale project Linked, more info soon).

The story:
In the not so distant future, you are a individual with the power to control gravity. This, of coarse, makes you very dangerous, and also a little grumpy! On this particular day, you were being transported to a maximum security facility on a distant planet when your prison transport is destroyed in a asteroid field! Stuck in the middle of the asteroid field, you have to use your powers to survive, dodging asteroids and keeping your oxygen and health levels up!

The controls:
Left-click moves the center of gravity to which all objects move, allowing you to move asteroids around in order to not be squashed by them.
Right-clicking on any object pulls it towards yourself.

Credits:
I did the programming. The awesome pixel art was made by @Timothy!

Please enjoy and hit us with some feedback!
image

Some technical stuff:
Grav was built in the HaxeFlixel cross-platform game engine, which uses the Haxe language. From working with HaxeFlixel on this project I would definitely say that it is quite an epic engine, and it is extremely well documented. Has anyone else used it? I would like to hear some opinions!

Disclaimer: It is still a bit lean on the sound side, hopefully we can fix that soon!

Kind regards!
stofStorm
Thanked by 1konman

Comments

  • Hey!

    This is a cute little prototype :). The destruction effect on the asteroids is pretty clear, and the core gameplay has some good potential. The tension between collecting stuff and not dying was cool. I liked that the asteroids did damage based to based on their size too.

    I think you could bake a bit more depth into the system based on speed: objects should be affected based on their weight. So bigger asteroids should accelerate slower, while smaller ones are faster. This ties into your damage quite well too.

    Having two negative resistors in the system (health + oxygen) seemed a little overkill. I think picking one or the other could work well. Just going with health is fine, as long as you increase the complexity of the system over time.

    Some interesting system elements you could add:

    - Gas canister: explodes on impact with asteroids, mass destroying them.
    - Grav field that affects only the player: still affected by your grav field, but gives you a way to move around a bit.

    Keen to see you larger game :)

  • This looks pretty cool from the description and the GIF. I think the mechanic is pretty well communicated and I'd love to try, but unfortunately don't have time right now :(

    Wanted to say we use Haxe and OpenFL a lot for our games. We have also used HaxeFlixel for some prototypes, but not recently. Haxe is a pretty cool language IMHO. If you are doing something 3D or collaborating tightly with artists, the pipeline in Unity is better, but Haxe and the frameworks are pretty nifty for smaller 2D things. There are also some ways to integrate Haxe into Unity, so you can use the Unity engine with the Haxe language, but I haven't looked into that yet myself.
  • Have you considered using real gravity calculations, that would make it very science-cool and probably increase the involvement needed by the player.
  • Hey guys! Thanks a lot for the feedback!

    @Bensonance I like the suggestion to have the asteroids' speed be affected different based on size, I think this ties in with what @critic mentioned about using real gravity calcs, which sound like a fun thing to implement. Science!! Also, I agree that adding more entities to the game, like the gas canister you mentioned, is a good idea. I have a couple of things in mind, such as enemies that are not affected by the gravity that shoot at you, then you have to kill them by moving the asteroids to hit them. At some point we do want to turn this into a more full sized game, and then it will probably have "waves", maybe bosses, instead of just being a time trail. At that point I think it would be a good idea to implement "unlockable" right-click abilities that you can switch out, such as a grav field that moves the player, or maybe a repulsive filed, hmmmm.

    @francoisvn Yep Unity is great, I usually work in that with C#, and its what our team is using for Linked. I am just fascinated with game engines and languages, so for small projects I try to use a new one every time, that's how I ended up with HaxeFlixel (next on the list is Godot or MelonJS). But I have to agree with you, Haxe is definitely a very cool and capable language and I would probably use it again.
    Thanked by 1critic
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