[SA Game Jam 2017] Baby Planet

ShaneMcNeill

Hi everyone first time game jammer and student game dev here!

Baby planet is a game about being a sun and protecting your baby planet from the dangers of space. The objective is to click on the various dangers (or good things) to gather resource, protect and upgrade your baby from space rock to a planet that can sustain life.

Categories: Student (& Hobbyist?) (48Hrs)

Team:
(Student) Shane McNeill (Programming and Design) @ShaneMcNeill
(Hobbyist) Catherine Vogel (Art and Design)

Image Link: http://imgur.com/a/esj4e
(If anyone can help me embed an image pls help)

Looking forward to seeing all the other submissions, good luck all!

Edit-
Posted the final submission, if anyone wants a mac build just let me know :D

EvanGreenwood

If you paste the location of the image (right click and copy location) between "img" tags it will display the image. You can press the little image button when editing a post to bring up a dialogue you can just past into.

CrissOle

Hi @ShaneMcNeill,

This is sounding and looking really great so far!

Looking forward to giving it a try :)

ShaneMcNeill

@CrissOle Thanks :) and I'm keen to give yours a bash when all is done.

CrissOle

Yeah it's going to be fun to see progress throughout people's development!

Looking forward to seeing a GIF of some of your gameplay ;)

ShaneMcNeill

Update:
- Added some asteroid sprites and a background
- Added some new functionality with some basic UI elements.
- Added some screen shake (WOOP WOOP)
- Sometimes clicking on the asteroids seems inaccurate and wrong, so busy focusing on getting the feel of that right as it is the core of the gameplay.
- So far its quite enjoyable to press play and just watch what happens which is hopefully a plus! (Could be a good screensaver if all else fails)

AshleySanders

I love space and I love this concept! Keen to give it a bash!

ShaneMcNeill

Post Jam Update:

So for our first jam ever this was a really fun experience and I'm excited to do even more, everyone is really nice and its great to see the other teams games come together. Good job everyone :)

About our final submission:
We are pretty happy with where it ended up after two days or so. While some issues such as clicking on the asteroids being a bit wack are still present the overall feel and look is exactly what we envisioned so that's great. Obviously there are a few things we still want to add and tweak but that we hope to achieve in the coming days time and work willing! Below is a small list of things we hope to add. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on this little game. Thanks to the Make Games SA community and to FreeLives, it was a jam!

Future Improvements:
- Repair Function to replenish lives lost
- Fix clicking
- Various animations and art
- UI Improvements
- Audio persistence through scene changes (currently a little jarring)
- New gameplay elements (New upgrades, Upgrade choices/tree, Second planet(?), Abilities for the sun)

All sounds used in the game were open source and found on opengameart.org and freesound.org

konman

@ShaneMcNeill I finally had a moment to play this after the weekend. Really like the concept.
Apart from the click problem, my experience was very relaxing. The music and art fits very well.

Just some thoughts if you plan to take it further:

Difficulty. Start with slower comets (real slow, old person slow) and then ramp up the speed as you go along.
If a near click could perhaps slightly change a comet's trajectory it could be cool. So it isn't as punishing if you miss.
Comets skimming of the edge of the sun could be cool too.

Impressive work from both of you in your first jam. Congrats.

Sean_Goncalves

Yeah the clicking issue is pretty problematic which is unfortunate this game has such awesome potential, I did find a way to cheat the clicking though to try and get a better understanding of how the game would work in an ideal build so by playing in windowed mode you can click out when there are asteroids present pausing the game so when you click in on an asteroid you can collect them, but in doing so I could see what you guys were going for and it was cool :D (in case anyone would also like to test it this way)

I'm not too sure what the issue with the clicking is but maybe someone on the forums can help you guys fix it if it really is something that is really wack, if its collision based I'd just suggest making the collision boxes bigger or as @konman mentioned maybe slow the asteroids down a bit making it slightly easier for people to click on them because right now its fairly tough.

And yeah going forward it'd be cool maybe trying to build up and defend an entire solar system one planet at a time and then having upgrades for each of those planets also giving you the player abilities with your click/s could be cool as well making it a balancing act of building yourself or the solar system with the resources you collect.

All in all it was a super cool concept and if the clicking could be better the game would be really awesome good work especially for your first jam its really impressive.

ShaneMcNeill

@konman Thanks for taking the time to play our game, I'm really happy you enjoyed it. We do plan on taking it further as soon as time allows. I will definitely look at the clicking issue again as well as the difficulty ramp. Adding to the relaxing experience you described could only help. I like the sound of changing the asteroids trajectory. Thanks so much for the feed back.

@Sean_Goncalves Thanks for the great feedback, I'm glad you see the vision we had for the game. I'm going to test that windowed mode cheat ;)

The clicking problem is a really strange one but I feel it has an easy fix, maybe some Unity setting that I'm missing, but I will definitely try and figure it out.

Defending an entire solar system would be a really great actually. Perhaps you can use the resource to invest into another planet once you feel the first one is sufficiently defended. We did find that the player was meant to be the sun but didn't really feel like the sun so we want to add abilities (passive and active) that are specific to the sun, for eg: When an asteroid crashes into the sun there is a chance you will gather it as resource or clicking in an area draws asteroids towards that point making them easier to click.

Thanks again for the feedback, its much appreciated.

EvanGreenwood

Hey, gave this a try!

Upgrading a planet is definitely something I felt compelled to do. I also ended up using the cheat.

I don't think there's anything functionally wrong with the clicking, the clicking seems to work when the mouse is over the exact bounds of the asteroid image, it's just that the asteroids are very small and very fast.



Here's a gif showing how fast the asteroids are.

It'd be rad to build up the earth and even the solar system a bit more. Building planets with asteroids has a nice feeling.

Also the sun is cute :)