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[bojlahg]

Hi!

This is early game prototype (gameplay prototype) - need feedback (especially controls and gameplay difficulty). Thanks in advance.

Screenshots

Video
PC gameplay
iPad gameplay

Play
Web(Unity Web Player)
Win32
Mac OS X

Task
Collect all the stars and land on the second blue platform.
Collisions with the orange and red obstacles cause damage.
Collisions  with the purple obstacles do not cause damage.
Grey objects are switches.

Controls

• Turn on left engine - left control/left arrow
• Turn on right engine - right to control/right arrow
• Quick level restart - spacebar

Flyer page on IndieDB

Update: MacOsX and Win32 versions now available

[ortoslon]

try swapping controls because holding left tends to propel me right

this reminds me of Uchuusen

[bojlahg]

try swapping controls because holding left tends to propel me right

this reminds me of Uchuusen

Inverted input is available in Options menu.

[ortoslon]

better now but i still don't like how hard i have to try not to flip. maybe make the up arrow turn on both engines

[Serk]

try swapping controls because holding left tends to propel me right

Same here, better with the inverted input.

Also, whenever I want to move forward and I press both arrows at the same time, there's always a slight turning force since I never press both keys at the exact same time, one of them gets pressed a bit earlier, and that means you get some rotation you need to always keep correcting.

I don't know if it was just me being clumsy, but it appeared as if, when the ship starts getting unstable, it becomes more sensitive to the inputs, or just harder to control. Like, when it becomes a bit unstable, I'll overcorrect and then the ship will spiral downwards completely out of control.

.. Yeah, perhaps it's me being clumsy

[e-dog]

It's interesting, but quite hard. The learning curve is steep, and I don't see what can be done about it, because all the difficulty is in learning to pilot that thing, and if you make it easier to control it, the game would be easy too (there's not much else there).

Anyway, here are some thoughts:

It's too easy to spiral out of control. When you turn the vehicle upside down, any boost will push you down, in addition to gravity pull. And trying to turn it back up will likely move you horizontally, possibly crashing into a wall.

Landing upside down is frustrating, because you get stuck and have to reset. It's easy to do too, see the previous one.

The damage is unforgiving. It'd be better if you can land accurately without damage (or with only a minor one), so you can get a star, land, move right, land, get another star, etc. You could try computing damage amount from impact velocity, I think.

Removing the gravity could help, but the game will feel different. Significantly reducing gravity could help too.

You can make some computer-assisted vehicle control. For example, it could fire engines automatically to try to get to the mouse cursor position. Or it could turn the vehicle upright when you hold a special button. But that'd be a different game.

[Sam]

I wonder if initial learning of the controls would come more easily if they were not the left-right cursor keys. We're very used to them moving things left or right so there's an extra step to learning that they do something quite different here. Would be interesting to try keys that are far apart too, so the player has one hand for each engine, again separating the task of controlling this ship from learned experiences of other games.

Some way to recover from landing upside-down would help a lot. Currently very frustrating to flip and need to repeat most of the level.

I felt the gravity was slightly too high. Takes a lot of thrust to gain height, but very little to flip wildly. Could also increase "rotational drag" for the same effect if you want the game as a whole to be slower paced.