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[Kolba]

It's about the universe and our place in it, exploring along the way themes such as the struggle of science vs. superstition.

It's about 98% complete. When finished I plan to upload it to a site such as Kongregate to make use of their leaderboards. A competitive element could do the game good, providing an added incentive for players to attain further heights.

I wanted to post it here first for some testing/feedback, so I'd be very grateful for that.

It may take a few minutes to load the game the first time. Please excuse the wait, I'll try to reduce it for the final release.

Ascent

[Agent Echo]

All the diving and swooping is strangely zen, and vaguely reminds me of many hours lost on dolphin olympics. Alas, I'm not patient enough to get much past 7500m!

[Quicksand-S]

I stopped around the 7250 mark then fell because I couldn't find more stars near that level.

It's pretty good, but I found the viewing area too small. I can't afford to wander around looking for stars because then I'll run out of momentum and fall, but I can't see anything until I'm already pretty close to hitting or passing it.

A larger view, or maybe making a zoom-level that's tied to speed (the faster you're going, the farther you can see) would be helpful and make the game less frustrating. It sucks to be at a high altitude and not be able to find any stars nearby.

Respawning stars after a certain amount of time could be nice too, so if there are none where I am, then I can at least find some where I used to be.

[Kolba]

Thanks for playing.

It's definitely too hard. The game proper begins at the Stratosphere, 10,000 metres, so for players to not even reach that height is a disaster. The difficulty sweet spot seems around 7000 metres so I've added a large field of stars at that altitude. There should be enough so that a star is on screen at any one time, removing the need to go searching. I hope this helps with the issue of the small window. Unfortunately enlarging the window or adding different zoom modes would seriously impact the level design and object placement.

I've implemented your suggestion of the respawning stars. I did already have respawning stars but only for the stars at ground level. I realised there's no good reason not to have them respawn everywhere.

Original post edited with a link to the new version. Cheers!