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jazorhe3 years ago(+1)

Loved the audio and graphics! The control is a little bit hard to use, but the idea of systems on the spaceship can break is very interesting.

I think the downside is this control scheme does not allow the ship to travel smoothly in any direction quickly with precision.

The field of view is a bit small too so when travelling I always hit something unexpectedly.

Lastly, I personally think that the subsystems break too often and it stops the gameplay very suddenly and frequently. I would prefer if the subsystems become malfunctioning rather than completely stalled most of the time.

Overall it is a very interesting concept with some cool graphics. Love how all the ships look too!

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CrazyFizik3 years ago (1 edit)

Thank you very much! 

Yes, I agree with you. There is still a lot of polishing and balance of the gameplay and I need to add movement in all 4 directions (with 4 degrees of freedom, as here, for example) and it will even be more realistic it's just that I've been experimenting with different approaches to gameplay and software architecture.

As for the field of view, this is just the most difficult part, in which I need to correctly choose the size of the ship relative to the height of the screen and accordingly balance the range of available accelerations and gravity. I also think that the field of view is too small, and the relative size of the ship needs to be reduced, however, this is complicated by the fact that I'm using pixel-art that imposes certain restrictions to preserve the perception of art. In other words we need to redraw the spacecraft sprites and reduce their sprite sizes. Currently, spaceships range in size from 24 pixels to 48 pixels, with an average size of 32 pixels, but it seems that the optimal size should be between 16 and 32 pixels, but in most cases no more than 24.

Fast way - I can increase the gameplay resolution: now it is equal to 360 pixels in height of screen which is then scaled to the target resolution (1080p or 720p), potentially I can increase it to 540 pixels, but in this case, the minimum comfortable resolution for the game will be 1080p, not 720p, and everything below 1080p will have noticeable graphic artifacts (related to turns and movement, because I do not use interpolation and anti-aliasing due to the fact that they will lead to pixel blurring).  

I think if I reduce the relative size of the spaceships to 1.5 it will be OK. I think like this:


Or it should be a different art approach: simple sprites (not pixel-art) which using bilinear filtering and anti-aliasing, or should it even be a 3D game. In this case, I can freely choose the zoom of the camera.

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jazorhe3 years ago(+1)

That YouTube link for navigation control is pretty neat! And it looks like all that has been achieved with holding down a mouse button. The animation does require some AI working out the direction it is going relative to its orientation. Really interesting stuff.

Our team also struggled a bit when trying to scale pixel art in our project and our approach was to adjust the Windows size… (the lazy way) however I would say, if you then created sprites of few sizes for the same spaceship, you would be able to do camera zooming and just change the sprites as you do so. That effect would be pretty cool to have I’d say. (Perhaps camera zoom can be triggered with a button by the player rather than automatically so that things are more flexible according to what the player is currently trying to do) and your screenshots do show that it can significantly affect the look of the game and the sense of surrounding.

I would love to see how you continue to develop on it and how your decisions will effect the final product.

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