[Released] (A Wish Upon) Some Kind of Star Drifter

[Nappi]

UPDATE: Released

 

 

Available on itch.io: https://ktomi.itch.io/some-kind-of-star-drifter

 

Gameplay video:

 

 

Music by @badatstuff (Jordan Hartley: https://jordanhartley.bandcamp.com/)

 

I am yet to implement the constellation gallery, but I'm simply too tired to do it now. I will definitely do it later, though.

 

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Original post:

 

The concept

 

You are drifting in space. Parsec after parsec of nothingness. 

 

Your engines are shot. But you got places to be, and vast quantities of energy to expend.

 

You start creating stars.

 

Gameplay

 

(I know the trajectories are messed up in this one.)

 

Your goal is to go through each checkpoint in the level. You do not have direct control over your ships movement. Instead you click on the game area to create stars that affect the trajectory of your ship. By holding down on the mouse button you gradually increase the mass of the stars and thus change your orbit. When you release the mouse button you start to orbit the newly created star. Create more stars until you have passed each checkpoint.

 

The scoring can be based on e.g. the distance covered or the energy expended to create the stars. Or maybe I will just make a relaxing game, and let the players create and name constellations at their own pace.

 

 

Random considerations

 

Multi-star systems are bound to get pretty crazy fast, so I may end up having to have only the newly created star affect the trajectory of the ship. I also may need to include a way to disable gravity to give more control over the movement. We'll see..

[infamous space turtle]

Nice! sounds satisfying, black holes for anti stars ?

[plasticflesh]

I know your model is based on Gravitational pulls and thus it's about gravity paths. But- what if it included solar wind? 

 

it could be cool to have "cosmic wind" be the medium that exists between solar wind wells. For example, the heliosphere. Would a dual star system have solar wind-weather? I guess that is what is happening when a dual star system has donar stars. Stellar wind might be way more difficult to model than gravitational pull. And I have no idea if this has a reasonable effect on interstellar travel.

[Nappi]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions!

 

I was already planning to introduce new mechanics on top of the base gameplay, and some kind of cosmic wind is definitely in my feature list. I'm not exactly aiming on realism here so I don't mind if they are not a big factor in interstellar travel. A simplified version of cosmic winds should be relatively straightforward to implement at least. I'm investigating other possibilities to spice up the gameplay as well. However, I don't know how much jam time I will have during the holidays, so I will focus on the core mechanics first and see how much time I have left after that.

[hedgefield]

This sounds amazing, good luck!

[Mythalore]

this is a really nice change up to the whole gravity slinging genre, best of luck knappi!

[Nappi]

 

I didn't have much time or energy to work on the project today, but I drafted the star creating system (dragging increases the size of the star), and implemented the gravity system. The gravitational calculations are recycled from a project this summer that I did not have time to work on.

 

What became immediately obvious was that I need  to implement a safeguard for when the player is about to collide with a star. My current plan is to erase the offending star once a certain threshold in proximity or speed is reached. I can take the training wheels of in hard mode.

[badatstuff]

Does this project need any music?  Because it looks cool and chill as hell and I want to make music in whatever style you want for it.

[supasheep]

This idea looks great! I love games which play about with orbits and orbital mechanics. Was the gravitational system difficult to come up with?

[phill]

Already looking smooth! Have you thought about how to complicate the routes? Are there going to be black holes or civilisations that you can accidentally fall in/destroy on your way?

[Nappi]

10 hours ago, badatstuff said:

Does this project need any music?  Because it looks cool and chill as hell and I want to make music in whatever style you want for it.

 

Thanks a lot for the offer! I was playing with the idea of trying to make some sort of ambient soundtrack myself, but time and skill considerations may prevent that. I will send you a message once I know what my plans are with that and what kind of aesthetic I'm going with. Definitely aiming for chill.

 

7 hours ago, supasheep said:

This idea looks great! I love games which play about with orbits and orbital mechanics. Was the gravitational system difficult to come up with?

 

One of the main reasons I like the idea of making a game like this (apart from the fact that space and space exploration are really cool) is that the underlying mechanics are really simple. Basically, I just look for all objects with a mass in the scene and then calculate and apply the forces they exert on the player.

 

When I first played around with this type of system during the summer (with an orbit golf game that is now on hiatus), I started by simply applying the forces to the rigidbody and letting Unity's physics system handle the rest. It worked fine, but I ran into troubles when I wanted to visualize the orbit (something I'm planning to do with this jam game as well), as I couldn't get the calculated and the actual orbits to match perfectly. To fix this, I ditched the physics system and calculated the velocity and position manually based on the acceleration caused by the massive bodies. Again, a simple calculation. To make sure that the orbits would remain at least relatively stable I went with fourth-order Runge-Kutta method.  I spent a couple of afternoon's figuring this all out back in the summer, and happily recycled the system here to be able to focus on other parts of the game.

 

So, in short, the gravitational system is easy to implement, but of course I had some missteps on the way.

 

6 hours ago, phill said:

Already looking smooth! Have you thought about how to complicate the routes? Are there going to be black holes or civilisations that you can accidentally fall in/destroy on your way?

 

I like the combined modifier and warning system in Spelunky a lot, the one where the text "My skin is crawling..." at the beginning of the level means  that there are giant spiders in the level. My current plan is to borrow that system for this games. Something like:

 

"The comms system picks up whispers of the wind" (Solar) winds, as discussed earlier. Possibly rotating patterns of wind.

"Have I been here before?" The play area has a star or black hole in it. My vision, at this stage, is that you start with a completely empty space, which means that existing stars are either previously created by you or that you are not alone after all. This will probably be one of the hardest modifiers in the game because multiple star systems can get really unstable.

"My navigational computer is experiencing problem" Cannot visualize orbits and you have to fly blind.

"I'm sensing some kind of a force field here" A barrier that you have to avoid.

[Nappi]

 

I couldn't work on the game on Saturday, but fortunately things were better today. I managed to implement the basic player controls (left click and drag to create a star, and right click to cancel star creation or disable a star), the checkpoint system, and the orbit visualizer (which needs some tidying up still). I still need to implement some gameplay elements but I think I will focus on the visual style next, just to keep myself motivated. 

[hedgefield]

It's so cool that the orbit trajectory forms as you hold down the button (presumably). Will later levels have higher flight speeds?

[Nappi]

When you click and drag to change the mass of the new star, the game slows down and draws the orbit trajectory caused by the creation of the star. The weird glitched lines in the gif are caused by hyperbolic trajectories (i.e. ones where the ship escapes the system) not being drawn correctly. I disabled drawing for those orbits for the moment.

 

I'm not quite sure how to handle speed/difficulty yet. Regardless of the initial speed, the player can quite easily generate an orbit where the instantaneous speed is manageable and then continue from there. One interesting modifier could be to have your ship constantly accelerate towards the velocity vector (equivalent to getting your throttle stuck), so that the player would have to manage speed constantly.

 

General progress update: I haven't been able to focus on this for a couple of days, but should have more time now (excluding Christmas).

[Nappi]

Played around with TrailRenderers and Animators today. I'm quite pleased how the checkpoint marker turned out.

 

 

Still a lot of work to do in terms of the rest of the art style, and even more with the actual gameplay mechanics.

 

 

[Nappi]

 

Couldn't decide which background color to use, so I implemented a background animator. You can now also name the constellations you accidentally create.

[gerbilsinspace]

The style of this is through the roof! Well done!

[plasticflesh]

Wow yeah! The new trails, changing color styles, and constellation titling is brilliant. Amazing work! 

[Nappi]

Once again, instead of focusing on more important stuff, I decided to spent my time on the title screen. I tried to make it so that it familiarizes you the key interaction (click and drag) before the game even begins.

 

 

 

I also made a script that spawns the player and the checkpoints randomly. Next, I will need to write scene transition system from title to the level text and the level text to the level itself. After that I need to implement at least a couple of modifiers to make the gameplay more interesting.

[infamous space turtle]

That video looks so good, very mesmerizing. 

[Nappi]

Thanks!

 

 

I have now more or less implemented the core sequence. I still need to add a proper transition between the level and the constellation saving scenes and tweak the other transitions too. I'm also starting to think that I should replace the checkpoints with more simple designs to go with the rest of the look.

 

Next up, implementing the modifiers!

[Nappi]

Progress in the last couple of days:

- Lots of under the hood improvements to the code.

- Reset functionality: Esc for manual reset. Automatic reset when ship is too far outside the play area or when the speed get too high.

- Framework for gameplay modifiers.

- Smoother transition to the naming screen:

 

Next up:

- Implementing the modifiers (for real this time).

[gerbilsinspace]

This looks gorgeous, and in the ultimate form of flattery, I really want to see if I am able to replicate this in some way. The controls look really intuitive, introducing a micro tutorial to the start screen is ingenious, and the colour scheme is gorgeous. Please keep this up!

[supasheep]

I love the bright colours! It looks like you went with only letting one star affect the trajectory at a time then?

[Nappi]

Thank you so much guys!

 

Since the last update I have implemented several modifiers (barriers, permanent star, faulty navigational computer, and unstable stars). I will still try to add stellar winds tomorrow, if I have the time. I also got some sweet sweet music from badatstuff! I will post a new video tomorrow. Oh and the game..

 

supasheep: Yeah, the trajectory becomes impossible to manage after a couple of stars, so I decided to go with a more chill approach. One of the modifiers is a permanent star at a random spot in the game area, though.