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A jam submission

Become the UniverseView game page

From a spec of dust in space, to the entire universe.
Submitted by simpletouch — 53 minutes, 53 seconds before the deadline
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Become the Universe's itch.io page

Team members and roles
simpletouch

How did you interpret the themes?
Combined the 2D arcade feel and aesthetics of classic Asteroids with the joining of objects and getting larger gameplay of Katamari Damacy, with some inspiration from rage games in the mechanic of losing size if you collide with objects larger than yourself.

Where Asteroids has you destroying the asteroids and avoiding all contact, this game flips it around and instead you are weaponless and trying to fly into and absorb small asteroids like in Katamari Damacy, while being challenged to avoiding asteroids larger than yourself or else in rage game style, you may be unfortunate and sent all the way back to the start of the game.

What are you entering?

Game only

Engine and tools used?
Unity, Bezi, ChipTone, Audacity, TMPEffects

Road to GDC

Yes

Consider my game for the Road to GDC prize

Bezi Challenge

Yes

We used Bezi and want to enter the Bezi Challenge

Synty Challenge

N/A

I am not entering this prize track

Which Synty assets did you use?
N/A

CrazyGames Challenge

Yes

Enter my game in the CrazyGames Challenge

Fan Art Artist
N/A

Fan Art Process Video
N/A

Where can we find your Fan Art?
N/A

Submission Confirmation

I have read the Bezi Mega Jam rules
This submission was created during the jam period
All team members and contributors are listed
Third-party assets are credited where applicable

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Comments

Submitted

I tried the opening flight and liked the clean space visuals and the idea of growing by absorbing smaller objects.

The drifting controls took some practice, and a clearer size/progress indicator would help me judge what is safe to collect. Great work!

Submitted

What a journey. I was small, then bigger, then a bigger guy hit me and i was small again, rinse and repeat till i became a blackhole that swallow the universe. The simple gameplay is enough to get me hooked. The art is simple but efective. Two thumb for the music. Good submission!

Submitted

It was interesting and fun.

Submitted

Interesting idea! The game is easy to pick up and understand, but hard to master (for some reason, I am really bad with looping borders!). The presentation and the music are fitting. The thruster sound effect is a bit too dominant and gets annoying after a while.

I know it's scope creep, but an occasional upgrade would keep me playing longer. I lost all my asteroids pretty fast, and starting over with 0 felt punishing.

Also, I would add an arrow as you get bigger; the ship was so small, and I was not sure where I was pointing in the later stages of the game.

Overall, a great submission! Good job!

Submitted

Great polish on this game. really captures the arcade feel while introducing a new interesting mechanic to it. My only note is that the controls need a bit of refining. Acceleration was very intense compaired to the rather slow turn speed. Especially given how chaotic the game became quite quickly. Very nice work on this.

Developer

Thank you for playing and enjoying my game! I wanted the controls to feel like the awkward nostalgic control scheme of the original Asteroids, which is why I made the acceleration vs turn speed the way they are, but can definitely see an argument that the top speed should be turned down a bit. Balancing all the different variables between the asteroids and player was definitely one of the harder challenges of making the game, so there will probably always be some room for improvement.

Submitted

The opening presentation is so good, i like how it zoom in, and the movement is quite nice, but i always confuse because there is no reverse button. Overall the game mechanic is very good

Developer

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it! The controls are intended to mimic the original Asteroids, which didn't have a reverse, but I could see that there's an argument that in this game because of the odd shapes you can make your ship that it might make more sense break away from the Asteroids control scheme a bit.

Love the presentation, but same as Orkfaeller, I could not get past the planet.

Developer

Glad you liked the presentation and sorry to hear if you found the planet part too difficult! It was one of the harder parts of the game to try to balance. One tip is to be slow and patient and stick to the middle on the left or right side, as the large planets only come from the top or bottom edges of the screen. Thanks for giving the game a try!

Submitted

Two standout point for me;

firstly, the presentation. Incredible how polished and high production this feels despite the minimalist art style. The main menue, the interface, the tutorial, very impressive. Bravo.

Secondly, the difficulty. Good lord, this punishing - despite one being functionaly immortal. I feel like the ship could have done with either a hint of magnetism, a tighter turn radius, or a break. Despite my best efforts I just can't get past the planet. Complete run ender every single time. Would have loved to see where this leads, but I'm apparently just nowhere near good enough for it :U

Developer(+1)

Thank you for giving it a try and for your kind words about the presentation of the game! Sorry to hear it was a little too difficult for you, it was a lot of iterating trying to get the planet part to be tricky but not impossible, but it is probably still a little much. One tip is to be patient and stick to the left or right side, and fly into the side to wrap to the other side if you get into a tight spot. Thanks again for playing!

Submitted

Thanks for the tip. Alas in most of my attempts the planet ended up filling up the entire screen before I could reach enough mass to absorb him, so there was no where to escape and I just got grinded up. Did I run into a bug by chance? 

Developer(+1)

Sounds like a bug yeah, the planets shouldn't take up that much of the screen, but I could see there being a potential issue around the timing of when the planet is spawned and changes in the player's size.

Submitted

Thanks, I'll give it another shot or two then.

Submitted

Great game, I had a lot of fun, remembering asteroids, way way way long ago, a nice inversion. thanks!

Developer

Thanks for playing and glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Submitted

hey man cool concept. the game could be fun if the space vehicle was more contrable. am i doing something wrong ? i could rate the game i like the art style but the execution is a bit off jsut cuz of the space vehicle not being controlled properly.i like the asteroids randomly floatin and breaking up.good game with bad vehicle control n idk how this meeting the jam requirements . if u could explain to me in the comments then i would rate 

Developer(+1)

Thanks for giving it a try! Mind explaining more in what way you found the controls awkward? How were you expecting the controls to work?

I wanted to make the controls be a fairly faithful reproduction of the classic Asteroids arcade game. The W key or up arrow is your thrust forward. A and D keys or left and right arrows are how you turn the ship. Takes a little getting used to, but one could argue that Asteroids is a beloved classic arcade game largely because of the unique controls it had.

For how it meets the jam theme, it is the mix of action/arcade genre from Asteroids with the unique puzzle like mechanic from Katamari Damacy of contacting items to grow in size. There's then a mix of the rage game genre for how your growth progress can be undone due to collisions with objects larger than yourself.

Hope that clarifies things!

Submitted

so u saying this is how the controls are suppose to be in the original game ?

Developer(+1)

Yep! If you've never played it before, here is a free version of the original game https://freeasteroids.org/ (Seems like it only works with the arrow keys, but it looks and plays just like the original arcade version)