Made a retro-ish space mining sim inspired by Asteroids.

[idle crypt]

I had this idea for a game where if you just played as one of those harvester ships in a Homeworld or other similar RTS games.

So I built it around the idea that you receive orders to supply ore so that the mothership can build more ships for their war or something to that effect.

Scope creep became a bit of a nightmare, despite using a game doc so I wanted to get something on here before I proceeded with the rest of the course. I've only had a few hours a few days a week so I've been working on this since July.

Music and Audio is from Freesound. Art and code is by yours truly.

https://martinbo.itch.io/asteroid-harvester

Enjoy!

[forest stratus]

I love this idea! I'm a big fan of alternate viewpoint games like this where your job is normally something an NPC/AI would do in a larger game. Art, sfx, music, gameplay loop are all really good. I think the ship could be bigger or maybe more readable in terms of position and orientation; I had a hard time with steering partly because of that difficulty. The other part was a lack of damping on rotation; while realistic in terms of space physics I often lost control of my ship especially when colliding with asteroids, so either a slower turn rate or damping would feel better for me. Another option would be to use mouse position for steering, where the player ship always points at the mouse cursor location. I also noticed the center of rotation is off-center from the ship and I wasn't sure if that was intentional or not.

I really loved the game over screen as much as it made me mad to see it lol, the monochrome aesthetic, and ship coming apart like that was unexpected and a really cool looking effect.

Dropping off ore at the station is really fun, I wasn't sure if the spinning things would block my ship or not. It could be a good challenge to make them solid to force the player to time their entrance to the station when there's a clear path, although that might be too frustrating. Another thought is to have the ship actually dock with the station for a second or two while the ore is unloaded, it might make for a good pause to let the player refocus on the game field and plan their next moves.

I did find the asteroids covering the station frustrating; I would calculate vectors that don't cross the station area when spawning asteroids and setting their velocity. Also when spawning asteroids it would be nice to have an idea of how large it will be; I got killed multiple times from being too close to the warning icon even though I felt I was a reasonable distance away.

Overall though I really love this concept and style! I would definitely play this more with the changes I mentioned, HOWEVER, understand that I'm not a professional game dev or tester and it's possible some or all of my ideas would make the game worse in some way. If you enjoy it that's honestly the most important part, so take my feedback with skepticism and keep making things you enjoy.

[round oriole]

wow reading this feed back really amazed me that is awesome !

[undone lagoon]

Love the vibe of the game, being drifted away and art !

[sweet niche]

I don't like that I drift automatically quite fast and the turning is too fast. It's simply too difficult to control it and therefore not fun i.m.o. But maybe some people actually like this experience.