Starman Run SC-1
First level of Starman Run - made for MVM 21. This game explores the thought of what could happen to the famous Tesla Roadster launched on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy maiden flight containing a mannequin in a Spacesuit, named "Starman". What if it follows a fate similar to Voyager VI in Star Trek The Motion Picture and becomes self-aware with the help of a robotic race of beings? In this game, Starman, now a robot himself, is shot down in his Roadstership and crashes on the home planet of his nemesis, the evil Vorgon Empire, a race of alien/robot hybrids. Help him defeat the Vorgons and restore peace to the Galaxy!
Controls are: Keyboard - WASD for movement, J=Fire, K=Dash, L=Shield, Space=Jump, ESC=Pause menu. Gamepad - (Xbox layout) A=Jump, X=Fire, B=Dash, Y=Shield, Menu=Pause
Best played fullscreen!
Download
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Development log
- Full game update and Android version out soon!Dec 08, 2023
- Many updates coming!Sep 26, 2023
- Visual update!Sep 14, 2023
- Update! Bugfix and upcoming featuresSep 14, 2023
Comments
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Encountered a bug where I became invincible. I haven't even gotten the shield upgrade; my end screen said "Power-ups Found: 4/5". There's also the slight inconvenience that dashing cancels the charge, though maybe it's intentional? Dashing through an elevator/teleporter retains the dash distance, which is kinda weird but doesn't affect the gameplay as much.
Other than that, solid game. Story was interesting, upgrades were well-placed, controls were very responsive (i could even gatling fire lol), designs are cool, environment may need some more going on but still not bad, bosses could be a bit harder tho.
Looking forward to more levels in the future :D
Thanks for the input! Any more details on how you became invincible? I totally agree about not much going on in the environment, 100%. I felt that this first level is quite a bit spread out so it seems empty-ish. Upcoming levels are a bit more compact. Dash and charge do need a bit more work and I may move the shield to later on in the game. As a teaser, upcoming planned biomes are: Lab, Factory, Forest, Mothership. Not necessarily in that order ;)
Apologies, but I can't quite remember how to recreate the bug. All I remember is it involved me spamming buttons. Perhaps dashing while gatling laser? I'm sorry but yeah. In any case, goodluck with developing the next levels.
I really liked this! The controls felt great, and the aesthetics all meshed together well. Your HUD really sold it, especially having a minimap that filled in as you go. That's not something I expect by default in a jam. I did have an issue with the shield, though. I assumed it was something I could activate, but I didn't see it in the control scheme. If that's the case, simply adding it to the description would be sufficient. If rather it's something that just decreases damage taken from enemies passively, perhaps specifying as much or even just calling it armor would lessen the confusion. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out a few small bugs. Just to be clear, they by no means make the game unplayable.
When you jump midway through charging the charge attack, you will not get a charge attack. Similarly, you cannot begin to charge an attack during a jump. However, you can jump after the charge is complete and release it midair. On the other hand, I had some difficulties with charging and running at the same time. I tried to replay the game to provide more effective bug reporting, but at that point I was unable double jump. As such, I couldn't even reach the charge power up. I'm wondering if it might have something to do with the way the game saves progress? I was playing directly in browser, in case that makes a difference to debugging.
On the whole, your game was very cool. Good work!
Thanks! And thanks for the details! I have a bug report notepad and check them off as I go. For the shield powerup, I had planned on(and will fully implement soon) making it an actual shield you could activate for a second, which would block an enemy's attack, but then have a few seconds cooldown time to keep it interesting. I was working on the sprites for it but couldn't make anything that I was satisfied with at all and had to scrap the idea and just program it as a 50% defense bonus and move on. I had already created really cool activate/deactivate SFX for it too. I then had to nerf the final boss a bit as I had originally designed it so that it would have been nearly impossible without the shield. So many things cut for time, but that's how it goes.
As for the charged attack, the original concept was that building up a super powerful blast wave required much more energy and so he needed to stand still and focus to build up the charge. I then realized it would be nice to be able to jump up and release it to get something up higher, so I added that in. In retrospect, it may be better from a playability standpoint to be able to charge it up anywhere as long as you hold the button, no matter what else you do besides dash, as that would be kind of an energy burst in itself. But I will have to test that out and see.
As far as saving progress, I basically save powerup and boss progress to a single slot, which overwrites back to 0 if you select "Start" instead of "Continue". Checkpoints and save slots was a feature that I had to postpone until a post-jam release. I will do some more testing with that in the browser version to see if everything is going right with that. These will be needed as for the full version I am targeting 10 full biomes/levels each around as big as the one in this version.
Keyboard controls changed: Crtl is Dash and Shift is now Fire.
Thanks! I will upload an updated version tonight with the alt key changed - as well as new moving platforms
alt key was a poor choice for playing in webbrowser -- brings up the browser's own menu panel, taking focus away from the game. Nice little platformer otherwise.
Thanks for the feedback. A fix will be coming tonight. By the way, what keys do you think work best? I'm used to using a controller.
For keyboard play, one hand for movement another hand for verbs (jump, shoot, dash, talk, ...).
AWDS and ⇦⇧⇨⇩ are typical for movement, while verbs are keys between them like JKL, BNM, IOP, shift, space.