GDS

Welcome to the Galactic Delivery Service!

Here at the GDS, we pride ourselves on our prompt and discrete parcel handling. Our customers love our personal touch. You'll see that we offer a workplace like no other! See the stars, dodge some asteroids and play in gravitational fields!

Controls and Game play

• Hold Shift to thrust
• Use the mouse to direct the heading of your ship.

Other items to note

1. You have a limited amount of fuel and your ship can only take so much battering.
2. There are power-ups to refuel and repair damage.
3. There are markers to designate delivery points and pick-up points.
4. You must make the required number of pick-ups and drop-offs before the exit marker will transport you out of  
5. Your progress toward these goals are at the top of the screen.

Flight Control

Deep space is unforgiving. Sometimes a bit of friction would be nice, but there is none here. A bit of velocity will go a long way. Well, it may go a long, long, long way. Bodies in motion, Newton once said, remain in motion and promote a healthy lifestyle. Each star and planet posses a gravitational field. They may be used to course correct or burn your ship to cinders. 

There are artificial borders to the play area. You will be reflected when you strike it. This is more of a pain than a feature, sorry. If I continue development of this bobble, I'll replace it with something better.

Development Notes

I came upon the idea of gravity as a game play mechanic. I liked and wanted to explore the idea of multiple gravitational sources, attractive and repulsive, in order to create a dynamic play area. I also wanted to put in play a lot of bodies for these forces to act upon. Asteroids and your ship are the principal pieces of debris in the system.

The game you are playing is the result of a partial week of work, vacation and all that. I was able to leverage my core library of scripts for many aspects of this project: power-ups, some of the flight mechanics. The visual assets and the gravity controller are new and seems to work okay. It uses a static controller-style pattern. Each gravity source and target in the system registers itself when it is enabled, un-registering when disable or destroyed. Gravity is applied uniformly between each source and target each fixed-update of the frame. This is done by summing the vectors of each source/target combination. There are a few knobs to influence this. More tuning is in order. In particular, the overall gravitational constant and masses of bodies in the system need more inspection.

This gravitational system seems to be able to handle many hundreds of items on my development machine. I am very interested to learn what the practical upper-limit is and what other system configurations are able to handle.

Review Feedback

Multiple folks have given great feedback. Here are some things to watch out for.

The flight controls take some time getting used to. There is no friction. As a result, it is hard to bleed off a lot of velocity to change direction. A bit of velocity goes a long way.

There are artificial borders to the play area. You will be reflected when you strike it. This is more of a pain than a feature, sorry. If I continue development of this bobble, I'll replace it with something better.

It can be difficult to escape the gravity of a planet or star if you get sucked in. Go with your momentum and apply a thrust at about a 45 degrees. A thrust vector that is too steep won't help here. The best bet is to build up velocity and peel away.

Epilogue

Thanks for coming by.