Redshirt's Escape
Repair your spaceship and escape the dying space station
Disclaimer: We saw too late that the theme had changed shortly after publication, so we made a game to the theme "Space Station".
Hey there, fellow spacetraveler!
You barely escaped an ambush from spacepirates, but your ship is heavily damaged and you're running low on fuel and oxygen! Luckily you find an abandoned space station, where you dock.
Now you have to keep the station's systems intact long enough survive repairing and refueling your ship. But the station's systems are slowly failing, so better hurry!
//IMPORTANT: Enable VSync to circumvent a Bug with walking.
The game was made in jMonkeyEngine, with heavy use of TiledMapEditor. Graphics were handdrawn with GIMP.
For two of us it was the second jam, one was aboard the first time.
Btw., as we didn't get to sound or music: The game plays awesome with the soundtrack of Stellaris ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V58UMNLR4N0
Comments (4)
A good challenge to balance all the things against each other, and the map is well designed around this. So evil that things randomly break after you've repaired them! It was a bit too hard for me, and I didn't manage to win, but I do get the feeling that it's possible. Good idea to make all the interactions take time, which forces the player to make tactical decisions about what to do when. In short: the gameplay is quite solid.
Graphics are a bit amateuristic, but quite functional. A walking animation would have been nice.
And of course sound effects and music could really have added to the stress: hissing air leaks (with matching particle effects) and a somewhat unstable engine hum, for example. (I didn't play with the Stellaris OST because I didn't want to bias my opinion of the game ;))
Couple small bugs: I got seams between the tiles, and wasn't able to play on fullscreen. Windowed worked fine.
Interesting take on the fake theme. You really nailed the desperation of being locked into an abandoned space station, with it breaking down around you. In fact, on my second try the last functional door of the room I was in malfunctioned. I was locked inside with no scrap to fix the door with. That felt like a proper HAL 9000 moment!
There could be a way to very slowly open a door even without scrap, prying it open with a tool or something, to avoid the previous predicament. Other than that the interactivity is very well thought out. Fixing the ship is a concrete task in the world, not just a trite goal like points or a time limit.
About the only small issue I have with the design is the size of the level. The rooms could be just a little bit smaller. The stamina system does get a bit annoying due to the amount of running needed. Not a huge issue from the play side of things.
The graphics are adequate, some parts are higher quality than others. It is the long corridors with identical floor tiles which, for me, drag the visuals down below average. It just looks so grey and drab.
You've just showed that there is no need for hostile aliens to make exploring an empty space station interesting. Proper good work!
I couldn't really figure out how to do anything… :/ I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games entered in the Alakajam #1, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/QBXJYhpSjpA
Hi! We played your game with Danae on this twitch channel, and now the video is available on YouTube. Feel free to check it out :)
Danae plays: Redshirt's Escape