Astral Influence

Buddy, you knocked it out of the park.

Well done!!!

Thanks for the great game play!!!

Really polished and fun. I was like "this is so cool" to watch at all times. The minimalistic graphics really sell the concept, love the black holes.

This is such a fun game! Great interpretation of the theme and game mechanics here.

The minimalistic graphics were a nice touch, it felt like I was alone out in space. Great job!

Great job! It felt very polished and complete, and the graphics really tied everything together. I would have had like to have a little bit of an indicator for the general direction the balls may go, or the planets influence, but fun never the less!

Black holes come out of nowhere in a good way, white holes(I assume that's what they are) are a little hard to tell apart from regular planets. I think it's a little annoying that the spacebar is enbaled when the puzzle is running, since, I assume, most players would want to adjust planets before trying again.
Love the way everything sounds like soft ping-pong balls.

Amazing entry! Fits the theme perfectly and its so elegent. I had a great time playing, especially when the black holes got involved

Graphics
The minimalist graphics are hard to mess up. The monochrome pallete adds to the game's polish. I am also going to take inspiration from your space background and ease up on the amount of stars. My game's background definitely has too many stars lol. The few stars in the background of this game simply makes it look more pleasing to the eye. 10/10.

Audio
The sound effects are the best I've heard so far. Pleasing to the ears. Satisfying, even. Great job on this, I'm curious where you got these sound effects. They sound homemade to me. Unfortunately, the lack of music or ambient sounds lower the audio score. 6/10.

Gameplay
As an engineer, I feel at home with this game. Trial and error until success haha. It gets quite hard, I could only pass about five levels until I was stuck on one for a while, then gave up so I could give other games a review. But the challenge is a good thing. I really like the orbital mechanics, they feel very polished. 9/10.

Originality
This feels very original to me. I haven't really played a game like it before. 10/10.

Theme
The core mechanic revolves around orbital gravity. Enough said. 10/10.

Overall score
9/10.

This was really fun, smooth and original! Also, despite the minimalism it looks and sounds very good.

By far one of my favourite entries. The sound design and graphics were done well. I did not think I was going to get through all of the levels due to difficulty but I did. Fantastic work!

Thanks for the nice comments everyone! Love hearing the feedback.

@ThatChipmunk

I would have had like to have a little bit of an indicator for the general direction the balls may go, or the planets influence

I wanted to get a working indicator but didn't get enough time to make a functional one unfortunately. Really jealous of this other entry Orbit Horizons haha

@Soul

white holes(I assume that's what they are) are a little hard to tell apart from regular planets.

Yeah sorry about that… didn't figure out a way to make cool looking white holes with the limited color palette I chose. Or rather, with the planet color I chose at the beginning that I didn't want to change later on >.<

I think it's a little annoying that the spacebar is enbaled when the puzzle is running, since, I assume, most players would want to adjust planets before trying again.

Totally agree, I meant to add an auto-reset function if the player tries dragging planets on screen, which I believe would have improved the flow of things, but I just forgot - I guess I got used to playing with my hand on the reset button

Love the way everything sounds like soft ping-pong balls.

@fisherbitgamedev

I'm curious where you got these sound effects. They sound homemade to me. Unfortunately, the lack of music or ambient sounds lower the audio score.

What I did for sound effects was record a bunch of sound snippets by just hitting stuff in my room, and then went to Audacity for modulating / pitching / reversing things until they sounded spacey.
I had plans to add some music, but having never done music before, the results weren't that good, so I decided to just leave the sfx.

It gets quite hard, I could only pass about five levels until I was stuck on one for a while

Also agree with this. I should have probably prioritized the trajectory preview to help with that.

Yo! Really cool and minimalist aesthetic.
Also you managed to make a lot of levels!
Some deepspace buzzing would be nice as audio background.

We went for essentially the same game, but I think both our games have a similar problem.
Somehow attraction physics aren't easy enough for a player to intuit, so the whole game comes down to guesswork, which even when you get right doesn't leave you with a lot of fullfillment.

Maybe it would've been better to limit the freedom the player has where to move the objects to. Instead of any arbirtrary position, I could imagine like 3-4 'slots'. That way it would play more like a classical puzzle, where you can be definitely and maybe even intuitively be wrong, but when you get it right you can get it in one go and it might feel more like a 'solution' instead of a random constellation that happens to be right.

Still a cool project!
I liked the little swirl I was able to get early on.

@elZach
Agreed! To be honest I was unsure if this was going to be more of a puzzle or something more real-time until I decided to just lock the planets after activating the cannon.

I can see how limiting the movement of the planets, maybe even to follow a straight line between some points to allow for some variation, could help with reducing the guesswork. Could also lead to more interesting solutions! A lot of my game can be solved with just influencing the trajectory so that it goes straight into the target. Limiting planet movement could require the player to do some fun loop arounds or something.

I also thought later about making the gravity more predictable around planets. You might notice that in some levels moving a planet far away has unpredictable results somewhere else in the level. Limiting the planet's influence to a limited and user-readable radius I think could have been helpful as well.

@mobous all great ideas! As I mentioned, we're in the same boat. :D

Looks great, feels good. I know its the whole game of it, but it did get a little tedious to trial and error path after path with a firing sequence. I didnt finish because i didnt have the patience for it.

Graphics: Simple, but good. There is just enough here to make it look deliberately minimalistic and not like placeholder art. The camera wobble helps a lot.

Audio: Ditto. Subtle and doesn't get in the way.

Gameplay: Alas, too much trial and error. See Orbit Horizons by elZach for an example how this could be done without repetitive starting and resetting… but it doesn't change the basic fact that it's too hard to reason about outcomes. Especially because there seems to be some friction in space?

All in all, a flawed concept, but very well executed!

Fun game, good difficulty and the black holes were really cool. Graphics are quite cool too.

So many comments here! Hard to say anything that wasn't said already. The popping sounds were so enjoyable to me. The art style with chunky pixels really speaks to me as well. The game was simple but the puzzles were engaging. Biggest issue is that (I think) it's wobbling, so it's hard to know if I moved a planet or it just wobbled. That resulted in bigger changes than I aimed for. Good job!