Gravity's Rainbows

This was one of the most fun ones I tried so far from the jam. Cute sounds and graphics. Simple concept but very well executed.

Neat. I like the mechanism sfx that plays as the screen moves.

Man that was a good game.

Well done.

I little more responsive with the gravity maybe

Nice game, easy to play and fun - sometimes I really lost control of the gravity ha!

I only get a black screen in Firefox :( My monitor is 4K, by the way, but I don't think it's why there is only a black screen.

It's hard but fair. Considering your own highscore, it's defitinely possible to "git gud".

Maybe I'd like to see some more feedback on what is currently going on, e.g. drawing your projected trajectory, or even drawing the trajectories that would happen if you pressed F or D. Barring that, maybe just a simple arrow showing the current acceleration would help too?

Looks pretty, and I love the gentle music too. Great work!

I think it'd be a good idea if you could choose to go into a neutral state like there is at the start, so you can just coast after setting up a good trajectory. It would give the player a little more control over whats going on. Otherwise, a neat game!

I really feel like it's missing something, like a way to better figure out what's happening and what will happen, like highlighting the planets that are currently influencing the movement of the player. Things as they are, it felt a lot like I was crossing my fingers hoping for things to go the way I thought, only for me to realize too late that they won't, so I end up with no momentum to get back on track.

This entry fits the theme perfectly, I find the concept original, the music is nicely chosen, but the gameplay isn't really fun to me because of how little I felt in control, though keep in mind that may be subjective.

I hope my feedback helps!

I tried it in Chrome and played now. I loved the music and how well the theme is interpreted.

It was a hard game for me, it's hard to control the flow while there are this many gravitational objects.

Nice job!

Thanks for playing and commenting everyone! I think the forces could have been tweaked a bit for the better, mostly to be a bit stronger. Also, I now wonder whether it might have been more fun to turn this into a racing game, where you just have to move to the right as fast as possible and the rainbows would serve as powerups if anything. Oh well.

@Gord10 glad you got it to work on Chrome, I played on Firefox myself and had no issues, so I do wonder what was wrong. If you still see this, could you maybe check the console with developer tools for any errors?

@thomastc always impressive how constructive your feedback is, I indeed did consider arrows to show the current blue/yellow force direction, but prioritized other things in the end (mostly music). The trajectory idea is even better (exactly as you have it in your game :P).

@gubFS I actually had that at first (it's still there as dead code now), but I figured having even more buttons becomes too confusing. Even with just two it's easy to go into mashing mode. You do have coasting-mode-at-home though, by tapping either button in relatively quick succession.

@Taevas All the planets influence you, based on their mass and distance. I was initially hoping that getting a feeling for this would be a good aspect of the gameplay, but in the end I agree that some visual cues would have been better (gradual highlighting could have been one approach, but thomastc's suggestion of trajectory forecasting would be even better I think).

Now it works in Firefox, too.

I wasn't even seeing any loading screen at the first time I tried in Firefox. Now the game can load completely about in a minute.

Thinking about this more, I believe the inverse square law for gravity is not the right thing for most games. A linear falloff with a radius outside of which gravity is hard zero would allow you to draw that circle, and so make things a bit more intuitive. Also gravity would not be so super strong near an attractor; slingshotting is only nice if you can somewhat control where you end up going. There are several more games this jam where I'd like to try the same :)

@Gord10: good to hear! 1 minute is pretty steep though…

@thomastc: I started off with "real" gravity, with indeed an inverse square law. The divide-by-zero problem of getting close to planets of course became immediately apparent, so I added a small constant to the numerator. Later I switched to a normal distribution, which is the final version. I think this could have been approximated quite easily by the original approach with the constant in the numerator and playing around with various parameters.

As you say, a linear falloff may also work well and be probably the simplest approach. A potential problem would be that the player can get hard stuck if no planets are inside the radius, and I liked the inverse square-ish approach because it lets the closest planet dominate the force more easily. To me that felt more satisfying when you let yourself be pulled close for slingshotting and switching gravity at the right moments.

@DiningPhiloshopher: Yeah, but my internet connection is 35 Mbits here.