Ambassador of Pluto VS the Celestial Bodies
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
This is our entry for Crossroads Jam 2024. The theme was Severe Weather, and so we made space and cosmic radiation.
Latest update notes
6/29/2024: Removed playable web build. Web performance was not up to our playable standards. The game is still free. You can use download and select "no thanks, just take me to the downloads" link in the popup to get the download versions without paying anything. The offline game runs much better and is closer to our intended experience. The downloads with _jam at the end of the file names are archived copies of the original jam release date. The other downloads are updated to have better graphical performance but otherwise unchanged from the original submission.
Our apologies to anyone who wishes to play this on a phone. Currently there is no plans to make any android or iOS builds, and the web build never really ran that great to begin with. This game has an ambitious number of bullets, and we just couldn't make it play well on phones in a browser.
Controls
Our game can handle mouse input, keyboard WASD and Arrow Keys, and even a controller plugged in. On all three you should have a sensible time. The game can handle swapping controls during the run, the last input used will be the active controller.
Full Controller Explanations
On mouse, click to go forward, right click to pause the game. The ship (pluto in the middle) will steer to your mouse when you move it far enough away from the ship. For weapons with aiming, they will fire at the mouse position.
On keyboard, enter goes forward, esc or p key will pause the game. The ship will move with your inputs on WASD as a pad, or on the arrow keys. For weapons with aiming, they will fire in the direction last pressed. There are no diagonal aiming inputs for now, we apologize for the inconvenience.
On joystick, START or SELECT will pause the game. One of the sticks, usually the left stick, should move around. The ship will move in the direction pressed, and you can easily move in small distances with a lighter amount of pull. Aimed weapons will fire in the last direction tapped. Only controller 1 is implemented, so make sure to use the first if you have multiple plugged in.
Credits
Game Design and Creations/Programming/Graphics/Sounds
Planets, Dwarf Planets, and the Sun images are from NASA
Previous version updates
6/27/2024: Performance Patch 1. Changed the source image size for most of the game resources. Makes the download MUCH smaller, and might help with performance since less graphics resources are loaded in memory. Also changed bullet from player to properly show up and have corn scaling instead of a square. That was embarrassing, oops.
6/24/2024: We have implemented a post jam sound patch. No changes to the game play were made. We simply added in a missing sound effect for the intro and compressed the audio from wav to ogg. The game plays exactly the same as our original submission.
If you really want the original submission, we have reuploaded that version under the downloads. They are the downloads with "_jam" at the end of the filenames. Keep in mind the only difference will be a missing audio for the intro screen!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Removed web buildJun 29, 2024
Comments
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I enjoyed the variety of weapons; on my first attempt, I assumed that the weapons would always be the same. Of course, the funny vegetable aliens are great too!
Thanks for sharing!
Quirky fun aesthetic, but I had the game lock up on me. I played the Web build on Chrome on Windows. In the second dialog, the audio got “stuck”, and the window went nonresponsive.
We have been having technical hell getting any web browser version working smoothly. The web really doesn't like rendering all the bullets on some systems. Please try the download build if you can!
the art and sound were so great and quirky--enjoyed seeing vegetables flying around the screen, though i was terrible at dodging their attacks lol. great work!
Loads of fun! I love how quickly the amount of projectiles ramps up to an absurd degree and the sounds the characters make are hilarious
Apologies about the sun and some weapons, some came out a little absurdly OP in the end. We plan to revisit post jam and rebalance the damages/fire rates to smooth it out somewhat. (For the record, the last fight is a joke/high score challenge and cannot be killed in this jam version. So don't feel bad, there is no ending you are missing.)
We had too much fun making the aliens and the universal language communicator screen. Our cat is still very concerned about BlackDrake21 making random sounds at his screen, late at night, for hours, as he tried to figure out what an angry bell pepper head sounds like.
Final Score: 21096. Lot's of fun. The art style is definitely interesting, and - along with the sound design - gives the game a very unique character. Could use a little more clarity on some mechanics - didn't realize I was healing by hitting things until the final fight of my run. But otherwise, great game.
Actually, the only healing is a simple regenerate over time.
I agree, we could have done a little more to explain what was going on. Another feature I think lots of people are missing is that the weapons shuffle around between planets each run. We ran out of jam time before we could add any explanation screens to anything. Spent way too much time making funny aliens, oops.
I don't know exactly what was happening but I know the aliens were very cute. Fun little game!
Not knowing what is happening, but still having fun anyway is the core of a good B movie sci-fi experience. Glad you had fun!
This was actually really fun! The photography/collage art style was really charming and the loop is so addictive. This is kinda weird but it reminds me of those .io games I used to play with my friends? The only thing is that it doesn't seem to run very well on browser and it drops frames if there are a lot of particles on screen. But otherwise excellent!
Thanks for the feedback, glad it was enjoyable! We wanted it to feel like an old b movie or lost to time space game.
Regarding performance, there is only so much I can do with the HTML5 version to get it to run better. So many particles/bullets/ships all rendering at once is just not very nice for web games. I have some culling for the ships and bullets, and a lot of tricks to try and get it playable, such as sending all ships to a single rendering image each frame. I think the HTML5 build is simply struggling from the 720p resolution + running at 60 fps.
I'll investigate further post jam to see if I can salvage the performance for this one. However, moving forward, any bullet hell games we make will probably stay download only. It's a constant technical issue I keep running into on making web games.
Just to be clear the poor performance on HTML is not something I hold against the project at all. You only have so much to work with in a browser after all! Keep up the great work