Great game, though the controls on mobile are a bit too imprecise.
As you drag a hole, the size widgets should disappear so you can better see what's around it. They could pop back up again once you're done dragging.
Personally I'd rather if you had to press a button or something (or long press?) to add a new hole. I keep accidentally adding new ones when all I want to do is adjust an existing one.
Also spamming the user with the help screen right off the bat is a bit much. As long as they know it's there and can pull it up / dismiss it, I think it would be more fun to sort of discover the game mechanics yourself.
Note several of the first 8 or so levels can be accomplished with a single minimum (8) sized black hole. Eg. I liked the simplicity of doing that on level 6.
Also a small bug: when rotating in response to the prompt to play in landscape, the button does not show and a refresh is needed while still in landscape
I resisted playing on mobile until I got home, and you're absolutely right that it's a whole other experience on desktop. In terms of addictive potential this reminds me favorably of that Seedship game, it's very simple, but powerfully "just one more round."
I get that it's only a game, but all of these gravity games (with a couple of rare exceptions) ignore the fact that the black holes (or planets/suns) should be moving as well.
Kerbal Space Program didn't!
I wonder if it'd be much harder to simulate real gravity "spheres", with Lagrange points and all. But even without it, in simplified mechanics, planning slingshots and using Oberth effect had been fun.
If you go on Amazon and search "100,000 whys", you will find page after page of essentially the exact same book. Presumably because asking some AI model "give me an idea for an educational book aimed at children" gave that answer.
I just asked ChatGPT to generate me an educational book title for children, searched the first result it gave me on Amazon, and found a book titled exactly that published a couple of months ago.
LLMs converge towards expected text which makes them really bad at creating novel interesting ideas when given essentially no information. You have to create the unique part yourself.
Yeah, for any given decision an LLM will tend towards a fairly limited set of answers across a pretty broad range of contexts unless you specifically steer it otherwise. It becomes pretty obvious when you run a lot of similar prompts through them. I remember one story of a teacher getting their class to use chatGPT for a creative writing exercise, and then getting them to read them out and compare them. What seemed like creative and novel choices from the LLM to each of them individually were actually replicated across most of the class.
Fun idea, but kind of maddening that I can click and hold to add mass to a hole but if i overshoot, i can't do anything subtract mass or delete a hole.
The ability to subtract mass is definitely needed. All you can do is click “undo” and try again. You can drag the holes around too. Still pretty fun, I played 5 or 6 levels
The "no fuel" mechanic is very challenging. If you click on the "sector" button at top left and then click "I give up" the computer will show you the solution. It's all about making gates with two holes and then steering by adding mass to one
I do apologise. I'm trying to replicate the mobile issues, though I don't have one to hand right now. I've just pushed up some changes that attempt to make touch interactivity a little better and I added full screen support
I love it. The dragging of black holes could be improved:
* The black hole is not moved until the cursor has moved more than five pixels.
* The first time the black hole moves in the dragging process, it moves more than one pixel, afterwards one. So it is a small jump and then it moves smooth.
* The cursor icon changes to the drag symbol only after the mouse has already moved five pixels, not as soon as the mouse button is hold down.
* When the mouse is outside the draggable zone, but still in the game window, the black hole is not dragged along the border.
frustrating game, feels half done. obviously least matter is consumed by bending it as close to the object, but game has crazy growth speed and no way to control it
Very nice, being busy with sth, and I could not go through all levels and reached the one with star(sun?), but the topic of gravity assist manouver was always inspiring for me, so I enjoy this game, congrats on making it!
i've been making a bunch of fun physics games like this. i need to push out the latest one. try this one, torture a parking optimizer: https://truckslop.joshu.dev/
It might be a cheat, but I'd really like a mode where the projected path of the ship had unlimited length. The trial and error cycle is a bit too long for some of the more advanced setups.
As you drag a hole, the size widgets should disappear so you can better see what's around it. They could pop back up again once you're done dragging.
Personally I'd rather if you had to press a button or something (or long press?) to add a new hole. I keep accidentally adding new ones when all I want to do is adjust an existing one.
Also spamming the user with the help screen right off the bat is a bit much. As long as they know it's there and can pull it up / dismiss it, I think it would be more fun to sort of discover the game mechanics yourself.
Note several of the first 8 or so levels can be accomplished with a single minimum (8) sized black hole. Eg. I liked the simplicity of doing that on level 6.
https://www.michaelfogleman.com/gravity-assist/
I just asked ChatGPT to generate me an educational book title for children, searched the first result it gave me on Amazon, and found a book titled exactly that published a couple of months ago.
LLMs converge towards expected text which makes them really bad at creating novel interesting ideas when given essentially no information. You have to create the unique part yourself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencode/comments/1ww5o7y/animated_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencode/comments/1ww5o7y/animated_...
Definitely a fun game kudos!
Another alternative is to make it like a turn-based Scorched Earth (Mother of all games), where you can either
1. launch asteroid size projectiles across star systems in a field of stars and black holes to it each other.
2. launch projectiles that then place black holes (perhaps either by timeout or signal--taking into account the speed of light!) to change the field.
It's a good start!
Scorched Earth <3
Another version of this idea has been out for some time now, check out Interplanetary[0] (85% off today it seems!)
0 https://store.steampowered.com/app/650220/Interplanetary_Enh...
Or pool...
I am prince of the planet potters!
This is not an attempt to be a jerk. Just letting you know there's people like me out there.
* The black hole is not moved until the cursor has moved more than five pixels.
* The first time the black hole moves in the dragging process, it moves more than one pixel, afterwards one. So it is a small jump and then it moves smooth.
* The cursor icon changes to the drag symbol only after the mouse has already moved five pixels, not as soon as the mouse button is hold down.
* When the mouse is outside the draggable zone, but still in the game window, the black hole is not dragged along the border.
https://www.falstad.com/rendezvous/
(check the autopilot option)
(This is a compliment.)
It’s a mobile world. This would be so nice as a proper touch enabled game
Desktop and Mobile are at about a 50/50 split, no it's not exactly a "mobile world".
Great concept!
Some missions have mass budget so large it seems to imply a "go fast, crash fast" solutions, but there's no time-of-flight score :(
ha, now I want to see a leaderboard, with players' score distribution (mass/holes/time mb?), like the zachtronics games
I had a blast. Thank you!
- It would be nice to be able to manually key in the matter; on Safari desktop clicking uses up matter too quickly to set precisely.
- Key to speed up time once running.