Forums » Games » Aralander: a simple lunar lander clone

http://whatsthatgame.co.uk/index.php?pages/aralander/

(Yeah, I finally started putting my own games in a proper place for all of them, note that there isn't much on the site, it only has two games, both pretty raw and unpolished, this is the second one I've made publicly available)

Straight forward enough lunar lander clone, using the sloped collision tiles from 1.19 as the graphics! (Yes, I really am that lazy when it comes to graphics. I'm no artist.)

There's no fuel, no scoring at this point, simply because I'm actually not that interested in implementing them, it was more about playing with the collision map + tiles and seeing what happened.

The game may or may not be updated, but I do have a list of things I can do with it should I choose to do so, heheh (if I find the time!)

This is great! Very addictive. Well done.

Hearing that ding is so rewarding! Nice work

That would be cool if you had to complete a mission before landing, and had fuel that you would have to try and conserve. I think it would be a great mix of strategy and skill.

Nice job though, nice simple game.

Thanks for all the feedback :)

I've been wary of adding fuel simply because I think it could be an arbitrary limitation that doesn't really add anything to the game, but the idea of having to go and fetch something could be interesting (like rock samples)

Fuel would add a sense of urgency and make you have to be more careful wasting movement.

That's the thing, it's still a reasonably arbitrary barrier to the game, and one that can't really be tuned that well (given how 1/5 of the landscapes are random and so is your position, meaning you might need almost no fuel)

I spent a fair amount of time chasing the 'right' amount of fuel in my previous game Meteor Storm (also on whatsthatgame.co.uk) but in the end it just felt like a flimsy barrier that made it arbitrarily difficult without adding anything useful.

Is your landscape procedural? (it doesnt seem to be but its worth to ask)

Some of them, yes. At the start of each game, a choice of (currently) 0-4 is made, 0-3 are stored maps, while if 4 comes up, it generates a map procedurally.

The algorithm is naive but workable; it starts by placing the landing pad randomly (but within boundaries), then goes left, then right, starting from the pad and picking a tile randomly - for each possible tile going either direction, there is a list of what the 'next' tile can be.

The list is not weighted, so any of the legal tiles can go next, subject to being on the list of legal tiles, and that if it begins a new slope (e.g. we've just had a 45' tile and the next thing we draw will be a completely new slope), the total height of the tiles in that map will not go above or below certain limits.

On the one hand it generates some quite playable areas but very often they're quite bland, and they certainly feel random, as opposed to the ones I made that have definite smoothing on the way slopes are arranged. (Or the overhang map, which cannot be generated procedurally; the upwards sloping tiles are not in the legal tile list)

Quote from Arantor
Some of them, yes. At the start of each game, a choice of (currently) 0-4 is made, 0-3 are stored maps, while if 4 comes up, it generates a map procedurally.

The algorithm is naive but workable; it starts by placing the landing pad randomly (but within boundaries), then goes left, then right, starting from the pad and picking a tile randomly - for each possible tile going either direction, there is a list of what the 'next' tile can be.

The list is not weighted, so any of the legal tiles can go next, subject to being on the list of legal tiles, and that if it begins a new slope (e.g. we've just had a 45' tile and the next thing we draw will be a completely new slope), the total height of the tiles in that map will not go above or below certain limits.

On the one hand it generates some quite playable areas but very often they're quite bland, and they certainly feel random, as opposed to the ones I made that have definite smoothing on the way slopes are arranged. (Or the overhang map, which cannot be generated procedurally; the upwards sloping tiles are not in the legal tile list)

Nice - I'll have to have a go at making it at some point.