• Made a spaceship game

Space

I made a game that I call Gravity Ships, and as per usual, you can play it online.

It’s something like if you took Asteroids and made it with a Spacewar! engine instead. There are planets, asteroids (which spawn over time), enemy ships (which are suicidally stupid), and a black hole. Everything is affected by gravity (except the black hole) – for convenience’s sake I don’t bother to calculate the pull from anything other than planets, asteroids, and the black hole, but the only truly stationary thing in the field is the black hole at the middle of it. It also has a mini-map, which isn’t particularly exciting other than it served as a way for me to learn the way custom drawing for nodes works in Godot.

There are plenty of things that could be added to the game: a score, shields, smarter enemies, etc. I kind of had a vague idea about needing to do something at the planets, either blow up things on the surface or what-have-you, but honestly I got pretty sick of working on this game. The numbers involved in gravitational equations aren’t intuitive in any way, so it was a lot of guess-and-try-and-guess-again development. The playing field is (by design) large and mostly empty, and it’s actually not especially fun to fly a space ship with “realistic” controls, and really this isn’t even especially realistic – there’s no fuel and the mass changes that result from it, rotation isn’t force based, etc etc. All in all, surprise surprise: more realism isn’t necessarily more fun!

As harsh as I am on it, I do think it could be fun with some more work. I’m not really interested in putting more time into it now, but the future is unknown! Perhaps I’ll come back to it, or scavenge it for parts later on.

Happy Halloween, and see you next week!