Crater Goods

"Fly through space to stock your shop. Featuring planetary gravity and shop management systems."

About the Game (What it does)

Crater Goods is a fun space exploration and resource gathering game where you collect specimens and sell them to researchers at an intergalactic shop. Use your trusty jetpack to gather as many resources as you can before you run out of oxygen. Work to remember what customers want and refine materials to fit their needs. Giving a customer the incorrect item results in a loss of a material and a low payment, so pay close attention. Use money from customers to upgrade yourself and gather more resources!

Inspiration

Dave the Diver by MINTROCKET was our main inspiration, as it features a similar resource gathering and selling loop.

Controls

A/D - Move W - Jump / Use Jetpack E - Pickup item

How we built it

We used the Godot Game Engine v4.5.1 and Aseprite for the art. We reused a library of addons made by Ryly for other games to make the iteration process smoother. One of the most useful addons was the DevTools addon that added a cheat console to our game to allow us to quickly test multiple aspects of our game.

Challenges we ran into

Tweaking the gravity and player movement took a lot of work. The normal physics you learn in highschool makes quite a lot of assumptions and approximations such as gravity always pointing down. However highschool physics crumbles when gravity is allowed to go in any such direction, now you have to use all sorts of linear algebra such as dot products and projection vectors to properly handle the forces involved.

These physics would also be counter intuitive to the player. One of the biggest issues we faced was players having a lack of control steering themselves in zero gravity. This forced us to compromise on our game's realism and allow the player to turn freely and slightly nudge their velocity in the direction they are turning when doing so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the gravity system, the inventory system, and all hand-drawn art. The upgrade system and shop work exactly as we intended, and create a fun and entertaining game.

What we learned

The complexities of making a planetary gravity system and finding novel and fun ways to implement shop management gameplay.

What's next for Crater Goods

Expanding the world and adding an end. Originally we wanted players to finish the game by uncovering some sort of dark secret (such as finding a lost spaceship) to beat the game but due to time constraints we were not able to implement that. The game feels it’s lacking depth in the upgrade system as all upgrades are just basic number increases. We would have wanted to have more unique upgrades that give the player whole new abilities (such as a grapple hook) instead of just improving what they can already do. Build upon the shop management loop. We had plans to add a shop reputation system and more room to customize your shop, such as by specializing into rocks and plants.