Asteroid Belt - Lattyware's Ludum Dare #23 entry.

This is a small project by Gareth Latty (Lattyware).

Other projects.

This is my entry for Ludum Dare #23 - Asteroid Belt, a game on the theme of 'Tiny World' produced in 48 hours.

Get it:

Download:

Source: asteroidbelt-src.zip md5sum: 8881dd1c7a67608322c5c6114be9c1cf, or get it from the github project.

Linux: asteroidbelt-linux.zip md5sum: 5bb449aee53ac5676f7ac9a9f66cc6a0.

Windows: asteroidbelt-win.zip md5sum: a31388ec8ee643da5097f06c0bbdd164.

Gameplay

You play as a man fed up of living on an asteroid, find your way to the edge of the asteroid belt, and to a real planet.

What was going to be the gameplay

You play as a race of people living on an asteroid belt. While you manage to survive, the lack of natural resources and the small asteroids make for poor living conditions. You look towards a habitable planet in your solar system, where you can settle.

Your aim is to build a spaceship and fly there, however, to be successful you will need to build your spaceship from resources scattered across asteroids, clear a path through the asteroids for it, and aim it correctly.

Asteroids contain a number of resources. Your home planet contains no resources, as they have been consumed by past generations of your people. All that remains is the rocket pad you have built. Other asteroids contain a variety of resources:

You will begin with meagre stockpiles of these resources, allowing you to build a variety of items to get to, and interact with asteroids:

Watch out - asteroids are inherantly unstable, and you only collect resources from asteroids which are connected to your home asteroid. Good luck!

Notes

Well, at the last minute the gameplay mechnaics fell apart - a lot of the gameplay for the actual game is done, but not enough to be playable, so I canibalised it into this. It's nothing great, but it is technically a game.

As usual, this isn't as polished as I'd like - 48 hours is not a long time, so please don't judge me too harshly. Likewise, the code isn't as elegant or well documented as I'd like - but this is to be expected.

I switched to pyglet from sfml2 for this due to sfml2 not being very easy to install as a dependancy - it all requires compiling from git repos, and the python bindings require cython - it becomes a big pain, so I decided to use something else until they are ready. Still like SFML, it's a great library, but it's simply not as easy to distribute. Unfortunately this means I'm stuck on Python 2.x, when I'd rather be on 3.x, but so it goes.

I also decided to use pymunk for physics - I hadn't used it before, but it's a nice library - if a little sparse in the documentation.

Requirements:

Usage:

If you want to play the game only, I highly advice getting a binary version of the game from my website. These have the dependancies packaged with them, and are easier to simply get and play. Then simply run the executable. Under linux, simply check the executable bit has been set (chmod +x ld23) and then do ./ld23. Under Windows double click ld23.exe.

To run the game from source, run main.py with Python. Under most linux distributions, simply python2 main.py or python main.py depending on what the main version of python for your distribution is. Under windows, you will probably need to add python to your system path - see the official python documentation for more.

Author:

Please feel free to contact me, I'm always happy to hear from people.

Things I Used:

Licence:

Copyright © 2012: Gareth Latty gareth@lattyware.co.uk

This game's source code is provided under the GPLv3 licence, see LICENCE or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more.

All other assets are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) licence - see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.