No recommendation, because there's way too little to do, and it crashes often. However, I like this submission a LOT more than Occupy Moon since at least an actual effort was made to do something new from scratch rather just mushing together Minetest Game and Technic. So, I appreciate the effort. :-) Maybe this game will be more interesting with more missions, content and in general just more stuff to do and more challenging gameplay.
Gameplay
The gameplay is very simple: You grab your jackhammer and dig as many moon rocks as you can, then you return them to the base. There's a catch: Your jackhammer needs to recharge, so you might need multiple travels. But this is really the only thing the game has to offer: Once you collected 50 rocks of a total of 4 types, you win. The game's only real challenge is to remember your base location, which is easy if you place moon rocks as some kind of waypoint markers. Not every rock will be right at your doorstep, so you might need a longer trip. But that's really the only challenge.
I don't think it is even possible to die / fail, or at least that's very hard to achieve.
Mapgen
Unfortunately, it appears it's just the default mapgen with different blocks. Since it's a moon game, I would at least expect something like moon craters, but I could not find anything unique about the mapgen. The strangest thing about the map is the HUGE amounts of moon ice.
The game is unstable. The game greeted me with one console warning. The game crashes often when I dig. One minor bug I found is that I can't throw away items, they instantly return to my inventory. I had no performance issues.
Graphics / sounds
I think it's OK but not great. The sky is convincing, because it is always black, even at daytime and you can also see the stars at daytime. Good one! And at night, the Earth rises instead of the Moon, and the Earth texture is really good!
The GUI sadly only has the default style. The node textures are meh. Since the world is having HUGE expands of the same node, the repeating pattern quickly becomes an issue. Hint: Minetest allows you to let a texture span across multiple nodes, read about the world-aligned textures in lua_api.txt.
Story
There technically is a story, but it's an excuse plot since it is essentially "Worker, do your job!". Unfortunately, the instructions only appear when you start the game, you can't get your briefing back.
You've hit the jackhammer crash bug which is unfortunately common. It's on the list to defnitely fix after the Jam even though I don't know if I'll develop the game further.
Thanks for appreciating the texturing effort, it was great learning anyway. Earth somehow turned out really good :)
Mapgen had to get cut due to time constraints, I started late in the Jam. I had it planned that the highlands (moon rock biome) would have rougher terrain than the basalt mare, and the whole thing would be dotted with craters. But it was the night (& morning Australian time) and I was rushing just to get a 'minimum viable' out the door, so default terrain it had to be. As it is, I got the biome definitions wrong. Moon ice should have stayed as an ore in the highlands biome rather than being its own biome too, I just had the strange idea I had 4 quadrants on the Voronoi so I needed 4 biomes or something.. (ideally the ice would live inside craters in colder or southerly biomes).
I had planned the game as a story-driven game in the first place, driving a moon buggy, discovering secret moon bases and research projects, but that all got cut due to time constraints. I knew that 'collect stuff' would work well enough to get an actual game out, and justified the "plot" around it. As Zughy discovered, you can get the instructions again if you reload the world, or did that not trigger properly for you?
Thanks for the hint about world-aligned textures, I'll probably put that in after the Jam.
..also did you finish the game? Your review seems to omit any mention of whether you got to/liked the ending...
Yes, I did finish the game, but the ending struck me as unremarkable. But that's not really the problem; the real problem is the whole game just does not offer a lot of things to do. :-(
Overall rating
No recommendation, because there's way too little to do, and it crashes often. However, I like this submission a LOT more than Occupy Moon since at least an actual effort was made to do something new from scratch rather just mushing together Minetest Game and Technic. So, I appreciate the effort. :-) Maybe this game will be more interesting with more missions, content and in general just more stuff to do and more challenging gameplay.
Gameplay
The gameplay is very simple: You grab your jackhammer and dig as many moon rocks as you can, then you return them to the base. There's a catch: Your jackhammer needs to recharge, so you might need multiple travels. But this is really the only thing the game has to offer: Once you collected 50 rocks of a total of 4 types, you win. The game's only real challenge is to remember your base location, which is easy if you place moon rocks as some kind of waypoint markers. Not every rock will be right at your doorstep, so you might need a longer trip. But that's really the only challenge. I don't think it is even possible to die / fail, or at least that's very hard to achieve.
Mapgen
Unfortunately, it appears it's just the default mapgen with different blocks. Since it's a moon game, I would at least expect something like moon craters, but I could not find anything unique about the mapgen. The strangest thing about the map is the HUGE amounts of moon ice.
(review continues in the comments)
Stability
The game is unstable. The game greeted me with one console warning. The game crashes often when I dig. One minor bug I found is that I can't throw away items, they instantly return to my inventory. I had no performance issues.
Graphics / sounds
I think it's OK but not great. The sky is convincing, because it is always black, even at daytime and you can also see the stars at daytime. Good one! And at night, the Earth rises instead of the Moon, and the Earth texture is really good! The GUI sadly only has the default style. The node textures are meh. Since the world is having HUGE expands of the same node, the repeating pattern quickly becomes an issue. Hint: Minetest allows you to let a texture span across multiple nodes, read about the world-aligned textures in
lua_api.txt.Story
There technically is a story, but it's an excuse plot since it is essentially "Worker, do your job!". Unfortunately, the instructions only appear when you start the game, you can't get your briefing back.
You've hit the jackhammer crash bug which is unfortunately common. It's on the list to defnitely fix after the Jam even though I don't know if I'll develop the game further.
Thanks for appreciating the texturing effort, it was great learning anyway. Earth somehow turned out really good :)
Mapgen had to get cut due to time constraints, I started late in the Jam. I had it planned that the highlands (moon rock biome) would have rougher terrain than the basalt mare, and the whole thing would be dotted with craters. But it was the night (& morning Australian time) and I was rushing just to get a 'minimum viable' out the door, so default terrain it had to be. As it is, I got the biome definitions wrong. Moon ice should have stayed as an ore in the highlands biome rather than being its own biome too, I just had the strange idea I had 4 quadrants on the Voronoi so I needed 4 biomes or something.. (ideally the ice would live inside craters in colder or southerly biomes).
I had planned the game as a story-driven game in the first place, driving a moon buggy, discovering secret moon bases and research projects, but that all got cut due to time constraints. I knew that 'collect stuff' would work well enough to get an actual game out, and justified the "plot" around it. As Zughy discovered, you can get the instructions again if you reload the world, or did that not trigger properly for you?
Thanks for the hint about world-aligned textures, I'll probably put that in after the Jam.
..also did you finish the game? Your review seems to omit any mention of whether you got to/liked the ending...
Yes, I did finish the game, but the ending struck me as unremarkable. But that's not really the problem; the real problem is the whole game just does not offer a lot of things to do. :-(