You're lost in a large, ever-changing field of asteroids. Your ship's scanners grow weaker as you run out of power. Your only hope of survival is to find and collect batteries scattered around the field to briefly restore power to your ship, only to gain a little time to search for more power.
I made this as my submission to the 39th Ludum Dare game jam as a solo 48 hour entry. It's a nice and short experience with roughly 1-5 minute play sessions. It is intended to just be played once or twice as there is no long term goal, the effort was put into getting the player into a relaxed mood. There is nothing to hold you or excite you and keep you coming back. During that 48 hour jam, I decided that anything that might break that mood was to be avoided. I have no expectation for players to play this more than once. If you enjoyed the game anyway you can hop over to the LudumDare website and vote here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/lost-cluster
Some of the visual effects for this browser version have been toned down to reduce lag. To be fair, there are several thousand objects active at a time, but no game play elements were changed.
To be blunt, this isn't very fun.
I'm flying around just searching for things. Feels very "needle in a haystack".
It's not necessarily difficult, you can just bump into everything infinitely without taking damage.
It's just tedious.
Maybe if there rewards or upgrades, enemies or something I could see myself wanting to play this.
Impressive for 48 hours though.
You're right, those sort of things can definitely liven up the game play. My focus was just on creating a mood for the player and not so much about keeping them entertained and focused. In my mind adding extra features that don't support that mood were just treated as distractions that should be avoided. I wouldn't ask anyone to play this for longer than 1 play session at most, I'm aware that there is nothing holding the player, but I'm happy you took the time to provide feedback.
I like the music and simple art but other than that there's not much to do. There isn't much of a goal and neither the awkward controls nor the unsatisfying collection of batteries help make this game any more enjoyable.
Understandable. The goal is essentially to just last as long as possible by collecting batteries and I didn't want to distract from the mood which was the focus of this game developed in under 48 hours. The intention was to be a short arcade-style game that only really needs to be picked up and dropped in a few minutes although adding some action or a more long term goal could go a long way in retaining players.
