Sending Your Boss Into Orbit Simulator
You're Grape Labs' top engineer. One day, your boss, the illustrious Kevin Grape, hands you a new project. Grape wants to be sent to the edge of space, straight into orbit. You reluctantly accept, expecting your inevitable doom. How far can you get?
First of all, thanks for playing! But be warned, this is my first game jam, one of my first games, and I vastly underestimated the scale of this project. I hear that's a combination for a great game!
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I really like the idea. Sending a BOSS to the EDGE of space is a brilliant way to use the theme, and I have fond memories of Kerbal Space Program. (Plus, who doesn't want to send Jeff Bezos to space with no way home?)
But KSP gave much clearer feedback about what was going on—and hence, things like how close I was to orbit and what just killed my crew. I don't expect something as lavish as KSP, of course, but the only indication of how high I was going and how close I was to death was a few numbers in the corner of the screen...and aside from altitude (100k is the traditional line between atmosphere and space), I didn't know how big the numbers would have to get before they were good enough/too bad.
Thank you for the feedback! You make a great point with KSP, I probably should've researched how those systems work before I made mine lol. I intended the very top progress bar to signify how close the player is to orbit, but it didn't end up working well since the way I programmed it makes it significantly more dependent on horizontal velocity rather than altitude. So it only starts going up later in the flight when the rocket becomes more horizontal.
But I really appreciate the feedback, these will be the first problems I address if I ever get back to this game. :)
Aside from the fact that it would be complicated and questionably practical to make in a game jam context, I wonder if some kind of trajectory predictor would work for displaying progress. A little globe or something with a curve showing where you would go if you just turned off your rocket and coasted. You could watch it climb higher as you accelerated upwards, and then widen as you accelerated horizontally.
Cool idea! I was planning to implement something similar that just renders a partial ellipse as an orbital trajectory once the altitude was sufficiently high, but I didn't have enough time. It would be cool if such an indicator could also take air resistance into account such that the trajectory starts going down towards the earth if it gets into the atmosphere. I don't know if I have the physics expertise to do such a thing, but I might try later!
Air resistance would be tricky to model, but there's probably a simple calculation that would let you show a rough trajectory based on your current velocity. I'm not sure if I know what to Google, but the formulas for projectile motion and/or Kepler's laws of planetary motion might be a place to start?