Drift
Drift
Description
In Drift, you are an interstellar designer carefully positioning celestial bodies to create stable system - loops.
Instructions
With the help of the preview trajectories, drag around bodies to design a system that is forever contained, looping continuously. Press play and observe your design lead to destruction, ejection or stability. Upon stability, return to the main menu to find new levels, more challenging than the others. There are a total of 5 levels in the game.
PS, the last level is yet to be completed, though it has been done at a stability of around 0.9, so I do believe with tweaking it is possible.
Known Issues & Confusing Elements
- All planets that highlight on hover can be moved. In some level there are multiple movable planets.
- In the main menu, invisible level previews can be clicked. To play the game in it's indented order, click only on visible planets.
Credits
Thanks to the following, whose assets (free for commercial use) have been used in the creation of this game. See their work in the provided links.
- Itch, Pixel Planet Generator, Deep-Fold
- Pixabay, feesound-community
- Google Fonts, Tiny5, Stefan Schmidt
Here's a preview of a setup for the last level by Beary. By shifting the setup to the right as far as possible, it's possible to get very close to a stability of 1.
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
OK, I won't even attempt to complete the Three Body Problem. But it's a very charming game :)
A very interesting and charming concept for a game. The pixel arts are really cool, i love them. I would love to take a peek behind the physics of this game, I feel like I'm going to get a Bachelor in Physic if I do.
However, I want to point out a mayor problem with the game.
1/ The Solution : For a few stage, The solution for a puzzle game must make a player feel they are smart for figuring it out. However, some puzzle here require pixel perfect placement to solve, or it feels like so. Which is a mayor problem for the game.
I think with a better difficulty spanning and a better tutorial overall. And with a lot of polish, the game can be really fun and unique to play around with.
Overall, a pretty interesting concept with a lot of potential. 7.5/10
Ideas: 9/10
-Fun; 8/10
-Potential: 10/10
(Unique: 10/10)
Excution: 6.5/10
-Game Feel / Polish: 6/10
-Game Flow / Diffuculty: 7/10
Thanks for the thorough review & feedback! It's always nice to see people go out of their way to help someone improve.
As for the physics, it's a standard classical mechanics (newtonian physics) simulation. Basically, all objects (with mass) pull other objects with a certain force determined by the mass of the objects and the distance between them: F = (G * m1 * m2) / r^2. It was quite interesting to develop, seeing as it is pretty close to how gravity in our own Universe functions.
As for the level design issue, I totally agree. Solutions to levels should build on a breakthrough - learning something new about how the game functions - not pixel-perfect precision. It's sort of the same problem when you combine a platformer with a puzzler. It doesn't quite work out well.
On the topic of a tutorial, improved difficulty scaling and polish, these are definitely things that could turn this, as it is now, experimental project into a game. I definitely want to continue building off this project, and give thought to how to turn this physics simulation into a game.
I'm glad you liked the idea, and it's very inspiring to hear that you think there's great potential. Thanks again!
Love the concept, the 3 last levels are brutal
Glad to hear you liked the concept! The levels do get quite hard quite fast.