Really nice game, and I love the amount of polish you put into the things surrounding the gameplay! Great job :D
Play game
Katamari Mech Spacey (カタマリメカ スペイシー)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Accessibility | #2 | 3.903 | 3.903 |
| Theme | #22 | 3.710 | 3.710 |
| Overall | #24 | 3.438 | 3.438 |
| Audio | #33 | 3.387 | 3.387 |
| Controls | #35 | 3.355 | 3.355 |
| Fun | #52 | 3.097 | 3.097 |
| Graphics | #55 | 3.419 | 3.419 |
| Originality | #61 | 3.194 | 3.194 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.5.1.stable
Wildcards Used
New Achievement
Notify players when they achieve something
New Year New Me
Each play a different character
Game Description
A space shooter where you destroy enemies, collect their parts, and take them back to base for cash!
How does your game tie into the theme?
When you destroy ships and collect their parts, they become part of your ship adding engines, lasers, missile launchers, etc.
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
N/A, lightvgm
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
3
Comments
I am really impressed that you made all sorts of tools that you used for the next game jam. I am definitely going to work on my own game template so I don't have to keep redoing basic things over and over. You inspired me. Also it was awesome being able to attach new parts and sell them for credits. I don't know if I could done anything with the credits.
I noticed that some item pickups where not volume adjustable like everything else fyi :) thanks for making the game!!!
Submitted
Recoil ReachThanks. Feel free to use what you want from mine, they're open source.
You could not do anything with the credits other than get three achievements. In my Day 9 devlog I explain about that. You can read my DevLogs here: Katamari Mech Spacey DevLogs
Can you give me more info on which item pickups were not volume adjustable? I spent half a day on that and I could have missed something.
An interesting take on the theme.
Had an enjoyable time on it even though an enemy literally spawned on me right from the start on my first run killing me right on the spot. Annoying but hey it happens.
Beyond that it's a solid entry.
Submitted
RecyclemaniaWell funny you should mention that. If I'd had less bugs you would have seen that, because the enemy ships would be randomly generated instead of randomly skinned and would have dropped wings and hulls too. Also, you could have constructed your own ship and that would have affected where you started and how the other parts affected you. Plus each character was going to get their own starting ship. Alas. You can read about the journey if you're interested in my Katamari Mech Spacey DevLogs which I wrote every night after developing.
Very well crafted game. The core system feels polished and it was fun to play.
What I would welcome is some respawn of enemies, maybe even making them progressively stronger to keep the challenge up as you are upgrading your own ship.
I also didn't found out if I can spare my earned credits on something.
Nice job!
Submitted
ThriftedThank you!
Yes I added in the ability to restart the level to spawn new enemies. from the pause menu (Tab/Start) you can select New Level and you keep your ship and can keep going. New Character starts you with a new ship and new pilot, but you keep your credits. I added that on the last day of the jam. I crammed a LOT in the last day of the jam. I talk about it in my Katamari Mech Spacey Devlogs, expecialy my Day 9 devlog.
Making them stronger was going to come, along with randomly generated ships instead of randomly skinned ships. Alas, time. And the ship editing system that would allow you to spend your credits wasn't quite done.
Really nice take on the limitation. I feel the default control settings for keyboard could be improved (but thankfully they can be changed in the settings!) and it also needs a bit more content.
Submitted
The World is Your WeaponThanks. Glad you enjoyed it. I'd love to know what you think would be better controls for the keyboard. I actually changed them a few times through development because of playtest feedback I got. I prefer using my controller personally.
More content was planned, but I ran into some bugs that prevented me from finishing what I had planned, including ship editing and randomly generated enemies. I talk about it in my Katamari Mech Spacey Devlogs if you're interested in learning more about my process.
This game is so cool and so fun to play. Also - wow - love all the different characters and voice acting!!
All the settings were super slick too. I'm really impressed that you had languages, key rebindings, and display / audio options too.
My favorite part was collecting other ship parts and becoming this overpowered frankensteined beast of a ship. I was pretty bad at driving / maneuvering the ship, but felt like the challenge was all part of the fun.
Awesome entry, and really cool take on the theme!
Submitted
JunkertonThank you! I'm rally glad you enjoyed it!
I talk more about the localization (languages) and settings in my DevLogs which you can find at the bottom of the game page. They are all addons I developed after my first Godot Wild Jam where I saw people using a game template. (Again, more about it in the DevLogs.) I developed my own.
Yeah I made each part of the ship actually interact with the player and add their forces to the ship. I was very proud of that feature.
I'm really glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for the feedback!
Would you mind sharing a link to your devlogs here? I tried to find them on Katamari Mech Spacey's page but couldn't see them anywhere (I am probably blind and just overlooking them lol)
Would love to read more about how you did the localization and settings stuff! I am still very much a beginner in godot but hope to add stuff like that to my games in the future :D
Absolutely! Turns out I wrote so many, itch made a page for them. Start at the bottom with Day One. Katarmari Mech Spacey DevLogs
This game is so cool and so fun to play. Also - wow - love all the different characters and voice acting!!
All the settings were super slick too. I'm really impressed that you had languages, key rebindings, and display / audio options too.
My favorite part was collecting other ship parts and becoming this overpowered frankensteined beast of a ship. I was pretty bad at driving / maneuvering the ship, but felt like the challenge was all part of the fun.
Awesome entry, and really cool take on the theme!
Submitted
JunkertonThis was a neat mashup. The parts sticking to your ship wherever they touch and altering it was fun. It added new options for how to attack, and a balance of when to return. The extra mass slowing you down was a nice touch, though the ship felt a bit sluggish to start.
I like that you could destroy asteroids for supplies, and they were plentiful, though I also tried not to destroy too many, as I used them to help map things out. It would have been nice if the radar showed where the station was to help you keep your bearings. The background just didn't quite work for me to be able to get a feel for how fast/far I moved and where I was. I got a bit lost a couple times, and then made sure to not go too far from the asteroids so I could find my way back. At that point I also zoomed all the way out, and mostly played that way from then on. I noticed in the settings there were inputs for zooming the radar, though they were not on the web page and did not seem to work, so I'm assuming that did not make it into the jam submission.
The base gameplay was good, but felt lacking. After earning credits, of course I wanted to spend them. I saw the comment that it was not ready for the jam and disabled. This is a good start, and adding upgrades at the station will be a big help.
The audio and graphics are good. We also like using stuff from Kenney and Ovani.
Overall, a nice jam submission.
Submitted
Angus DefenseThanks for playing! Yeah, the ship felt sluggish because I got a lot of complaints that it was too hard to stop. So I added two Inertial Dampeners to the ship. My plan was to make a separate starting ship for each character, but I ran out of time.
The station does appear on the radar. Do you mean if you get too far away from it, pointing where it is? If you take a look at my DevLogs I talk about the pains I went through to make the background scroll. I lost a whole day to it. Which is why things like the radar zoom didn't get implemented.
Yeah, I went into it in detail in my DevLogs, but I've been dinged before for bugs I knew about about didn't fix over adding features, so I went the other way this time and spent a whole 2 days just stomping on bugs. I had a whole design system where you can drag parts onto the ship at docking points, and then was going to use those for the katamari effect. Lack of time led to the cool Frankensteining thing though.
Yeah I haven't used Kenney's stuff much other than for control icons, but I saw this pack and thought it'd be fun, plus I've never made a space game.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the feedback!
I was meaning to add something pointing to the station when it is not on the radar due to distance. My first run after I defeated all the enemies nearby I went exploring for more, and then realized I had lost my bearings and wasn't sure where the station was. Something pointing the way home would have been nice to have then. Later I found that enemies spawned close enough I did not need to go so far away, so maybe it is not vital, just a nice to have if you do get lost. I did acknowledge the parallax background, but the way it moved just wasn't registering in my brain in a way I could instinctively keep track of my position while looking at everything else.
Sorry, I only skimmed the devlog. We try to play and comment on as many games as possible during the first few days of a jam, so don't take a lot of time to read devlogs, unless there is a comment that they contain the basic controls or tutorial. It sounds like you have a lot of cool features planned that will make the game feel more complete. And I fully understand trying to predict what the next group of jam participants are going to want, and trying to plan your dev time to cater to it, only to find comments that the things you skipped are of interest to the players.
We always use Kenney's assets for the remapping icons, and occasionally for other UI elements, but we also used this space pack in a previous space game. It works really well for simple pixel art sci-fi.
It sounds like this should be a fun game when finished. We'll be sure to check it out again in the future.
Fair Enough. I do the same thing. Last game jam I got 70 reviews by doing that. This one I did 30 in the first two days. I just found out itch compiled a page of all my devlogs for this jam if you're interested later. Katamari Mech Spacey DevLogs There are code snippets in there, as well as a lot of other information you might find useful as I see you're trying to do this professionally.
Also to be clear, the background is not moving in reaction to your movement. It's the asteroids and ships that do that wahen you hit them with your Frankenship. The background just moves in the same direction slowly, no matter what. Making it react to the player's movement caused it to look like you were entering warp speed and was even more confusing.
Thanks, I'll take a look at them when I get a chance.
The background not moving with the player would make sense for why I felt things were off when I tried using it for getting my bearings. If you'd like, our last game Salvage Hunter, was a space shooter, and here's how we did the background. We did a multi-layered Parallax background, with objects on each being a different size, and moving at a different speed, to simulate distance. We had a mixture of stars and clouds/nebulae. We also had a setting where the player could adjust the alpha of each layer, if it was too distracting, and started at 70%. The background was moving a bit even when the player was not, though the game was a side-scroller, so there was an implied always moving to it. For something like this, I personally would still give the background some movement, but much more subtle than we did for the side-scroller. When the player moved, we adjusted the background position in relation to the player's movement, but only a small amount (1/100th the player's movement), and for each layer it was multiplied by the Scroll Scale to keep that layer feeling like it was the proper distance. Here's the code we used in the Background class.
func _physics_process(_delta: float) -> void:
var player_velocity := Vector2.ZERO
if is_instance_valid(player):
player_velocity = player.velocity
var adjusted_player_velocity = player_velocity / 100.0
for child in get_children():
if child is Parallax2D:
child.scroll_offset -= (adjusted_player_velocity + scroll_base) * child.scroll_scale
I appreciate the thought and the code. I actually have a parallax scrolling background in the game that worked great with an image. It just doesn't work with the shader I'm using. The shader itself maintains the same look no matter how you move the texture it is applied to. So I was trying to work with the shader. Unfortunately, the direction of the shader only moved with a float. So I had to change it to a Vector2, then rotate it, then turn off the constant rotation, then do this:
# Given a player velocity, animate the starfield. func _physics_process(_delta: float) -> void:
if Game.starfield_panning:
var limited_vector := player.velocity.limit_length()
var panning_vector := Vector2(limited_vector.y, limited_vector.x)
#print(panning_vector)
starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("pan_speed", panning_vector * 1.0)
if Game.starfield_acceleration:
if player.velocity.x < 0 or player.velocity.y < 0:
starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("anim_speed", 0.75)
elif player.velocity.x > 0 or player.velocity.y > 0:
starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("anim_speed", -0.75)
else:
starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("anim_speed", 0.2)
The problem is it always looks like you're jumping into warp speed, even if I use really low numbers like 0.1 (instead of 0.75). In this case I think I just needed to rebuild the shader from the ground up - and it's a bit outside my wheelhouse.
Shaders can be fun and create awesome effects, but I'm just a beginner with them. I did start coding with C, so at least the syntax isn't a problem for me, but there's lot in there I'm not as familiar with, and have to look up, that I tend to keep them simple for now.
It is awesome how much code and process you share. I'm starting to read through your devlogs, and they are very interesting. I'll have the kids read through them later as well. We will likely take some inspiration from some of this in the future.
Yeah, I was using someone else's code. I've made a number of 2D and 3D shaders. I prefer using the visual shaders rather than code because I like how it helps me structure my thinking and also see all the options possible. But really I had to learn how to write them in Godot's version of GLSL before I could effectively use them. I've found that converting shaders from Godot's GLSL into a Visual Shader really helps me understand how they're working.
Yeah I spent about 1.5-2 hours every night writing them. My brother said it would help me to get people interested in what I'm working on for when I'm selling my own games as opposed to working on other people's for money. I would also recommend you check out my (FREE) course on learning how to be a software developer through game development with Godot. There are only 6 classes, but I spent a 40-hour week on writing each one. I thought perhaps I could make money that way, but it turned out to be too much work so I made them free to the Godot community. Some of the code is not the way I would do things in Godot now, but it teaches a lot about the engine, as well as source control, unit testing, and a LOT on game design. There are a ton of links in there on object-oriented programming, the history of video game design and development, etc.
Thanks. We will check it out. I've dabbled in game dev since I was teen and taught myself programming from books with CDs containing compilers and code, but my main job was web dev for almost 20 years. It's been fun, but challenging, trying to make the dream of doing game dev for a living come true.
Selling classes/tutorials can be hard these days with so much free on YouTube. We got a set of Zenva classes from a Humble Bundle and hated them. I got them to start teaching my kids, but kept having to stop them and point out things that were wrong, or terrible advice. Then we went onto YouTube and found several free courses that were much better. We did purchase some paid content from some creators after the free courses, but it is a full time job putting out enough free content to get that following, and from the comments I've heard them make, its not doing as well these days. And, of course, you have to keep updating the content as things change.
BTW, I was doing a Zenva course yesterday and I was thinking about your evaluation of them. I realized that as a now seasoned Godot developer, I just ignore all the poor choices they make in coding, and take what's useful for me. They definitely have some good programming tricks IMO. However, overall I find GameDev.tv has better, more complete courses. They still have issues, like using @export variables when they should use @onready variables, but at least they don't pepper their code with hard-coded node references everywhere. You might check their courses out, though I have to say that while I found their Godot courses above average, I found their Blender courses to be stellar.
I really enjoyed the idea and mechanics, but I did leave wanting for more, be it enemy density, challenge, or just more content. Maybe the high quality opening set my expectations a bit high haha. I wasn't sure what the point of the credits were, but I did still have a blast trying to make the biggest franken-ship possible, your gameplay on its own is intrinsically enjoyable.
Overall extremely well done!
Submitted
Solution Hiring Innovation TeamI understand about wanting more. If you want to see what I didn't have time for (and why), check out the Day 9 Devlog. The credits were intended to be for buying new parts for your ship and building it. Bascially there's a lot more in there that wasn't polished so I turned it off. I have found in jams that you get dinged pretty badly in the voting for bugs, even if your game is overall solid.
Frankenship would have been a good achievement too. Dang.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
There's quite a lot of presentation involved in this that I wasn't expecting, UI and settings all look very professional.
I like the Katamari twist added onto your standard space arcade game, works great with the theme. Movement gets a bit weird if you hold on to too many parts instead of going back. Your turn sensitivity goes crazy to the point where a single tap was turning me more than 90 degrees.
Nice work on the submission.
Submitted
Waste Disposal Island 333Thank you! Yeah the key to changing things as you picked stuff up was to actually drive all the player input through the parts of the ship, and then have all the effects stack. There is also a drag-and-drop ship customization system in the game but I didn't finish the UI. I talk about it in the devlogs if your interested in more details.
Here's a link: Katamari Mech Spacey Devlogs
Really cool sound design and music, loved the attachment mechanic once I got a hold of it :D
Submitted
GimmeYourGunHad to play your game since you were also inspired by Katamari!
Love the idea of attaching ship parts to you hull and you ship even gets weirder and weirder to control the bigger you go.
Submitted
KleptoglobI am very impressed by the game's introduction sequence. There is so much polish on this game its impressive!
Submitted
Carton Pongreally great submission! *clap*
I looked at your devlogs, that's just great writing. It's crazy you did whole game and still write so much details. It's cool to see how it looks like from professional side.
When I saw your intro I did know it's something more than usual prototype on jams. It's pretty good, could be use for some much bigger and expensive game :D
Game is creative, just wonder is there way to throw away sticked parts to my ship?
I couldn't find in devlogs, how did you do voice acting? It's crazy you have so much characters.
Congratulations on your submission!
Submitted
RootwardenThank you.
TBH, a lot came together in the last day. I still have a postmortem to write. Hopefully today. There's always an emotional and energy level comedown after a game jam for me.
There is not a way to throw them away. You can only deposit them back at the space station. That will get rid of them and give you credits. I tried to make it so you could jettison them and get points for that, but that didn't make it in. There's also a whole ship crafting system that's almost done but I didn't add it in because it wasn't complete.
The voice acting was actually all from Phat Phrog. I think I forgot to link those on the credits part of the game page, so I'll go fix it now. I got those as part of a Humble Bundle a while back and had been looking for a place to use them.
Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Love Katamari and never thought that concept would work so well in a shmup!
The presentation on this game is pretty great, including voiced dialogue and language support within the scope of a game jam is a massive effort, so great work!
Submitted
Re-cycle CycleI really like the idea of mashing Katamari Damacy with this type of game! I had quite the ridiculous mash of parts on my ship by the end and frequently accidentally bashed other spacecraft to death (which immediately added all their parts to my ship).
Submitted
Wild TalentFun concept how the enemy weapons attach to your own ship.
Multiple languages and animated intro in such a short jam duration, respect.
Submitted
Trash Fortress PrototypeHere's a direct link: Katamari Mech Spacey Devlogs
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