Orbiter 18 - Can you survive? (I earned money with this game!)

Unity Courses Talk
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#21

Fantastic job, Jamie, well done.
I found myself immersed throughout and intrigued by the potential outcomes.
As a sci-fi fan I found the setting captivating.

Suggestions and fixes:

  1. Consider adding a depressurizing chamber connecting the interior of the shuttle to the exterior as the depressurization, upon opening the hatch (pressure inside of shuttle is different from the outside), would surely cast you far out of the shuttle along with anything else that is not securely bolted down, the drastic temperature change would probably also effect electronics.
  2. Opting to secure the antenna loosely implies that actually secures it tightly to the heat shielding.
  3. After shutting off the power, obtaining the wire strippers, then attempting to inspect the “larger panel” (by pressing “S”) I could not progress any further - no input commands appeared to be logging, I could replicate this bug twice.
  4. Upon loosely attaching the antenna and having returned to investigate it, the dialogue implied that it had been firmly attached to the heat shielding.

What I liked:

  1. The death tally after every playtrhoug, and by extension the multiple endings
  2. The relevant updates to state changes, for example: what I was carrying and what I was wearing
  3. The logical and intuitive flow that required a attentive and methodical approach
  4. The attention to detail - I intentionally checked the viewport again to note if the situation would demonstrate the recent developments, I was pleased to see that it had
  5. I got to wear an EVA suit

Thoughts:

  • Good thing I had the driver equipped when I decided to launch myself to the upper ladder rungs on my second playthrough.

Playthroughs: 6

  1. Electrocuted after attempting to clean the frayed wired - I assumed the wire strippers had insulated grips - only later did I realise that had I paid more attention I would have noticed that the grips were cracked.
  2. Brutally “final destinationed” after the antenna came loose and crashed through the outer and inner layers of what I thought should’ve been fused and tempered silicate panes :stuck_out_tongue:
  3. Cast out into the burning void after the heat shielding failed on re-entry.
  4. Hurled out the open hatch - left the hatch open to see what would happen… the result didn’t come as a surprise.

How much time did you spend on this project? Did you enjoy yourself throughout?

#22

Nice game, I enjoyed playing it!
Now on to the course so I can hopefully make my own.
Thanks for sharing and best of luck!

#23

Hi, thanks for the nice comments. Good luck with your own project!

#24

Hi, sorry I didn’t respond sooner. I really liked your post and enjoyed all your insights. It was quite a while ago I programmed this but I recall it taking a few days to complete. Though I spent a lot of time testing and researching new things along the way.

I did enjoy doing it. In fact I am now considering a career change to move into coding.

#25

Go for it, you’ll be an inspiration to some.
I’m now following you on itch.io to keep updated with any progress you make in this career path where game development is concerned. Let me know if you have any other networks that will keep me informed on your progress in this regard, I’m interested to see where it’ll take you.
Good luck!

#26

Hello Everyone,

Just wanted to post an update on this game.

I have (due to a planned career change) decided to focus on this and some other Udemy courses again. As a refresher I went back to this course and started to go through it again. I re-opened my original code for Orbiter 18 due to some reported bugs and wanted to share my experiences as I thought they might help.

First, I’ve learned that when programming this originally I put in a lot of notations into the background code which helped me clearly lay out each section of code and what scene in the game it related to. Such things as **** Start of viewport ********* and ******** End of Viewport ******* included for each section of the code, though likely not the “professional” approach, certainly made it much much easier to debug the reported problems easier afterwards.

However, with the good I also discovered some bad in my original coding. As was mentioned in an earlier post, my game has some inventory items carried from area to area. Also some events occur in the game such as tracking if power is on or off. I originally coded it with simple integer’s for these as it was the simplest thing I could think of at the time. So for instance Int “power” starts by equaling “0” which is on and is set to “1” when it’s off. Likewise if your holding some wire strippers then “strippers” = 0 when you don’t have them and = 1 when you do. I’ve learned this is a bad way to code when you need to debug it later! I wish I had made the code more readable from the start by making them boolean’s instead and more descriptive such as powerIsOn = TRUE or = FALSE and strippersAreHeld = TRUE or = FALSE. This would have saved me lot’s of headaches trying to keep straight when debugging if “antenna” = 1 does that mean it’s fixed or is it not fixed?

On a different note. I am considering advancing the code to allow for touch sensitive button options for selections so I can port it to IOS and Android devices, as well as writing a sequel to the game with more of a survival feel and expanded inventory, however, it’s going to take a lot of additional research on my end to learn how to find somewhat efficient ways as my original inventory tracking method won’t work I expect.

Finally, if anyone has any direction to find a resource for how to save small text based data files within the game so it doesn’t have to be played in one sitting, I’d appreciate it.

Hope everyone is having fun!
Jamie

#27

Oh, and I think I fixed all the previous listed bugs (and a few more unlisted ones) in the game. Try to reproduce the issues if you have a chance and let me know if anything else doesn’t work.

#28

I’m amused by the amount of creative work you put on that lesson :slight_smile:
I had fun dying a bunch of times :sweat_smile:

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