Controls: W - Fire main engine A/D - Rotate left/right Q/E - Gyroscope left/right T - Toggle automatic stabilization (SAS) S - Hold to momentary toggle SAS K - Hold to automatically kill velocity via RCS R - Toggle maneuvering thrusters (RCS) F - Toggle solar panels V - Toggle dark energy collectors C - Increase throttle Z - Decrease throttle X - Set throttle to 50% (Throttle can also be controlled by clicking on it) B - Toggle afterburner Arrow keys - Move ship with maneuvering thrusters L - Hold to use warp drive Spacebar - Fire plasma pulse - this isn't yet fully implemented, and also represents something of a half-baked idea, seeing as I'm not actually planning on putting in a lot of things for you to shoot. At the moment, you can destroy the green items (even from across the sector), but seeing as those are your only source of fuel resupply, that's kind of pointless. I could make this into a bigger mechanic, but I probably won't. As fun as that would be, this game is not about shooting things. To prevent damage, solar panels and dark energy collectors cannot be extended simultaneously, and neither can be open while the main engine is firing. Indicator dial pointers: White- Direction you are currently pointing Light Green- Current direction of motion Dark Green- Direction of nearest item, if sector contains one Violet- Direction of black hole, if sector contains one Sector map blips: Teal- You Green- Object Red- Plasma pulse Violet- Black hole Galaxy map squares: Teal- Current sector Dark Green- Visited sector (contains item) Black- Visited sector (empty) Violet- Contains black hole ---SUPER SECRET CHEAT CODES--- Enter these in the "GGG" gravity-change console (summoned by pressing G three times) gravconst- Change the strength of gravity. refuel- maxes out fuel, charge, dark energy, and monopropellant. supercubierre- Toggles supercubierre mode, which makes the warp drive work near black holes, consume no charge, and go twice as fast. hypercubierre- Toggles hypercubierre mode, which makes the warp drive work near black holes, consume no charge, and go eight times as fast. Entering this command with supercubierre mode turned on will turn off supercubierre mode. megathrust- Toggles megathrust mode, making your engine 100 times more powerful. Hypercubierre mode too slow and too easy to control for your tastes? Here's your solution! killvel- Stops all rotational and linear motion of your ship. If you like megathrust, you'll love this. randsector- Makes you jump to a random sector on the local 20x20 grid. gohome- Returns you to sector 0.0 (the starting sector). growivy- Puts a ring of ivy around your ship. Repeated invocation will make the ivy grow bigger! Cool! killivy- Makes the ivy get smaller, and vanish entirely if its size goes below 1.
Latest Updates: (~~Here begins staggeringly long devnotes~~) The UI update for the afterburner light broke the velocity vector indicator, and I only just got around to fixing it. Sorry about that. Future UI updates of that nature shouldn't cause any more problems. A new feature has been added: an afterburner. Yeah, yeah, I'm aware that afterburners are a component exclusive to airbreathing jet engines. "Afterburner" may be something of a misnomer here, but 'VASIMR High-Thrust Mode" just doesn't have the same ring to it. You can toggle the afterburner on and off with the B key (the little light on the control panel labeled "AFT" will show whether it's on or not). When the afterburner is active, your engine will be about four times as powerful, but half as fuel-efficient. These values are preliminary and may have to be rebalanced later. The X key now sets the throttle to 50%. This is not Kerbal Space Program, and as cool as that game is, setting the throttle to zero in this game serves very little purpose. Fixed the RCS brake function- it no longer works or draws thruster flares with RCS turned off. Fixed some RCS thruster and rotation stuff. The thrusters / reaction wheels now safeguard against spinning your ship too fast. I know spinning so fast the game thought you weren't even spinning was fun, but let's be real here- nothing could really spin that fast without breaking up. The K key is no longer a cheat key- it now automatically sets the linear RCS to fire against your motion, slowing you down at the cost of monopropellant. For the function of the old K key, you can now enter "killvel" in the cheat console to kill all linear and angular momentum instantly. There's currently no cheat to release rotation speed constraints, but I may put one in at some point. The galaxy map feature has been overhauled- now with cloning! That means instead of running all over the place and becoming a huge mess, the map now scrolls as you cross sectors. If you're the kind of person who always feels the need to accelerate until you run out of fuel just to see how far and fast you can go, fear no longer- you can now reach ludicrous speeds without filling up the stage with little boxes. Added new resource, dark energy. The warp drive uses it slowly when active, and it can be replenished by unfolding the dark energy collectors (V key) and flying near a black hole. Glowy purple light = collecting dark energy. Solar panels and dark energy collectors cannot be opened simultaneously, and also cannot be open while the main engine is firing. However, you can now have either dark-e collectors or solars open while using RCS. I've also put in a rudimentary title screen! Eventually it will have buttons for play game/controls/settings/etc., but I'm too tired to do that right now. If you hate my beautiful title artwork and want to skip the title screen completely, you can hold Y when clicking the green flag to cut straight to the game. Theres now a sort of sound effect for the warp drive! It's insanely buggy. Apparently sound is a tricky thing for Scratch, because all the bugs are apparently caused by the program just 'skipping over' code blocks, even to the extent of repeatedly skipping a block which is the only block inside of a forever loop. It appears to be beyond my control, but I'm working on it. I've muted the effects by default for now, but you can turn them on if you want to hear the amazing failure. Okay, okay. *grumbles* Gravity is now calculated in two dimensions instead of three. Spirographic orbits still make me die a little inside, especially when elliptical ones are within my power to create. However, 2D gravity makes it possible to feel gravitational effects from much further away in the sector, and gives you a much longer interval to do a capture burn if you want to make orbit. It's too bad that it has to be like this, but I'm not enough of a space goddess yet to make elliptical orbits that don't have a massive speed gradient that makes the game almost unplayable. You can still set the gravity to 3-dimensional with the GGG console, but the default is now 2D. Game Description: You are the pilot of a small research vessel. Your mission in this area of space is to investigate the sudden appearance of a multitude of small black holes, and find out more about the mysterious objects seen floating nearby them. At least, that will eventually be your mission. Right now (hence the Alpha status), I've only been focusing on world-building and mechanics and things, so most of the environment is there, but there's not an awful lot to DO yet. I'm working on it. And I don't mean that like I say I'm "working" on Interstellar- unlike that old game, I actually am working on this one and will eventually finish it. Notes: As I mentioned above, this is an unfinished game I'm currently working on. "3-dimensional" inverse-square gravity is now sort of working, and is set as the default. However, should it mess up for you (or if you're just twisted enough to actually like spirographic orbits), you can press the G key three times and enter "2" for F=1/d gravity, or "3" for inverse-square (F=1/d²) gravity. If you want to admire the super-cool black hole effect without being sucked in, you can also enter "0" to turn off gravity completely. Objectives will be added in the next update or the one after, so hang in there! Music credits: All tracks are from the Spore space stage prototype. The one that plays in an empty sector has the filename "PlanetMusic_Barren" but is unofficially titled "Another Big Rock"; the one that plays in sectors with objects is "PlanetMusic_Alien" or "We're Not Alone", and the one that plays in black hole sectors is "SolarSystemMusic" or "Spacebound Sunbathing". The prototype containing them can be found at spore.com/comm/prototypes. All sprites are my original work. Some gameplay mechanics were inspired by Kerbal Space Program.
