***DOUBLE CLICK THE FLAG ***Press space to go through the instructions A hundred trillion years into the future, the universe has entered its "Black Hole Era". New stars have stopped forming, while older stars have turned into black holes or neutron stars. As the remaining light of space fades, the darkness only continues to spread... Welcome to "The Starlight Trail: A Black Hole Odyssey"! PREMISE: * You are travelling the universe on a spaceship during the Black Hole Era. * To keep your spaceship running, you need to convert electromagnetic waves into electricity. * Fortunately, some neutron stars still exist and produce electromagnetic waves for you to use. * Unfortunately, the nearest neutron star is 728,000 kilometres away. * Many black holes are around, so you will have to avoid them on your journey. Wouldn't want to get sucked into one after all! GOAL: Fly your spaceship to the neutron star while avoiding any black holes in your way. INSTRUCTIONS: * To move your spaceship from side to side, press the left and right arrow keys. * To move forward, press the up arrow key. You CANNOT move backwards in this game. * To throw rock fragments in front of you, press the spacebar. * To use the X-ray telescope, press the x key. This will reveal every single black hole in the row. ***You can only use the X-ray telescope once. Make it count! ***The amount of rock fragments you receive per level depends on how many potential black hole spots there are in the row. For example: • 3 spots = 1 rock fragment • 4 spots = 2 rock fragments • 5 spots = 3 rock fragments • 6 spots = 4 rock fragments Therefore: [spot number] - 2 = rock fragments available CREATOR NOTES (the process of making this): • According to my notes, I believe I first started making this game on May 2, 2023 • Lately, I've been wanting to make a game that is short and reasonably quick to make. By reasonable, I mean a few months, not a year or two. • After re-listening to the black hole sounds recorded by NASA, I thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could make a game with black holes that uses NASA's recordings for the sound effects?" • And so here we are! The sound effects were my initial inspiration for the game, but it grew so much more since then. • I'm extremely fascinated by space and love reading facts about it. I remembered learning about the "Black Hole Era" once before and decided to base the game's time period on that. • Coding this game has been quite the challenge, but I'm glad I managed to pull through! • From the very start of this project, I decided it would be most efficient to make extremely basic assets and sprites, code them to function, then update the graphics once everything worked correctly. I'm happy to say that this method saved me a lot of time, and prevented me from making assets that I wouldn’t end up using. • The spaceship sprite, X-ray telescope, and most of the backgrounds were taken from copyright-free websites. Meanwhile, all of the animations were made entirely by me. The title screen was also drawn by me. • Coming up with the title was a bit of a challenge at first! I wanted the title to reference the main quest of the game, which is reaching the neutron star, while also referencing the core game mechanic of avoiding black holes. • In the end, I decided on "The Starlight Trail: A Black Hole Odyssey" because even if it's long, at least it included the aspects I wanted it to have. I feel like it invokes "going on a journey to find a star, while traversing through black holes." Thank you for playing! This is my first complete game I've finished on this account so far, and I hope to create many more in future! :)
