Star Surveyor
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
Star Surveyor is an exploration game about interacting with and observing a diverse ecosystem without harming that ecosystem. There is no killing in this game. Instead you can feed frogs, ride dinosaurs, and swim in underground pools—all in an attempt to learn more about the planet you've landed on, and its inhabitants.
The goal of the game is to collect data on creatures using your scanner. You can then send that data back to Earth in exchange for spacesuit upgrades that allow you to further explore the planet's depths.
Star Surveyor is currently in development , but you can download a demo of the game below.
freesound contributors
angeliqueperdike; samararaine; j1987; fins; chriddof; andromadax24
oceanictrancer; tiptoe84; bmusic92; paul368; 123jorre456; rhodesmas
maxthrower; jamesrodavidson; oscaraudiogeek; owlstorm; swuing; vataaa
adam-n; jorickhoofd; klankbeeld; dave-welsh; justkiddink; ueffects; vrodge
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Comments
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"There is no killing in this game"
*Looks at last gif on the right*
Hm, right, surely these are some "friendliness pellets" again ;-)
Just what I needed. Thank you. Any further plans for this?
no concrete plans, but this is one of my most popular games so there’s a good chance i come back to it some day.
Great game!
This is an excellent game. I love the concept and gameplay. I have nothing to complain about except that there are some bugs.
1. When you're underground, the game is very laggy (you probably know this already)
2. When you dig up the mushroom (the red & yellow colored tile) and pick up the mushroom, you're still able to scan the place where the mushroom was, even though it isn't there.
3. When the spaceship said I needed 21 data for the next upgrade, I collected only twenty. When I went back with one more, the number dropped to zero but I didn't get an upgrade. Confused, I collected one more data, and the number changed to -1. I'm not sure if the fact that I broke the tiles underneath the spaceship caused that issue (as a programmer, I know that very strange things can cause certain bugs ;)
i love it! i particularly loved little touches like the explorer sitting down when idling and the crawling animation. i also really like the camera and your flashlight shrinking underground was a really cool feature.
it was also a little more difficult than i expected which was a nice surprise. i love all the variety in the animals' and plants' behavior, really gave them a lot of personality.
Had to join just to leave you a comment on your excellent little gem of a game. Found out about it in PC Gamer, now I'm really looking forward to your steam release.
This reminds me of Metroid Prime games' scanning mechanic and also the camera from Beyond Good and Evil (love that game).
I hope the full game will give you flavor text for each of the lifeforms you scan. Also you should get more data from the first of each type you scan and less from scanning the same one again (just a thought).
hey! thanks so much! I do plan to have flavour text for life forms, and you actually do get more for scanning new species in the demo--it's just not communicated particularly well there :P
Hi. I felt like a dummy, having rushed to post my comments after playing for only a short time. After I posted it I noticed that you do indeed get more scan points for the new lifeforms.
I think the swimming controls could use a bit of tweaking, I found it nearly impossible to scan the fish because they are moving around and you are sinking too quickly, or trying to frantically tap up to stay afloat. More buoyancy might make that aspect of the game more enjoyable/manageable. Maybe I'm missing out on a suit upgrade though, I don't think I've gotten all the upgrades yet.
I noticed sometimes the lantern gets caught and left behind in the block above your head while you're digging. Just a minor bug. Also in fullscreen mode I noticed some kind of separation in the tiles. I didn't notice that in windowed mode.
You should make escape key exit the game to a menu (of course these types of things may be getting addressed in the full game, just my observations from what I've played). I got stuck the first time and had to manually force quit because I couldn't figure out how to get out of full screen and exit. I realized afterward F key was what was needed to toggle back to windowed mode, but that's not intuitive.
I think you should limit digging to a shorter reach and not be able to dig on the opposite side of rock. Just a tiny thing that bugged me for some reason :)
Great game though, has lots of charm and fun mechanics. Will be interesting to see what else the full version has in store.
What are you using to develop the game out of curiosity?
Hey,
yeah I could never get the swimming controls the way I wanted for that demo. there's no extra suit upgrade for that, it's just bad design :P.
And the digging--I've decided I'm going to remove digging. It's a good way to hide secrets, but having to put rocks down everywhere just sort of spoils the look of the game. beyond that, digging kind of messes with the core concept: you're here to observe, not to destroy. digging destroys.
I made the game in openfl, using haxepunk as my framework. mostly because I started with flash and flashpunk--I don't know if I'd heartily recommend haxepunk. haxeflixel is probably better.
Digging is a fun part of the game, but I think you get that upgrade too soon. If it were me I'd leave it in, but work it into a later upgrade of some sort. I don't mind the rocks, that was kind of a new thing I'd not seen done in this type of explorer game. You always see double jump and jetpacks, and keys or ammo types that unlock doors, this was original as a barrier that caused you to need to dig tunnels to find ways around them. Maybe there could be a pick upgrade at a later stage to break the rocks too.
I'm not familiar with any of those tools you mentioned, I've used gamemaker and Unity myself.
Great game but it seemed too short original concept but maybe you could add more places to explore.
there's definitely going to be a bunch of places! im planning about 4-5 areas. this is just a small sampling to introduce people to the game :)
Thats great good luck.
Very nice game. Probably one of the nicer things I've found on itch.io.
You really should compress your audio. You can drastically reduce the size of the game that way. The ambience file (by far the largest) dropped to about 22 MB when I compressed to .ogg. I'd suggest compressing the other larger files as well.
I also noticed that the light used underground tends to slow the game down quite a bit, including when the lantern is in use. I also noticed most of the sound cutting out several times, but I suspect you already know about that.
yeah the darkness stuff has been plaguing me performance-wise for quite some time. with the library im using there really isnt a better way to do it, unfortunately.
the audio stuff should be compressed directly into the executable but i couldnt figure out how to do it in time for demo release...it won't be accessible once the full game launches. i'll probably compress them into ogg as well, if that produces a smaller file.
This game needs to be in my steam library. NOW!
This looks so cool!
Can't wait to play.