Star Tripper

by Sam Ursu

2022

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A choicescript space trading game with custom UI and some bugs, October 9, 2022
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

I played this game for a couple of hours, but didn't find the ending. I ended up poking around in the code, though.

This is a choicescript game with some neat css styling. In it, your sibling has been abducted and you have to find them.

Gameplay consists of moving around quadrants. There are 100 quadrants, and it costs fuel to move between them, a small amount for adjacent quadrants and a large amount for distant quadrants. Each quadrant has 4 sectors, which costs battery power to move around.

The game is procedurally generated in a minimal sense; each planet has a randomly selected 'level', which determines how many shops and things there are. Then text in each shop is pre-determined with blank slots that have words chosen from a random list.

I quickly realized that almost everything on a planet was pointless except for the trading and refueling. You can buy info, but it's rarely helpful, usually talking about planets so far away that fuel costs eat into your rewards. Travel guides don't seem to do much.

So I just bought and sold and moved around. I found an asteroid and claimed it, and started improving it.

But there were significant bugs: for instance, mining never has anything in it. Peeking in the code, it's hard coded, line by line, for 350 lines, for there to be nothing in the mines.

More severely, there are separate variables for available cargo spaces and total cargo, and only one is updated when upgrading your asteroid, so every time you upgrade your asteroid you permanently lower your cargo capacity.

I saw in the code that you can find a cheeky companion (didn't see how), possibly get married, and that there is an ending coded, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find it.

Dialogue-wise, in the main story bit, the game has character, but it likes to play tricks on the player in the sense that the guy you're talking to will treat almost anything you say as something wrong. I wasn't used to that, but it worked overall.

I think this game needed a lot more playtesting, including by the author; it doesn't 'feel' like the author played through a complete game by himself, and I'd heartily recommend doing that a couple of times, tweaking the game to make it easier or harder as needed. I would definitely raise my star rating if that polishing happened!

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Sam Ursu, October 12, 2022 - Reply
As always, it's great to be reviewed by the OG himself! :)

Bit confused about the so-called "bug" in the mining game. It's worked just fine for me and everyone else who has played it, and it certainly isn't "hand coded." There's actually an algorithm that increases the chance of the player finding ore based on how deep they go into the mineshaft. Nonetheless, the coding in this section is a bit bespoke, so I understand why this wasn't immediately obvious.

Glad to see some of the hidden content was discovered, but there's a lot more yet out there to find!
MathBrush, October 12, 2022 - Reply
Here’s a video of my gameplay in this section (couldn’t screengrab so used phone):
https://youtu.be/QQAo0Vi4aq4

I’m my original game, I tried this on several worlds on several shafts at different heights, and there’s never any ore. This was on two different computers as well. I’m not really sure why it’s happening though.
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