Inspired by Thrust

[mendel]

"Thrust" came out 30 years ago for the C64 and other home computers of the day. It looked similar to "Terra Lander" right down to the vector graphics and striped backgrounds (no trees though), but it played differently: you had "true spaceship" controls, i.e. you could only rotate the ship and thrust ahead (and shoot ahead). You then had to pick up an orb that was coupled to your ship like a pendulum, with about equal weight, which made the flight dynamics that much more unstable. In Thrust, you had to battle physics about as much as you did the shooting stations, straining to retain control; you went down into the bowels of the level to retrieve the sphere and back up into the night sky to return to the stars afterwards, i.e. each descent was followed by an ascent with the now-heavier (by the sphere) craft through narrow corridors and corners.

Having played the Terra Lander demo, I get the impression that while it may have been inspired by Thrust or similar games, this game looks to be too "dumbed down" to approach the levels of fun and challenge that I had with the older game. A chance wasted.

[Godling]

They're all rips on Lunar Lander[en.wikipedia.org].

[JP]

If you like Thrust-type of games, you should definitely check our upcoming game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1321890/Gravitators/

We're a rather hard-to-find niche crowd, so today I've been browsing around communities of similar games and see if anyone was looking for more games from this genre. If you are anything like me, you'll probably want to get your hands on any decent gravity shooter out there. I've designed this game with that kind of player in mind.

In our game, there are 4 ships to choose, all with different controls and weapons, basically making it a different game depending on which ship you play with.

We just released our free demo for the Steam Festival, so I hope you check it out! Don't forget to wishlist if you enjoy it!

[mendel]

The Gravitators demo plays nicely. I may remember that wrong, but it feels like from level 3 onward, the levels get rather large and take a while to complete; and I hope you're getting the gamepad support polished until the release; but it feels fair and is great fun to play.

[JP]

Hey, thanks a lot for playing it, Mendel!

The levels do get larger and more complex, and there are still a lot of mission objectives and environments to experience, but we decided to keep the demo mission order the same as on the final game, so you could keep the progress when the game comes out.

As for the gamepads, it is definitely in our tasklist before launch. We discovered there were some players having trouble getting used to controls with keyboard and mouse, so we want to keep both methods available for players to choose. Unfortunately, we couldn't make it happen before the Steam Festival, so for now, the ships themselves will work with the controllers, but the menus, maps and other options are still WIP. Additionally, we also needed to have the tutorials automatically adapt to the input the player is using, and create all the artwork for it.

Thanks again for the feedback, and hope to see you play it again after launch. Taking aside wishlisting, if you'd like to receive news and updates, you can also find online in:

https://twitter.com/InsularGames
https://www.instagram.com/insulargames/
https://www.facebook.com/insulargames/

JP