nice, but i find it very hard to play. acceleration is either not enough and you are pulled in by the planet, or it is to much and you are getting away so fast that you can't counter steer. shouldn't gravity take care of that? if i am in orbit, then speeding up along my trajectory should slowly increase the orbit, and slowing down should decrease it. but speeding up takes me immediately out of the orbit as if the planet had no gravity.

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mvx64 a day ago | parent [-]

Thanks for trying it out. It's a regular inverse square law, no tricks. The numbers (masses, distance) determine the final acceleration but not the actual trend of the curve.

I've become too familiar with it over testing to notice unintuitive behaviour, but I think I understand what feels off: in real world units, the gradual region you describe is very wide, and feels linear. This would make for very boring gameplay (imagine spending minutes to reach the planet). You need to keep the playable area [radiusForce0, radiusForceMax] small. So you will either map that small [r0, rmax] into real world [F0, Fmax], which means the force will be almost constant across, or "compress" the [F0, Fmax] curve so that you can fit both [zero outer space gravity, strong surface gravity] into that [r0, rmax].

That's what happens here, I probably tweaked the values for the second case. It's kind of an accelerated version of reality and the margins feel very tight, and you have to "buy into" that reality.

For example, Master difficulty in Mission 1 may seem impossible, but if you try to be gentle and find a balanced orbit, you can complete it with miniscule fluctuations in distance and minimal input.

Just rambling though, I never really actually designed or balanced the game.

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em-bee a day ago | parent [-]

maybe some kind of indicator to show which level of acceleration/speed is best would help.

the unintuitive behavior is that it is very difficult to find that balance. if i am to slow i crash into the planet, if i am to fast i leave orbit with no chance to get back in time. being gentle always results in being to slow. in other words there is no gentle way to reach the balance. and if i don't know where that balance is, i don't know what to aim for.

you may argue that finding that balance is the goal of the game, but then i guess the game is not for me. i lose interest if i have to try 10 times and still can't figure out how to do it right.

	▲	mvx64 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Understandable. That's kind of the goal, the gameplay is very shallow complexity-wise, so raw responses/difficulty is one way to put some playing time into it. There are some methods that help a lot, like keeping a completely perpendicular or parallel viewing direction, and adjusting the distance with the corresponding set of thrusters. Even slight angles mean you have to randomly mash forward/backward/left/right and hope to keep a steady orbit, it's not gonna happen. For what it's worth, even for me now, it would take more than 10 tries probably to beat Master on Mission 1.