Clear Skies

Clear Skies is a star-gazing game that I created solo for the Ludum Dare 58 (opens in new tab) jam. It was created for the Compo category, meaning that all code and assets must be made during the jam, and alone. I placed 29th overall out of 272 participants, and got 14th in Innovation and 24th in Mood categories.

The jam’s theme was collector. I do a lot of star-gazing during winter time. Each night I pick a new target to hunt for and try to find it with my telescope. Finding a specific object from the night sky is not always an easy feat. This process is called starhopping. It means moving your telescope from a familiar star to another and finally (hopefully) reach the target destination.

This translated into a game quite nicely. I gave the player a book that listed star constellations they can find and the most notable stars of each constellation. Then, their task was to find them all using their telescope by connecting stars together similarly to how they were defined in the book. Due to the telescope, the player can only see a small portion of the sky at the same time. This forces them to naturally use the starhopping technique just as they would in real life.

Development

Clear Skies was developed using the PICO-8 fantasy console (opens in new tab). While it has very harsh limitations, it is one of my favorite platforms to make small games solo, as it features all the tools within the console itself. This means I was able to do coding, art and even sound effects and music directly inside the console.

As stars in the game accurately simulate a portion of a real night sky, modelling it was an important task during the development. I ended up taking a screenshot of the sky, scaling it to the size of the map, and then drew stars on top of it using Aseprite (opens in new tab). This allowed me to easily get star distances right. I also used the relative brightness and color of the stars in the art. Even though the star color is not too apparent in real life, I felt it was necessary for the game. Combining the star size, name and color gave the player a lot of different ways to locate stars from the sky.

Learnings

Shared cartridge memory

PICO-8’s bottom half of the spritesheet and the bottom half of the map live in the same cartridge memory. This is stated clearly in the documentation but I missed this when moving quickly during the jam. At first, I had my whole sky modelled in the map. However, the sky was so large that it ended up overlapping with my sprite sheet. Due to this, I had to refactor the whole sky rendering during the jam. I ended up drawing all the stars manually to the screen, skipping the map memory completely.

Giving your players more than they need

I deliberately added a lot of ways the player could locate and recognize specific stars from the sky. The book not only lists names of notable stars but also shows their color and relative size (brightness). It was clear from the feedback that players used a lot of different strategies to locate constellations. Some used the color alone, some hunted for star names. As people tend to gravitate towards different kinds of hints, adding a few more is never going to do any harm.

You can try the game directly on your browser on Itch.io (opens in new tab).