Horizon
An incremental game about the physics of long-distance, high-speed space travel. Manage engines, fuel, and research to go as fast and far as possible. Currently endless.
Also playable on my website.
An incremental game about the physics of long-distance, high-speed space travel. Manage engines, fuel, and research to go as fast and far as possible. Currently endless.
Also playable on my website.
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I have reached current endgame, with 600k lorentz factor and lvl 93 antimatter engine mass & auto research. I have ~600k antimatter engines.
I have 103684m2 of fuel net, and L41 antimatter engine consumption. Fuel gain scales really fast with speed, and with any more net I will start gaining fuel faster than I can use them. I will eventually get too much fuel that weigh my ship down.
Looks like fuel net has 'air resistance', so the terminal speed depends on how effcient you use the fuel. Strangely, the fuel effciency is boosted by the number of engines.
3 suggestions:
1. Combustion engines are useless. I would better skip them, because they can't gain any meaningful speed to get lorentz factor significantly above 1. The game only starts when I get to fusion.
From lore perspective, combustion engines are useless if you want to get anywhere near c.
I think you should directly remove combustion engine tech, and start the player with fusion, and maybe add 'exotic' after antimatter.
2. I think fuel should have a limit, so fuel doesn't weigh the ship down.
3. I think it would be interesting to add some way to gain more building materials.
Thanks for playing and appreciate the feedback! I'm not sure if or when I might do more with this, but I very much agree with your suggestions.
The combustion engines especially are arguably even worse than useless. If you waste too much fuel with them, you can stunt your progress. That said, I'm not sure I'd completely remove them, especially if I took a narrative route with future development. There's maybe something interesting there about technological obsolescence.
Yes, I pressed that reset button after I found out I wasted too much fuel with the combustion engine.
If you decide to keep those obsolete techs in the tech tree, I think you can add the ability to hide certain techs. This prevents too many obsolete techs from cluttering.
If the combustion engine is kept, I think it needs a redesign: Since the fuel efficiency is all what matters, you can increase its base efficiency a lot, but make it not scale proportionally to number of engines. This makes it useful at start, and fusion is still a big improvement.
Alternatively, the real time research speed could be based on proper velocity, so increasing velocity early is still helpful, allowing an early engine to exist.
Another note: When fusion is unlocked, it's relatively easy to research the efficiency curve to high levels. This basically makes that efficiency irrelevant because it's near 100% all the time. This is even more true for antimatter engines. So I think the whole efficiency mechanism should be removed for the fusion and antimatter, and leave it exclusively to combustion engines.
Really neat! I really enjoyed realizing that research speed increased as time passed on earth faster, I think this game combines the big numbers of clicker and games and big numbers in physics in a super fun way!
I like the game, a very scientific approach of an incremental/idle game. It's fun finding an equilibrium of fuel/engines and improving it with upgrades.
The Lorentz Factor is a dimensionless variable, i. e. it has no unit instead of m/s. This is an actual error, the following feedback I'll write is just personal preference.
The start is a bit rough imho, there are a lot of numbers. I mean all of them make sense and have their purpose, but still there are many numbers at start. Maybe hiding numbers like Lorentz Factor or Proper Velocity until they actually become relevant later in the game could help.
Antimatter Engines are worse than Fusion Engines, it takes such a long time until they get better than Fusion Engines. It feels a little bit too slow for me. After researching Antimatter Engines you just have to invest so much more to actually get them relevant.
This game also needs better number representation. It's so difficult comparing the Output or Thrust of different engines, you have to count like 17 or 18 digits. SI prefixes or exponential notation would help significantly.
Overall it's a nice game, I enjoyed playing it.
Thanks for playing and really appreciate the feedback!
I absolutely agree with your points about the rate of progression and clarity of numbers. They're the first things I'd work on if I dedicate more time to this. (It was made for a course, on a deadline, so of course some things just aren't as polished as I'd like!)
And thanks for pointing out that Lorentz factor error. I was aware it's dimensionless, but carelessly copy pasted some code and forgot to remove the unit! Will certainly at least fix that.