Evil Satellites

A game for the No Video Jam 2 by Talon

Evil Satellites is a 3d space shooter audio game made in 2 weeks for the No Video Jam 2, a game jam spanning two weeks from April 9th until the 26th.

Background

At some unspecified time in the future, humanity has a problem. A big problem. The fear of the Paperclip maximizer has come true. An AI has gone rogue, taken over all the satellites that it could get access to, disregarding their original intensions for its own needs. Someone has to fix this. And what better way to fix this than with a spaceship, a sarcastic AI, and lots of brute force. You will have to shoot down aggressive satellites that try to shoot back, collect the debris they leave behind as they fall victim to your weapons to use as more ammo, and avoid running into satellites or debris unintentionally.

Controls

The game has two modes of operation. The keyboard, and the gamepad.

Keyboard

Movement

• W: move forward
• S: move backward
• A: move to the left
• D: move to the right
• Left arrow: turn left
• Right arrow: turn right
• Up arrow: angle the nose down
• Down arrow: angle the nose up

Weapons

• Space: hold to fire your automatic weapon
• V: hold to enable magnetic debris collector

Info

• H: check your health
• X: check your ammo

Radar

• R: toggle radar on and off
• T: switch radar from satellites to debris and back
• Y: get distance and angle of focused object

Gamepad

Movement

• Left thumbstick: move forward, backward, left and right
• Right thumbstick: Turn left, right, and angle the nose down and up

Weapons

• Right trigger: Hold to fire your automatic weapon
• Left trigger: hold to enable magnetic debris collector

Info

• A: check ammo
• B: check health

Radar

• Left shoulder: toggle radar on and off
• Right shoulder: switch radar from satellites to debris and back
• X: check distance and angle of focused object

Overview

Here's a quick overview of how to play the game.

Menu

When you start the game, you will be dropped into the main menu. From here you can start the game, change some options and exit the program. Exiting is possible from any point in the game by pressing alt+f4. Use the arrow keys, or the DPad of your controller, to move through the options. Press enter, or A, to select one. Waiting a few seconds after the menu item has been spoken aloud will give you a little summary of what you can expect the selected option to do.

Options

• Music volume: Press enter and shift enter to adjust the music volume before you start the game, or disable it completely.
• Use screen reader: If you're running a screen reader such as NVDA, this will tell the game to prefer speaking through it rather than SAPI.
• Use force feedback: If you have a controller plugged in, it will vibrate on certain events in the game, such as firing your weapon, getting shot, crashing into something, etc. Use this option to enable or disable it.
• AI: Here you can enable or disable the AI voice in the game. The AI will comment on certain happenings in the game. If you find yourself distracted by it, you can disable it here. I highly encourage you not to, though! The AI is great!

Gameplay

Once you select "Start", the game will load and you'll be dropped into your spaceship. Enable your radar, which will be in satellite mode by default. Turn around until you hear the radar straight ahead of you at its highest pitch. Check how far away the object is. Your shots can reach up to 500 units away, however the projectiles will take quite a long time to get there, so it becomes harder to hit the satellites from that distance. Anything 50 units or below should be very easy to hit. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to hit it from further away though, as the satellites will shoot back! Their projectiles are the same as yours, so take the same amount of time to travel. Once you've hit the satellite enough times, it will explode and leave debris behind. Switch your radar to debris mode. Enable the debris collector by holding down the button, and fly towards the debris. Once you get close enough it will fill up your ammo, and the debris will disappear. Running into a satellite will cause you to lose a ton of health. Running into debris without the collector enabled also loses you quite a bit of health. Try to avoid that! Health will slowly fill back up over time, ammo will not. It is important that you keep an eye on your ammo count, as running out will basically spell game over.

Credits

• Code, music, sfx: talon
• SFX, testing: pitermach
• Writing, testing: Mayana
• Voice acting (AI): Raven Oska
• Shift Backtick and the AudioGameDev discord server for the game jam, the server, many fun conversations and a fantastic time!