Reviews

Review by Joiltt all reviews by Joiltt

SpaceFants is a delightfully quirky rts / lemmings-like that is a wonderful display of technical prowess.

The game starts with a cut-scene of a sunflowerseed space ship frantically steering over a hex-based (space?) archipelago. Next, a wave of cute space-phants is released onto an island somewhere in the uncaring void. From there, the space-phants will wander in random directions, and fall out of the map if they wander off the island.

However, this is the point I must shamefully admit that I do not have the slightest clue what is going on, perhaps in a good way.

You can build walls and bridges with the mouse. Walls can alter the walking direction of the space-phants, bridges can presumably be used to get to other islands. Lastly, there appears to be a virus (orb?) on another island.

I assume you must go collect the virus, but controlling the space-phants is quite difficult, as they seem go wherever they please, and had a bad habit of avoiding my bridges. I did also run into quite a couple of crashes on the windows binaries, for instance when clicking and dragging the mouse around, or when space-phants fell into the void.

In summery, SpaceFants is weird, a tad mysterious, and confusing, but made all the more interesting by those very qualities.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by Mokkan all reviews by Mokkan

I find SpaceFants to be an amusingly quirky game. The graphics, music, and sounds all fit together quite well, and I particularly enjoy the Dogz/Catz-looking allephants. The gameplay seems to resemble Lemmings in that the goal appears to be to guide enough allephants to the goal. The tools available are pretty simple, but I think the concept is quite solid. It is really novel that the perspective of the camera affects the connectedness of the bridges, although I wish I was able to make more practical use of this mechanic.

I found the pathfinding to be a bit strange at times, which made the game a bit harder, as I wasn't able to reason about where my allephants would go when I placed a wall or a bridge. It also seemed a little strange to me that allephants would happily wander off of the islands, but they treat the edges of the bridges as walls.

In terms of how the game applied the TINS ruls:

## genre rule 143: Humoristic/Funny
Humor is subjective, but the goofiness of this game definitely appeals to me.

## artistic rule 147: Inspired by MC Escher
The aforementioned bridge-connectedness being affected by the camera angle is a great implementation of this rule. Also the tessellation of the hexes and the infinitely repeating map.

## artistic rule 94: Plug
I believe there is a plug for "Allefant 1" that pops up as an on-screen message.

## technical rule 113: Hexagonal
Hexes are everywhere in this game.

## bonus rule 13: Test of Might (include tests)
The readme alludes to some tests, but I did not see any test output when I ran them :(

Nice job, this is a great entry!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by Tijzz all reviews by Tijzz

The game starts of cool, zooming in and revealing the play area. The controls are intuitive for navigating through the 3D space, which makes it easy to position the camera the way you want it.

Then, the elephants are dropped of and the game begins. The idea is to get the elephants to the end point which is basic, but fine. However, the moment you start building, the flaws of the game become apparent.
The building tool feels weird to use and it does not feel like you have a lot of precision in placing walls and bridges. It is also not clear on whether you have the walls or the bridges selected. The world is 3D and smooth, while the building tool uses a grid like structure. I found myself just building a huge wall around the elephants so that they could get to the end goal, but because the elephants behave seemingly random and don't really feel like going towards the goal, you find yourself waiting a long while (and quitting because of it).

The readme tells how the Escher rule is implemented by having bridges be connected if they look connected. I couldn't really figure out how this worked in the game.
The humor rule is difficult to implement in general and the elephants, sound effects and music where amusing, but nothing made me actually laugh.

Even though I describe a lot of flaws, I still think you did a good job. If the building mechanic would be made more intuitive and the behavior of the elephants would be made less random, you really have the start of a game going!

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None