Star Tripper
Star Tripper is a game that’s not trying to sell itself very hard. The summary consists of a single sentence, describing itself as inspired by a Palm Pilot game that I’m definitely not familiar with! So I didn’t really know what to expect going into this one.
It turns out that Star Tripper is massively underselling itself, because there is A TON to do. After the intro, which establishes you as the scion of a rich and powerful family looking to rescue their kidnapped sibling, it dumps you out in the great wide universe where you can do just about anything. And I do mean anything! The number of quadrants and planets you can visit must number in the hundreds, with activities on each ranging from religious prayer, drinking, visiting bookstores, ferrying passengers, and of course karaoke and gambling (not available yet in my playthrough, but I’m excited about them anyway). Oh, and the resource trading. How could I forget that?
What I Liked
The goods trading is the meat of the game, and it feels very satisfying. It didn’t take me long to get a feel for how it worked - buy goods cheaply on planets that produce them, and sell them high on planets that don’t. I quickly spun up a burgeoning empire in electrical cables and for a while I was rolling in money. I felt very smug about my early success, and was pushing into deeper and deeper quadrants in the hope of finding a space station to spend my cash on a better ship and start the process all over again.
What I Didn’t
Unfortunately, a game like this is hard to balance, especially with one programmer and one tester (based on the credits). So while I thought the trading was fun, fuel management ended up being a pain. In particular, refueling on a planet is a real drag! Instead of the spaceport having a fuel station (why???), you have to go to a bar, buy a patron a drink (at a price that scales with planet difficulty), buy them ANOTHER drink (with a similar price that isn’t revealed until you’ve bought the first), and then finally unlock the option to pay them even more money to buy fuel. Not only is this tedious, it means that if you land on an expensive planet you can wind up with not enough cash to actually buy fuel, leaving you to do odd jobs until you scrape together the cash to leave. An easy fix for this would be at least to let the player buy as much fuel as they can afford, but when you’re buying it from a shady person outside a bar it’s all ten units or nothing.
There’s a few options of jobs you can do to earn cash - I’ve run into mining ore and making coffee so far, although I suspect there will be more once I get further in. Unfortunately, the mining minigame seems to be designed for players to trade credits for carpal tunnel - you descend a mineshaft for up to 50 meters (requiring one click for each meter), mine until your bag is full (20-30 clicks) and then go back up to the surface (again, one click per meter). Then you do it again. I did this once and then stopped because it gave me wrist strain. The other money-making minigame I’ve encountered (working at a coffee shop) is much more fun, since it’s based around remembering customer’s orders instead of blind clicking. Still, the payout wasn’t enough to justify the 20 or so rounds I’d need to complete in order to get back off the planet, so with that as my only option I decided my run was over. (The minigame rewards don’t seem to scale properly with the planet level either?)
Finally, I had absolutely no idea how to progress the story, and after the first quadrant I didn’t encounter a single space station where I could upgrade my ship. In hindsight I really should have written down the number of that first quadrant! (I really should have written down a lot of things. Definitely bringing a notebook for round 2.)
Bug Report Corner
Reloading a save will start all your achievements over from scratch. This didn’t bother me too much, but it’s definitely unintended behavior.
Other Thoughts
I’m going to give this one another shot once my frustration’s worn off, because despite the other issues I was really enjoying this until I got stuck on Tau Huborkon. I can see myself coming back to this one a lot once I unlock arcade mode. (Also, I played this with a brewing sinus headache so that definitely affected my persistence. Sorry Sam!) With some more polish and maybe a better primer on gameplay I could see this becoming a classic. Also, I’m going to be smart and make better use of multiple saves so if I screw myself over again I won’t have to start from scratch.
Myself, I went back and forth a bit with tweaking it a bit, but fuel management being a PITA was part of the original game (from 2002), and I ultimately decided that it was a fundamental element of the gameplay, so that’s why it is the way it is in the IFComp release.
I’ve seen her thumb get bruised from tapping on the screen so frequently, which always makes both of us laugh like loons. And yes, you’re right, there are far easier ways to make money.
Imagine that you are cutting the grass using a lawnmower. To make sure you don’t miss any patches or spots, you have to cut the grass in even segments starting from the far corner and working your way across and down.