Ludum Dare #13compo
Exproad, Improad, Reroad!
Here it is, last second. Lots more I wanted to do, but it’s fun.
Java Webstart.
New (non-contest) Version Here HAS A RESTART BUTTON:
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroad.jnlp
(The new version has menus, multiple difficulty levels, and a lot of tweaks)
Contest Version Here:
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroadLD.jnlp
Source:
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroadSource.jar
Basically, you want to avoid the zombies. Shoot them with left click in order to kill them temporarily (exproad them) and shoot them with right click in order to kill them permanently (improad). Move the mouse to the left edge of the screen to replenish lost ammo (reroad).
Oh yeah, you can also use WASD you move your car. And due to some weird bug in Java’s resource loading, I had to take the images/sounds out of the JAR and host them on my site, and then load them dynamically. Basically as a result you’ll get a very quick (only 97k) source download but you’ll stare at a black screen for like 5 seconds every time when you start up. I’ll try to get to the bottom of this in the future. It’s weird because I used the exact same resource loader code I’ve used a million times before. Not sure what the problem is.
Oh yeah and press F to toggle full screen, and ESC to quit.
A longer more detailed entry:
This is my game for LD13. Basically, I was totally peeved with the road theme so I decided to go with something totally different (and a little racist). I tried to find things that I could pretend fit the theme but were actually totally different, and eventually found rhymes for road, which were explode, implode, and reload. That got my mind working and it became a game where you play as an asian with a bad English accent. And turns out it actually does take place on a road and in a car. Oops. 😛
Webstart
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroad.jnlp
Please vote for me, good or bad!
Controls
WASD or Arrows – Move truck around
Mouse – Aim your gun
Mouse button 1 – Shoot and exproad
Mouse button 2 – Shoot an improad
Move mouse to left side of screen – Reroad
F – Toggle fullscreen
Esc – Quit the game
Backstory
You are a humble Chinese rice farmer who is just turning in for the day when you hear groans from behind you. Oh noes, the terrible rice-eating zombies are back (in China, zombies eat rice, not brains, similar to how in France they eat frogs and in Egypt they eat pyramids), and they’re after your rice! Your faithful brother and you load up your pickup truck with all the rice you can carry, and he takes the driver’s seat while you man your giant RICE ROCKET. The zombies can smell that rice, though, and they’re putting up a chase! Everyone knows that even if you blow up a zombie (exproad it) it will pull itself back together, so you’ve got to exproad them and then improad their fleshy bits while they fly in the air. Good luck!
Object
Basically, you want to defend your rice from the rice-eating zombie plague. You start with 8 bags, and when you get down to 0 to lose. If a zombie touches you, he takes either 1 or 2 bags. In order to kill a zombie, you’ve got to first blow it apart (with left click) and then implode its pieces (with right click). You’ve only got a limited number of shots, however, so move the mouse to the left side of the screen in order to reload. The game gets progressively more difficult the longer you survive. You can’t win.
Future
I will probably add some new stuff, like I already have score half-working, but the game was spazzing out when I was drawing dynamic OpenGL text. Must have messed something up. Basically you’ll be able to beat levels, upgrade your weapon, etc. etc. The usual.
Wow, I’ve got the best food, and the second best journal.
Hahahahaha.
I can’t say I expected that, but I did expect EIR! to land just about where it did in the other categories. 14th overall, with my other places in that ballpark. That’s top 24% which really isn’t bad, and I said to myself after playing everyone else’s games, “it’s one of the better games but not one of the best games.” And I was right.
One thing that I learned from this whole experience which I hadn’t gotten from my previous game ventures was a chance to see what’s successful. After creating them I think I have a good feel for which of my games have something really good going for them and which don’t, but that’s different than being able to specifically point out what gets acknowledged by the community as “good.”
So, what
is
good? What does that really mean? In Ludum Dare 13, it means something that looks complete, and not something that looks like it was made within a time limit. The vast majority of the entries to LD13 were more like demos and attempts than completed games (mine amongst them), because people would finish an engine and time would be up. The top 5 places in overall could all be described as games that set out to achieve something and did it. Complete products, no holes anywhere. That, I believe, is the most important piece of doing well in a 48 hour competition.
There’s more to it than that, obviously. The game needs to have something unique in it to set it apart. Some of the games submitted were complete but didn’t do amazingly well, mostly because they didn’t stand out enough. Increpare, the big winner of LD13, made something that any one of us could have done. His gameplay is crazily simple, the execution of it not at all complicated. But his idea is so standout and brilliant that he went away with 5 medals, all of which were gold. Then there is PsySal, who weaved an engrossing story, and bluescrn who who executed incredible gameplay. All of these approaches are different, but the key point is that they all stand out.
Similarly, you also need to have a sort of minimum level of execution in every other category. If there is one part of your game that is memorable because it’s bad, then you’re pretty much out of the running. When I saw the initial screenshots of these games I thought Fiona’s entry was a surefire winner, because the presentation is so slick and the idea so cool. But when I played it the controls were so difficult that this potential was immediately eliminated. Meanwhile although increpare’s gameplay was ridiculously simple, there was something about creating that movie length time limit and the maddening screw-you-over mechanics that made the gameplay good, and some people spent a lot of time trying to get to an “end.” His gameplay certainly wasn’t the best, but because it wasn’t at all bad, his game was able to seem like (and become) a winner.
So, in the end, what you need is:
1) A complete-feeling and polished game.
2) Something that makes your game stand out.
3) No major or easily noticed problems with your game.
Easier said than done, of course. But the most noticeable thing to me is that bells and whistles and complexity of gameplay are completely unimportant. It’s much better to take a simple idea and make that work perfectly.
Java Webstart.
New (non-contest) Version Here HAS A RESTART BUTTON:
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroad.jnlp
(The new version has menus, multiple difficulty levels, and a lot of tweaks)
Contest Version Here:
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroadLD.jnlp
Source:
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroadSource.jar
Basically, you want to avoid the zombies. Shoot them with left click in order to kill them temporarily (exproad them) and shoot them with right click in order to kill them permanently (improad). Move the mouse to the left edge of the screen to replenish lost ammo (reroad).
Oh yeah, you can also use WASD you move your car. And due to some weird bug in Java’s resource loading, I had to take the images/sounds out of the JAR and host them on my site, and then load them dynamically. Basically as a result you’ll get a very quick (only 97k) source download but you’ll stare at a black screen for like 5 seconds every time when you start up. I’ll try to get to the bottom of this in the future. It’s weird because I used the exact same resource loader code I’ve used a million times before. Not sure what the problem is.
Oh yeah and press F to toggle full screen, and ESC to quit.
A longer more detailed entry:
This is my game for LD13. Basically, I was totally peeved with the road theme so I decided to go with something totally different (and a little racist). I tried to find things that I could pretend fit the theme but were actually totally different, and eventually found rhymes for road, which were explode, implode, and reload. That got my mind working and it became a game where you play as an asian with a bad English accent. And turns out it actually does take place on a road and in a car. Oops. 😛
Webstart
http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ExproadImproadReroad/ExproadImproadReroad.jnlp
Please vote for me, good or bad!
Controls
WASD or Arrows – Move truck around
Mouse – Aim your gun
Mouse button 1 – Shoot and exproad
Mouse button 2 – Shoot an improad
Move mouse to left side of screen – Reroad
F – Toggle fullscreen
Esc – Quit the game
Backstory
You are a humble Chinese rice farmer who is just turning in for the day when you hear groans from behind you. Oh noes, the terrible rice-eating zombies are back (in China, zombies eat rice, not brains, similar to how in France they eat frogs and in Egypt they eat pyramids), and they’re after your rice! Your faithful brother and you load up your pickup truck with all the rice you can carry, and he takes the driver’s seat while you man your giant RICE ROCKET. The zombies can smell that rice, though, and they’re putting up a chase! Everyone knows that even if you blow up a zombie (exproad it) it will pull itself back together, so you’ve got to exproad them and then improad their fleshy bits while they fly in the air. Good luck!
Object
Basically, you want to defend your rice from the rice-eating zombie plague. You start with 8 bags, and when you get down to 0 to lose. If a zombie touches you, he takes either 1 or 2 bags. In order to kill a zombie, you’ve got to first blow it apart (with left click) and then implode its pieces (with right click). You’ve only got a limited number of shots, however, so move the mouse to the left side of the screen in order to reload. The game gets progressively more difficult the longer you survive. You can’t win.
Future
I will probably add some new stuff, like I already have score half-working, but the game was spazzing out when I was drawing dynamic OpenGL text. Must have messed something up. Basically you’ll be able to beat levels, upgrade your weapon, etc. etc. The usual.
Wow, I’ve got the best food, and the second best journal.
Hahahahaha.
I can’t say I expected that, but I did expect EIR! to land just about where it did in the other categories. 14th overall, with my other places in that ballpark. That’s top 24% which really isn’t bad, and I said to myself after playing everyone else’s games, “it’s one of the better games but not one of the best games.” And I was right.
One thing that I learned from this whole experience which I hadn’t gotten from my previous game ventures was a chance to see what’s successful. After creating them I think I have a good feel for which of my games have something really good going for them and which don’t, but that’s different than being able to specifically point out what gets acknowledged by the community as “good.”
So, what
is
good? What does that really mean? In Ludum Dare 13, it means something that looks complete, and not something that looks like it was made within a time limit. The vast majority of the entries to LD13 were more like demos and attempts than completed games (mine amongst them), because people would finish an engine and time would be up. The top 5 places in overall could all be described as games that set out to achieve something and did it. Complete products, no holes anywhere. That, I believe, is the most important piece of doing well in a 48 hour competition.
There’s more to it than that, obviously. The game needs to have something unique in it to set it apart. Some of the games submitted were complete but didn’t do amazingly well, mostly because they didn’t stand out enough. Increpare, the big winner of LD13, made something that any one of us could have done. His gameplay is crazily simple, the execution of it not at all complicated. But his idea is so standout and brilliant that he went away with 5 medals, all of which were gold. Then there is PsySal, who weaved an engrossing story, and bluescrn who who executed incredible gameplay. All of these approaches are different, but the key point is that they all stand out.
Similarly, you also need to have a sort of minimum level of execution in every other category. If there is one part of your game that is memorable because it’s bad, then you’re pretty much out of the running. When I saw the initial screenshots of these games I thought Fiona’s entry was a surefire winner, because the presentation is so slick and the idea so cool. But when I played it the controls were so difficult that this potential was immediately eliminated. Meanwhile although increpare’s gameplay was ridiculously simple, there was something about creating that movie length time limit and the maddening screw-you-over mechanics that made the gameplay good, and some people spent a lot of time trying to get to an “end.” His gameplay certainly wasn’t the best, but because it wasn’t at all bad, his game was able to seem like (and become) a winner.
So, in the end, what you need is:
1) A complete-feeling and polished game.
2) Something that makes your game stand out.
3) No major or easily noticed problems with your game.
Easier said than done, of course. But the most noticeable thing to me is that bells and whistles and complexity of gameplay are completely unimportant. It’s much better to take a simple idea and make that work perfectly.
Comments16
Could Improve on: Resolution/Graphics (or decide to keep graphics deliberately retro-trashy then maybe make it even more trashy).
Lice!
More screen space between the truck and zombies would be nice. The game seemed quite crowded all the time.
I have to give technical 1 for the Java App Deployment stuff.
If you could hide the mouse, that might increase the fun. Adding obstacles, or something that'd make one use one's control of one's vehicle, would also be good.
Particle effects were cool, as other people have already said.
The particle effects are nice though, it has a distinctive style, and it's relatively polished too, so good marks for all of those :)
I'm guessing one of the reasons I don't think it's a lot of fun is that the scoring system is unfinished. With such simple scoring, and the ability to keep increasing the score after game over, there's no motivation.
Stunning work, great resources, but lacks something when it comes to gameplay. :)
See you around JGO!
I'm still not so sure about the two rockets though. It seems like the right way to play is simply to go left-right at a couple guys, then reload. There doesn't seem much point in the two missiles (other than cool effects), because you have very little chance to suck multiple guys into one wormhole, and you can't risk a guy getting by, so you always need to fire one for one. At least that's my theory. I would try a higher difficulty to check, but the load time was a couple of minutes the first time, I don't want to do that again!
I won't touch the ... more sensitive issues...
The particle effects are indeed effective, and the monsters sound very zomboid. The graphics come across more cartoony than poor, which is nice. Reminds me of the Bart games on NES.
My main complaints are with the interface - I initially launched the game with my keyboard out of reach, so had to get up and fetch it to select a difficulty level only to realize that the game is actually played exclusively with the mouse after all... Also, more importantly perhaps, the default cursor is really lost in the mayhem of gameplay, so you should have put in a huge flashing reticle or something to show where you're aiming. Oh, and there were some interesting timing hickups - the game would sometimes freeze for a second or two, and other times it'd race ahead at breakneck speed for an instant. It didn't seem to disrupt gameplay all that much though (but I guess I could have lost a few boxes of rice without noticing).
Overall it's fun and frantic. I scored 180-something after maybe a 5-minute run on normal difficulty.