Rolling Down the Road

by caturday

The point of this totally awesome game is to roll a sticky ball down the side of the highway. It’s kind of fun like pickup up trash and sharp plants next to the freeway on a hot day might be? Eventually I’ll get some scoring in there. Crack open a beer and enjoy playing on the freeway. I sure did. Scoring? Do you keep score while wandering around next to US 15 in Las Vegas (think Bat Country from Fear and Loathing)? I’d say everyone is a winner here.
This was my first LD competition. I got started yesterday at noon (company party the night before, you know how that goes). I look forward to seeing what other folks have!
[Update: I fixed keyboard control so you don’t need a 360 Controller]
C# Source (complete w/ models in both .mb and .fbx)
[Update: Fixed the installer.]
[Update2: Fixed keyboard control so you don’t need a 360 Controller]
[Update3: Removed Shader 3.0 stuff – not needed – it’s 2 lines in the src if you want to change it.]
Windows Binary
If this doesn’t work for you, please let me know. It seems to want to install .Net stuff if you don’t have it. If this becomes an issue, again, please email or comment.
One bummer –
this is better with a USB 360 style controller
, but it does work w/ keyboard. I fixed keyboard control after the bell.

Comments4

Hamumu

Can't install it, it just sits there trying to put in the .NET framework.

jhauberg

As a fellow XNA'er, and probably the only dude (besides you) in this community with .NET AND XNA installed, I felt it was my duty to try your game.

Generally your game just lacked polish, but it was cool how certain things stuck to the ball, and it looked pretty good. It would have been even cooler (but probably a good bit more complex) if the rolling of the ball was affected by its current state, and if you started being able to roll down the larger cactus plants, or even cars, once you reached a certain size.

What I didn't like about your game was that it took me a while just to understand what was going on, what I had to do, and how to get the ball under control. The initial startup was totally frantic, and I think I got stuck in a couple of cars before even gaining control of the ball. A starting "Press whatever to play"-screen, and initial state that wasnt just random would have eased me into the game much better.

In regards to the controls, everything seemed to just go way too fast, way too quickly. Might just be me, but I think that smoother zooming/speed gain would have made it a much better experience to play.

(NOTE: I only tried it with my xb360 controller, no keyboard)

EDIT: going back and looking at screenshots, I guess I just didn't play long enough to be able to stick to the cars/larger plants.

Doches

There's a solid gameplay mode in here, but like shrt said, it just needs polish and some interface help. It does play really, really quickly (I'm using a keyboard here, which worked just fine, I think) but that's OK -- once you get started. One note: I played until there were no more small shrubs, and I still wasn't able to pick up anything larger. Made it sort of hard to...keep playing.

That said, I can see this evolving into a distance/time trial Katamari type game, where you have to travel a certain distance in X seconds, and are scored by how much you pick up along the way. Pretty cool. Also, Nevada? Random...

increpare

hmm...going to have to give this one a miss; it's spent the last 15 minutes installing and has shown no signs of progress :( (I know it's installing the .net framework, but it's late and i need some sleep).