(38kb .exe single file) UPDATED due to major bug,. caused a crash, unforutunatly it worked fine here,. anyway, is fixed? now.., (slight graphics improvment as well)
ARROWS to move around, try to catch the red guys. If you get them all on one level press SPACE to generate another cavern. ESC to quit.
Built using ZGameEditor (zgameeditor.org)
To open the source in ZGE you may need the beta? not sure, try with the release ver. and let me know.
Ok, here is a finished 'game',. well not so much, however it is a playable game-like and perhaps interesting to some. The idea was to do a rogue-ish (as opposed to a proper Rogue-like) game inspired by DoomRL. I was at the Hand Eye Society Social in Toronto on Thursday and chatting with Raigan Burns (metanetsoftware.com) who was gushing about how cool DoomRL is,. so I was just playing it when this LD15 came along,. I had also been thinking about doing something along these lines anyway (although a bit different) and had been doing some experiments with map generation in the ZGE latley, so seemed like a good idea, to just set it in a cavern. The perlin-noise plus some levels of convolution works well to make nice cavernous maps,. so I use that here. Next I wanted to have some lighting effects as well as a way to give the AIs limited vision. So I did a brute-force raycasting lighting setup,. and most of the workflow slowdown came from figuring where to store what data and how to pass it between things,. as I normaly just stick with the model structure built into ZGE and in this case the 'map' is an array that is drawn from a single model. Anyway hacknicalties slowed me down and I did not get much gameplay in here,. so I just hacked in some quick synth sounds and a couple visual tricks for shts and giggles,. and here you have my little entry.
I did have a much more 'game' like idea, however time was just too short for that,.(or i was too slow?) but I do have something to show anyhow. I also learned a bunch of interesting stuff and will likely rebuild this whole thing and develop a proper game from the experiance gained,. so a successfull LD15 for me ;)
The graphics look very cool (except the player and enemies). The sound is very pleasant, even with what I assume was wine screwing up and making a soft quick ticking noise on top of it. But the best part about this game is how the dark atmospheric graphics with line of sight, synth audio, trippy zoom effect, and hypnotic uninentional ticking noise combine to make a freakishly trancey experience. Seriously, this game messed with my head. I'm still pretty disoriented.
I really do like the atmosphere, lighting works really well, and the music and sound effects are excellent. When it comes to gameplay, however, this doesn't feel quite finished.
I look forward to seeing what you can do with a full version. Keep up the good work! :)
Interesting concept. I like the dark graphics and the ominous music. It made me feel like I was in a dark cave somewhere which keeps very much to the theme. Actual characters instead of diamond icons would improve the feel even more I think.
The tile-at-a-time scrolling was bugging me. Moving that way is fine but having the whole thing jump a tile at a time was kind of disturbing. But the shadow/fog of war thing was really neat.
i really like the way this looks and sounds. i like the shifting hue as i move through the caverns. there isn't much to provide motivation to explore the randomly-generated caverns, though.
Not too much gameplay here, but the lighting was pulled off very, very well. I also liked the graphical effect when you consume a monster (or whatever it is you're doing to them).
Looks like you got an awesome base for a game, there just isn't much of a goal to it yet. Whatever it is you planned for it, I'd love to see you continue with it.
Comments21
EDIT: Tried the updated version, still crashes.
I AM THE REAL MONSTER!!!
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I look forward to seeing what you can do with a full version. Keep up the good work! :)