Ludum Dare #18compo

Graphell

by zombuster

Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.93

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.00

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.07

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.86

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.43

Audio★★★★★★★★★★1.38

Humor★★★★★★★★★★1.40

Community★★★★★★★★★★1.89

Coolness★★★★★★★★★★6%

Had a lot of fun with the theme, hope you enjoy the game too. No sounds sadly, but a lot of explosions.

Written in Java.

--Game Info--

Lost in outer space, no defenses but your trusty mining hook.

Grab enemy ships using the mouse and launch them back at their friends.

Enemy types:

Red dwarfs: tiny red drone ships, spawned by mother drones. Harmless for you but when used right they can be useful.

Plain drones: red-white, and suicidal. Don't get them too close or they will bash your hull apart.

Shooter drones: With a blue core these spit out plasma bolts like crazy.

Shield drones: A blue shield gives these units some extra bit.

Elite drones: blue-white, and out to get you. Can't outrun these babies.

Mother drones: Slow and bulky, these ships spawn red dwarfs all around. Grab one if you need some good old firepower.

Bomb drones: The pulsating ones make big badaboom.

All drone types (except dwarfs) can be combined.

Make crazy combo's to get lot's of points.

Comments12

droqen22 Aug 2010, 21:53

The concept sounds cool, but I'm getting a ridiculous amount of lag ):

ZomBusterauthor23 Aug 2010, 00:05

Sorry for that, optimization is not one of my strong points

zigs23 Aug 2010, 09:36

that's too bad, causes it's otherwise a very enjoyable game :)

stqn23 Aug 2010, 15:45

First impressions:
- java freezes firefox completely for 10 seconds while loading the game :( (it does that all the time apparently, not just for your game)
- wasd is not okay with an azerty keymap :-
- big input lag

Danik23 Aug 2010, 17:01

Nice game! It shares a lot of the gameplay with my entry, just more focused on pure gameplay while mine is more focused on graphics and stuff.
Great minds think alike. :]

ExciteMike24 Aug 2010, 21:09

It's hard to tell if the concept was working out or not due to the performance problems.

pekuja28 Aug 2010, 12:15

I thought this was really cool, but it was really hard to see what was going on when everything is a circle. I also wasn't sure if I was taking damage from touching enemies so I didn't really feel like I was in any danger. Some sound effects and a clearer health bar would probably help there.

I think this could be a really cool game if polished up a bit.

eli29 Aug 2010, 11:34

Man, the cover art is NOTHING like the game!!
Needs work. I'd like to play a future version of this game.

stqn31 Aug 2010, 23:27

So after patching my Linux kernel to improve interactivity (zen patchset) and writing a tiny script to switch my keymap from azerty to qwerty, I tried again :) ... and now the game is actually fun and works reasonnably well!

Obviously it would be nice to some (explosion) sounds and maybe some levels with different enemies... The graphics are simple but have a nice retro look.

stqn31 Aug 2010, 23:30

Oh, after reading the description I see there are different enemy types... I can't say it was obvious ingame. Introducing them one after the other could help.

moop2 Sep 2010, 13:01

Good fun to play. I liked the graphical style though it got very busy later on and it was hard to tell what was dangerous and what was just particles.

Ran very slowly on my Mac, worked just fine on Windows though.

Zillix3 Sep 2010, 09:39

Link isn't working for me =(

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