Sadistic science professor R. E. Searcher, Ph. D., has met with an unfortunate incident that not even tenure can alleviate. In between kidnapping and "instructing" this year's batch of ill-fated freshman, Professor Searcher has somehow managed to turn his most recent instrument of torture- his shrink ray- against himself.
Having shrunk to the size of a lima bean and fallen through the drain in his classroom's much-used emergency eye wash station, Professor Searcher must now navigate the sewer tunnels and collect beakers of chemical energy before the effects of the shrink ray wear off and he becomes crushed to death in the tiny world within the sewer pipes.
Welcome to Science 101: The Sewer Chronicles, where exams are cumulative and there is no extra credit.
Can't run this, as my graphics card isn't compatible with the HiDef profile in XNA. Second game this compo that I've had that problem with. As an XNA user myself, I would strongly recommend setting your build to the more compatible graphics mode, as it will still do pretty much everything you need to do in a 2D game but will work with onboard gfx chips, which the HiDef profile doesn't.
SCIENCE!!! I like the mechanics - constantly having to fight against growing self, balancing it with shrinking to get to the goal. Voice acting is fun, the game itself is crazy-professor-humorous. Well done!
I like the idea and the style. The graphics were also very nice, and the sound seemed to fit it well - though the voice overs, while initially cool, got old too quickly when I was just constantly dying. The killer for me was that there didn't seem to be any way out of the first section. No matter which way I moved, the scientist always died within about five seconds or so. Maybe he was growing faster than he should've been on my machine for some reason? I don't know. Would've probably given this a high score if I could've gotten anywhere with it!
Fun with the growing/shrinking concept, collision was weird at some times and the voice acting was funny, maybe it needed some more variant quotes when you died so it would get that old.
it's an interesting idea, but I found the constant growing a bit frustrating at times. Cleaning up the collision might solve this. In games like this it's usually best to undersize your collision rects and be a bit forgiving where possible. Obviously that can cause other problems with pushes and the like so sometimes it's good to have multiple collision shapes depending on what you're colliding against.
Comments21
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/confirmation.aspx?id=20914
The killer for me was that there didn't seem to be any way out of the first section. No matter which way I moved, the scientist always died within about five seconds or so. Maybe he was growing faster than he should've been on my machine for some reason? I don't know. Would've probably given this a high score if I could've gotten anywhere with it!
Fun with the growing/shrinking concept, collision was weird at some times and the voice acting was funny, maybe it needed some more variant quotes when you died so it would get that old.
I've got a quick post on using Reach in XNA here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/19/xna-users-increase-compatibility-with-reach/
As others have mentioned, you should always build XNA games with the Reach profile where possible.