This is an arena shooter where the enemies evolve between rounds. Two alpha specimen are chosen from each species of enemy, and they mate, which mixes their attributes into new enemies, which can also get mutations.
I kinda like the different "specimens" but I really don't see how the new specimens are selected. Is it done statistically, or programmatically, or what?
Otherwise the background was rather bland. Gameplay was pretty basic.
There's a few things that goes to picking the specimen. Primarily it's how much damage each creature dealt to the player. Secondary is how many bullets it fired, and then tertiary would be how long it lived and how close it walked to the player.
The 4 way movement + 4 way shooting makes for some frantic gameplay. It's pretty fun! I lasted 3 rounds and killed 54 enemies. The music is pretty great too
Fantastic! 60fps. Love the health bars. I wish you could hold down two arrow keys for diagonal shots. Reminds me of robotron, smash tv etc. Keep up the awesome work.
M
matthias_zarzecki28 Aug 2012, 21:15
Solid twin-stick shooter! I like the bullet-speed, it's fast enough to feel badass, but slow enough for enemies to slip through.
Music works surprisingly well. It's catchy.
The game did tend to choke a bit, and I feel the evoltuion-aspect of the enemies is too... "mild". You don't really notice unless you look for it (at least in the first handful of rounds)
Very simple and fun to play, but maybe too simple. I think the evolution of the enemies wasn't too important or explicit, it could be better explained what was happening on this matter. As far as I could tell, there wasn't much I could do regarding the evolution mechanic to plan a strategy or something like that :P At first I thought it was too easy, but the difficulty curve is rather steep and it gets terribly hard to avoid bullets! I believe the shots are in random directions, so when it gets full of bullets there isn't a pattern or anything I can use to predict how to avoid them... In any case, I survived 12 rounds and killed 188 enemies. :D Nice little game although I think it requires more work to make the evolutions meaningful for the gameplay.
Well, Jack, it's a 48h game, so there may be some slip ups like that. :P Also, I think a good player can get further still with "real" play, so I don't think it's a big problem.
LegacyCrono, I do agree that the evolution could be more meaningful. I may work on a new version post-compo and try to figure out ways to make the evolution aspect more interesting. I do think there's real potential there.
The fighting is fun and the evolution system work great. I missed the diagonal shots. You could easily improve graphics by adding some soft shade to your spheres, but I'm not sure you can access flash design tools and gradients are painful to use with code. If you don't have flash IDE you can still improve gfx by adding particles on monster death instead of the shrink effect. Pop and explosions tend to be more rewarding than a vanish/shrinking effect... Nice music :)
The tune was very catchy. :) It felt a bit annoying that you couldn't shoot diagonally, I found myself missing the feature quite a lot. It was quite hard to keep track of the evolution/mutation/gene process, were the alpha specimens for each round chosen by random? All in all, the game was fun to play, but could've been even more fun with for example mouse aim.
A very simple shooter but it works well. You say there is some kind of genetic algorithm at work but honestly I couldn't tell the difference from random generation. The audio was a bit repetitive... Also I like the wall texture :)
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Otherwise the background was rather bland. Gameplay was pretty basic.
The two things I didn't like : The BG texture (I don't get it x) ) and I didn't really see any difference between the enemies
It isn't the first time the walls of CB2 have made their way into a game :).
Music works surprisingly well. It's catchy.
The game did tend to choke a bit, and I feel the evoltuion-aspect of the enemies is too... "mild". You don't really notice unless you look for it (at least in the first handful of rounds)
At first I thought it was too easy, but the difficulty curve is rather steep and it gets terribly hard to avoid bullets! I believe the shots are in random directions, so when it gets full of bullets there isn't a pattern or anything I can use to predict how to avoid them...
In any case, I survived 12 rounds and killed 188 enemies. :D
Nice little game although I think it requires more work to make the evolutions meaningful for the gameplay.
Nice music :)