Forget natural selection, it's time for *ninjural* selection! Wield the power of life and death to guide the evolution of your little invaders. Run, jump, slide, and wall-jump around while you shoot invaders to cull the herd or punch and kick eggs out of them and watch them multiply.
*The updated version actually has a goal now! Please check it out and let me know what you think!*
Quite fun to move around in but as you mentioned in your post there's no goal. Without any challenge or goal it gets boring kind of quick, with further development this could be sweet.
You may have an objective in mind but I have a suggestion if you don't. Since they're always falling towards the bottom maybe there could be a place to protect and a place to damage on the bottom. That would keep the player blasting dudes who were wandering near the protected area and punching out babies to land on the attack area. Reminds me of a pachinko machine full of monsters. I also really like the charging effect, good indication
Very fun and polished. Its a shame there isn't an overarching goal to drive the player, but I can't really think of one and this is a fun little time sync
Any game with ninjas is cool. Reminded me a lot of that game mode by the guy who created flixel. Music a tad hectic. Too many enemies for me to get too far. Can you finish a level, or do you just keep fighting until you die?
Very well done (5 stars for all), but sometimes I loose the character. Maybe, will be better if it will be a bit larger? Music is awesome, can you please post a link to soundtrack?:)
feels very retro--the sticky walls are really nice. (besides the missing goal) the only thing i would change would be to move punch/kick to a different button--once the board was chock full of bad guys i had a hard time finding free space to open up a can with my guns
Well put together little platformer. Shame I couldn't figure out what to do. I tried killing some things, made a few eggs, not much else seemed possible. It would be nice to see the game get some concrete goals and ideally challenge the player to think a bit more.
i really love the art, remember's me a game i had on my phone, the design is neat and easily handable, really, nice job, can't wait to see an eventual post-LD devellopment :D
Very fluid controls, definitely fun to just running around around and kicking ass. But without an end goal it does get kind of monotonous. Even if you just added an 'asses kicked' score with a timer to encourage kicking the most asses in the shortest time it would add a lot to the game.
Spectacular polish, as well. And I think I saw your post about the character animation being your first - it's very well done, be proud good sir.
I created so many of those creatures, I almost killed my browser. :) It's a very good, playable platformer engine - I wish there was some goal. I really like the minimalistic graphic style.
Wow... That was impressive, I'm really curious to know how you made the game generate so many different creature shapes. I'd love to read about that!
Everything in the game is so small, and yet the animation is so fluid... I certainly like that. The movement was very well-polished but I found the main character's acceleration kinda hard to control... But since there's no way to die, that didn't become a big problem.
Too bad you can hardly say it's a game because there's no goal, I played it for some time trying to make my favorite-looking creatures survive, but got bored fast. This could become quite an addictive game if you worked more on its concept and gave it a goal and rewards.
Fun and sandbox-y, it was fun to wall-jump and slide around, but I agree about the lack of an overall goal. Still, very well rounded and polished for a 48-hour game. Keep it up!
Thanks for all the great feedback, everyone! :D I just updated the post-competition version with faster acceleration, to address the concerns about the controls. I'm still working on adding goals - I wish I could spend all day working on this but I'm supposed to go to my real job now...
Oh, here's the algorithm for creating the creature sprites:
Make a blank white bitmap.
For each pixel on the left half:
If a coin flip is heads: Turn the pixel black. Turn the opposite pixel black on the right half. Flood fill the outside with transparent pixels.
Hmm, the formatting didn't turn out so well on that algorithm. Let me try again...
- Make a blank white bitmap.
- For each pixel on the left half:
- - If a coin flip is heads: - - - Turn the pixel black. - - - Turn the opposite pixel black on the right half. Flood fill the outside with transparent pixels.
- - If a coin flip is heads: - - - Turn the pixel black. - - - Turn the opposite pixel black on the right half. - Flood fill the outside with transparent pixels.
Great game overall. The music is excellent!!! I like the graphics, they feel good and match the music. Could use some sort of scoring system and a time limit maybe to give it a goal. Could distinguish bad ones from good ones somehow, so the player has to shoot the bad ones, and punch the good ones, so that the good ones reproduce.
Brilliant! Really enjoyed playing this game. Very satisfying shooting game. The controls were easy and smooth. Very well put together game. Well done!!
love it, especially the quake effect with the charged shot and the particle effects. it's even more fun to smash your enemies and create new eggs isntead of just killing them
This is fantastic! It does get a little boring without any objective, but the graphics and audio are great. The movement is nice and smooth as well. Nice work.
Pretty interesting, though it got boring quick. Multiplying the creatures didn't seem all that satisfactory, but I really liked the music, and I thought the physics and control was fluid.
I then tried the post-compo ver. Much nicer, but still hard to know what's going on. I would multiply "best", but then "best" would change between 2 creatures instead of to a new one.
Really cool game, has a lot of potential. When I first saw the screenshot of the game, I was certain this is one of those vertical-scrolling "climb-as-high-as-you-can-to-get-a-highscore"-games, in fact, I think that would work pretty well for this and could be a lot of fun. Controls feel really smooth, but being able to hold S instead having to press it repeatedly would be appreciated. While the music is really good, I'm missing some sound effects, like for exploding enemies, shooting, jumping etc... Try Bfxr if you don't know that already.
I love holding down the fire button and charging mega-man style and then firing a giant bullet. Game looks great! Very fun to just move around the environment. I feel it does need some work- some sense of progression and levels to navigate through- but the character (even though he is only a few pixels) is awesome and has a lot of personality. His wall slide- his run- his firing and charge- I love the guy and would love to see this game get developed further. (I did play your further developed game with a goal as well, an improvement but I think it still needs some more.) The environment was rad- very simple but very compelling and stimulating- seeing the bits of platforms off in the background was a nice touch. This is prob. one of my favorites so far! A lot of potential here! very cool
The speedy performance is thanks to the Flixel engine, which is made for this kind of thing (low-res platformers).
I'm definitely going to do something with the nice platformer controls and the character. Mixed with evolution gameplay it's pretty broken, so I might just rip that out if I can't get it to work with some radical changes, but I'm definitely going to do something with the ninja guy...
Not quite sure what the objective is in the post compo but great job!
C
Cake&Code13 Sep 2012, 19:36
At first, yeah, it was a bit boring since I was just walking around a killing things for no reason, but after I started imagining this as a fully fledged experience (with achievements and destinations) it got really interesting.
I challenged myself to kill a certain amount of guys, or to hunt down ones with "horns", or to wall slide for a certain distance. There are just so many possibilities and your update with the target is cool, but please go further! :)
Yes, maybe add a third button for kick/punch. There were a dozen times i accidentally did the opposite of what I intended because I misjudged a distance or something jumped down on me.
A great idea and the excecution makes it fun to play even without a goal. Are those aliens randomly generated? They look nice even when small. The only-a-few-pixels-small hero was great. But the real winner for me was the music. I think the music with the looks and gameplay work great. It just needs some danger and score. I'll play the updated version after the compo (so many to play).
You may have an objective in mind but I have a suggestion if you don't. Since they're always falling towards the bottom maybe there could be a place to protect and a place to damage on the bottom. That would keep the player blasting dudes who were wandering near the protected area and punching out babies to land on the attack area. Reminds me of a pachinko machine full of monsters. I also really like the charging effect, good indication