More of an artificial life simulator than a game. Zenful.
* My original Ludum Dare entry has been replaced by this bugfix 1.1 update. There was a bug in the respawn routine that prevented proper rebirth of the player. While I was fixing the respawn routine, I noticed how I could add a gun to the ship with only two lines of code. The original did NOT have guns, so please only rate the game play before you fire the guns. Then enjoy the guns afterwards as my treat.
The original 1.0 Ludum Dare 24 entry can still be played as a java jar file. Or just play 1.1 without firing the gun.
You are on team red, eat the green plants to stay alive and blue is your enemy. Numbers in the bottom left represent the number of creatures alive, and the highest number of creatures ever. You only have limited health and it constantly drains if you don't eat the green food circles, avoid the blue, and make contact with the other red circles, your buddies. Press "R" to respawn a new ship to control, but keep it alive!
When you turn orange, you are about to die! Get close enough to teammates to harness their life forces. Use the nose of your ship to feed on red or green cells.
When you grow a connection to another cell, and then break that connection, you cannot grow another connection with that cell again. It will ignore you. Watch out for that!
You can manipulate the ship with: WASD - Thrusters ARROW KEYS - move laterally 1,2,3 - change teams R or Menu - new ship Touch and Drag - flick organisms around
Yeah.. about that. I couldn't seem to come up with a goal at all. You could try to achieve a personal high score of most alive at one time. It crashes and needs a restart sometimes when the ship dies off.
hm. can't get it to run on firefox (web version), chrome did it. then i could play for like 10seconds, firing wqild and then the game got stuck? animations got very chunky
Firing wildly will do bad things. Every bullet is a new cell, and each new bullet costs health. Fire sparingly to plant new seed or move the enemy away. There is still problems with the game when you die, so don't do that. If the game crashes, you can always reload the web page to try again.
Pretty cool. I think with a bit more polish, this could be a really cool game.
C
Cake&Code28 Aug 2012, 17:36
Trying to navigate the mess of organisms was fun, but flicking them around with the mouse? Priceless. Breaking them apart and just narrowly avoiding an enemy cluster was awesome. I wish the game had more of theme, since evolving clusters of organisms would have been great! Overall, it was a fun little romp.
Interesting concept. I like the way you "infect" the plants. Controlling the ship is a bit too hard IMHO. I'd end up using the arrow keys almost exclusively.
I also got some weird bug in which the ship disappears but somehow I gain control of a bubble. Only it moves extremely fast. I played version 1.1.
After your ship is lost, press R or MENU to respawn it. Otherwise it unintentionally becomes a fast bubble. Health constantly runs down, firing and touching an enemy worsens it, but sticking the ships nose in a food bubble or red organism will improve it.
There are two seperate controls, arrow keys for lateral movement, and WASD key thrusters. What would make for a better control scheme? I think having the ship drive itself to any touched point might be something fun to try.
I liked the concept. Enjoyed playing the Android version on my phone - I couldn't access all of the movement controls though, but I still managed to get quite a good score anyway at one point. I really liked the vector style graphics. I couldn't get the web version to run.
I like the retro vector graphics. Controls were a bit trickyon Android but it was still quite fun to play with. I agree with comments above that a bit more of a goal to aim for would be good.
Liked the vector graphics. Clusters seemed to explode sometimes ... not sure if this is a feature or a physics stability issue. Android version ran fine until the gun put too many objects on screen, then some slowdown (Galaxy Nexus .. should be able to handle it)
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I also got some weird bug in which the ship disappears but somehow I gain control of a bubble. Only it moves extremely fast. I played version 1.1.