Silent Game of Death

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.14
Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.97
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.47
Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.14
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.58
Audio★★★★★★★★★★1.13
Humor★★★★★★★★★★1.67
Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.74
Coolness★★★★★★★★★★72%
This is "Silent Game of Death" the result of my first shot at Ludum Dare. I felt it went okey until 4 hours to the end when I realized I totally forgot about the audio! At that point I still had some major features left to fix so the game simply had a change of name, from "Game of Death" to "Silent Game of Death", oh yeah you probably want to know what it's about!

Silent Game of Death (SGOD) is a top-down shooter, you use the mouse buttons to control most of the action, the left button lets the ship shoot a stream of plasmabullets when held and by holding the right button the player attracts the ship towards the mouse. There is also a small help in case of emergency, press the spacebar and the ship overloads its main battery and lets out a huge energy burst! After letting out a burst the battery must recharge, preventing you too use it too often.

The enemies in this game are no ordinary aliens, since the theme of this was "Evolution" I began to think about using a "Game of Life" simulation as the enemy, your goal is simple, all you have to do is destroy the game of life, when there is no more life you win. The simulation might kill it self after a while, but that's not the points. It's all about speed, destroy all the life and prevent the simulation from evolving to set a new fastest time.

This is not a complete game, there is still a lot to add to it and I will. There is only one map shipping with this game, it contains a couple of "gliders" and some "spinners", after that the maps are randomly generated, but saved to the disk. This means that the next time you play, you can try to set a new high score(fastest time) for that specific map!

Ok, I feel like I covered most of it. Enjoy yourself and try to have fun with my game (even if it has no audio in it).

Joakim Rosenstam

screenshot

Comments27

Thurig27 Aug 2012, 09:33
Great first entry! Nice explosions.
Markavian
Markavian27 Aug 2012, 09:56
Good effort, solid idea. The plasma bullets and explosions look gorgeous, shame about the lack of sound effects. Not sure what murdering the game of life says about evolution, but made me laugh :)
draxov
draxov27 Aug 2012, 11:27
Love the style of it, bit of a steep difficulty curve from 1st to second level, but still enjoyed it :)
SpectreNectar
SpectreNectar27 Aug 2012, 11:33
Clever. I failed to work out my score though. It was like 59:59:99
aitorman27 Aug 2012, 11:41
Love it! Very well done graphics and polished gameplay
NatNoBrains27 Aug 2012, 15:13
The lack of audio made it a bit non-atmospheric, but the controls were nice and the graphics were really nice.
Ligh7zIncrement27 Aug 2012, 15:16
Pretty good, the bullet effects and bombs were amazing!
pekuja27 Aug 2012, 19:18
The idea seems pretty cool, but it seemed way too easy and got quite boring after a couple of rounds.
josefnpat
josefnpat27 Aug 2012, 19:22
Oh my god, Conway's Game of Life game of life mixed up with a shooter. Fantastic idea!

For some reason the game goes from level 1 to level 12, to level 13. Can you fix that, and repost the game?

I really want to play the other levels!

Shame there's no music thought.
dalbinblue
dalbinblue27 Aug 2012, 19:47
I did like the game, but found it somewhat frustrating that you could nearly clear the board and then get a chain reaction that would fill the board faster than you could stop it. Because of the speed in which things grow, and the mental effort it takes to figure out what the next iteration of Conway's algorithm will produce, I'm not sure a fast paced shooter is the best choice. As more strategic game where you have some more time to plan out a move may be less frustrating, but overall awesome idea.
Citiral27 Aug 2012, 20:11
A neat game, the graphics were pretty good, and it was a very original concept. It did get boring after 5 levels or so, though. It could also have used some audio :)
Spaceoff
Spaceoff27 Aug 2012, 20:15
Graphically very appealing, and a great concept, although pretty much every level from 2 onwards feels the same due to the nature of Conway's Game of Life :/
kyyrma27 Aug 2012, 20:19
Well polished, although music could add a lot to the game. The graphics are nice! The actual game does get repetitive pretty quickly, but still a solid entry.
sirGustav
sirGustav27 Aug 2012, 20:21
I'm actually giving you a 4 stars for audio since in this case silence is a better design then constant sfxr gun sounds. With that said, some tron/daft punk like music would have been since for this kind of look.
SecondDimension
SecondDimension27 Aug 2012, 20:23
Nice controls and visual effects, I definitely like the way it all looks. Feels like this could have turned into something really good with more time
Maxium
Maxium27 Aug 2012, 20:27
Its a shame this has no audio , otherwise cool idea.
Zathalos27 Aug 2012, 20:44
A shooter combined with Conway's algorithm is pretty cool. I with the cubes would transform more slowly. A lot could be done with this kind of idea like more ships and abilities. Overall pretty good.
Pitzik4
Pitzik428 Aug 2012, 02:47
Awesome game! You really made the Game of Life constructs seem more alive to me by having me kill them. They really are systems that can be broken by destroying bits of them!
SaintHeiser28 Aug 2012, 03:24
Ahahahah. I really impressed how you combine "Life" game and TDS. But something looks incompleted. Good job with gameplay and theme. But implementation can be better.
csanyk
csanyk28 Aug 2012, 04:37
Loved this! Too bad about the sound. I hope you add some in later. Please do something about the controls, too. They are very awkward.
TinyPlatypus29 Aug 2012, 11:41
Very nice take on Conway's game of life! The mouse movement is a little slippery but great fun anyway!
tdsmale29 Aug 2012, 11:46
Fantastic!
raarlac29 Aug 2012, 18:07
Great gfx and well polished. nice!
vigrid31 Aug 2012, 15:54
Wow, I would never think of mashing these two games up. Well done! Easily fits the theme, too :) It would be great to see more designed levels, not just random ones after the first. Great work anyway!
BMacIntosh
BMacIntosh8 Sep 2012, 16:58
Uh, I'm not sure how I'm the only one having this problem, but the ZIP won't open for me. I get invalid archive errors in Windows and 7zip. I tried downloading it twice.
everchanger
everchangerauthor10 Sep 2012, 08:39
BMacIntosh that seems really weird, I just tried to download the game again and tried unpacking it with both Windows built-in zip archive opner and 7zip. Both worked over here, I guess there might be something wrong with your 7zip installation, what OS are you on? Thanks for trying to try my game :)
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