Make the entire screen black by moving around it while the enemies attempt to undo your work. You can kill them, but if you try and miss you'll get a 5s penalty.
Arrows move. Space eats/attacks. Shift pauses. Ctrl slows player movement down (for getting those pesky single-pixel lines). S toggles music.
There's a bit of a slowdown issue due to the way the win-state is calculated. This can be mostly avoided if you leave some space uncolored near the top-left until near the end of the game.
My first LD. I got lucky with the idea for this one. "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones came on Spotify shortly after the theme was released and that's where the idea came from.
Great idea, nice game... I didn't manage to play it through cause it starts to lag after a while (i guess you draw rectangle of textures on every move - this must be optimized)
Aleksandar - That problem was actually a lot worse previously, though I know it still causes issues. It can be avoided if you leave something near the top-left corner open for most of the game, since the major culprit is the loop to check for the win-condition, which works from top-left to bottom right.
I got the lag thing that others mentioned, at about 5 minutes. It was fun before that - I don't know that there's any strategy other than killing all the white guys first and then sweeping out the black, which takes a while. I found that I didn't have great control over my guy, but it was fun to play. Definitely minimalist!
Dietrich, the first link, the .ccgame, shouldn't require an installer, I believe. It'll unpack the files (kinda works like another zip file), but shouldn't need an install.
Let me know if I'm wrong about that though; I don't have another computer to test it on to check, and this is my first time trying to distribute a game from XNA.
Sorry about that, frog. As soon as final exams are done, I'm hoping to look into moving my game to Monogame and hopefully being able to export Linux/OSX versions. Unfortunately, that's still 4-5 days away, unless I can squeeze in the porting amid studying over the weekend.
So, killing the blobs is actually really important, and once I'd figured that out... it was fun, for a time, but then it got really dull again because then I had to paint over the entire map.
Nice mechanics. It was a bit of a pain to get the last pixels, becaus the game started to run extremely slow from one moment to the other. I had just 1/4 stripe left, so I dont think its about the drawing. It seemed so start bugging out, as the music stopped. Maybe restarting the audio-track caused the problems. However, I liked it. Good entry!
There's a neat idea here somewhere, but in practice, I didn't see it on display here.
I have to ask--is there any reason to NOT attack the enemies? Because I immediately started running over the enemies while spamming the spacebar to get rid of them all as soon as possible, which I did. But then I wonder--why require you to press spacebar? Why can't they just be killed by me touching them?
And then I'm left with a board of white which I then, line by line, have to paint black. This is very, very boring, at least to me. Same reason I didn't care much for Farming Simulator 2013 (though I know others did). It wouldn't be any better if there were still enemies--it would just be frustrating on top of tedious.
I'm sure something could be done with leaving trails and enemies/player affecting each other's trails, but just painting the screen doesn't work well at all, in my opinion.
The reason you're required to press the space bar is because missing an enemy incurs a time penalty. Removing that aspect would ruin that part.
And yeah, it is fairly boring after you clear them out. That was something that I realized about halfway through development, but never did come up with a fix for. Part of me wanted to break this up into various levels and throw in some obstacles or new enemy types, and part of me thought implementing an online leaderboard would at least provide incentive to beat other people, but I didn't have time for either of those to be implemented, unfortunately.
So, I can't blame you for getting bored. My main goal here was to finish. This was my first Ludum Dare, my second game, and my first game made with graphics or with XNA; so I just told myself to get something done.
Thank you very much for taking the time to play it though, and thanks for the critique as well.
And actually, I just thought of another mechanic that might have made this game much more bearable. Oh well; too late.
I think everything has been said. Nice at first, then it becomes a lawnmowing-like experience. I hope "Sympathy for the Devil" will be your next LD title, could be a great game ;)
I agree with everything on the boringness/lawnmowing. Personally, I would have made it so that you only have to paint something like 80% black, and randomly spawned new enemies throughout the game. I also thought touching them and then pressing space was a rather boring way to kill them.
The graphics are oddly very good looking in their simplicity.
Combat was neat, and the chunks of black being erased looked neat, but after defeating enemies it was too tedious. Perhaps taking out combat and making winning be based on how much you can get black, or keep black.
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Aleksandar - That problem was actually a lot worse previously, though I know it still causes issues. It can be avoided if you leave something near the top-left corner open for most of the game, since the major culprit is the loop to check for the win-condition, which works from top-left to bottom right.
Let me know if I'm wrong about that though; I don't have another computer to test it on to check, and this is my first time trying to distribute a game from XNA.
I like the concept tho, If it was a bit more challenging I would enjoy it for longer.
Good job!
Great job on your first Ludum Dare! (It was my 1st time too!)
I have to ask--is there any reason to NOT attack the enemies? Because I immediately started running over the enemies while spamming the spacebar to get rid of them all as soon as possible, which I did. But then I wonder--why require you to press spacebar? Why can't they just be killed by me touching them?
And then I'm left with a board of white which I then, line by line, have to paint black. This is very, very boring, at least to me. Same reason I didn't care much for Farming Simulator 2013 (though I know others did). It wouldn't be any better if there were still enemies--it would just be frustrating on top of tedious.
I'm sure something could be done with leaving trails and enemies/player affecting each other's trails, but just painting the screen doesn't work well at all, in my opinion.
Visuals were fine and music was good, though.
And yeah, it is fairly boring after you clear them out. That was something that I realized about halfway through development, but never did come up with a fix for. Part of me wanted to break this up into various levels and throw in some obstacles or new enemy types, and part of me thought implementing an online leaderboard would at least provide incentive to beat other people, but I didn't have time for either of those to be implemented, unfortunately.
So, I can't blame you for getting bored. My main goal here was to finish. This was my first Ludum Dare, my second game, and my first game made with graphics or with XNA; so I just told myself to get something done.
Thank you very much for taking the time to play it though, and thanks for the critique as well.
And actually, I just thought of another mechanic that might have made this game much more bearable. Oh well; too late.
I hope "Sympathy for the Devil" will be your next LD title, could be a great game ;)
The graphics are oddly very good looking in their simplicity.