First game! Great Time! Submitting at less than five minutes left!!
EDIT: Whew, I'm glad we can edit our submission notes... and that we have a submission hour!(should've read the rules more carefully) Anyways, this is my game. You, the teal cube, must avoid the enemy cubes and get to the victory cube. The game is isometric. You only have one moment to move, or else the game moves for you. In other words, every moment in the game, you have to repeatedly press the key of the direction you want to move in. You'll understand when you play it. Oh, and no holding down the arrow keys either. Let's just say right now, after the past day of rapid coding and testing this, my fingers are so tired, there's no way I could beat it. I have made sure it is technically beatable though.
If you find the game frustrating(as I do) and want to "save" your progress, you can modify the level_1.png file under "lib/levels/". Simply move the red pixel to the last place you were at.
The game is coded in Ruby with the Gosu game programming library and the chunky_png library for reading level data from png files.
I'll see what my options are for distributing mac and linux binaries and add them later. If you have ruby installed(1.8.7 might work but 1.9.3 is recommended) you can download the source and run it in place of LD28Takemikazuchi545.exe
Note: Edited Start_screen.png during submission hour to include instructions to press escape to start game. Note2: Edited the lose_screen.png to have clearer instructions on what to do(text: "Protip: Maintain your direction by repeatedly pressing the directional keys". I believe this falls under the "typo bug" exemption as it doesn't change any features.
I've said it before, but a game about awkward controls is no excuse for awkward controls.
The fundamental idea behind this (=player's input gets processed) could've been implemented better in a puzzle sort of way, with some predictability or a way to influence the processing. You'd probably end up making a turn-based game in that case. Right now it's just unplayable.
It's not necessarily about awkward controls, it's more about maintaining a constant rate of input. If you can get around 5 keystrokes a second you can maintain your direction pretty easily. The rest is just reading the enemy paths properly. Is it badly balanced? Yes. Is the control gimmick flawed? Definitely. And the sloppy level design doesn't help. I wouldn't say it's completely unplayable for a lot of people though. I like your idea about making it more puzzle based though. I don't think I'll revisit this concept, but if I do I'll keep that in mind.
Ok, that was a good idea, but playing it, was too annoying. Maybe that is because I lose because the computer moves my character, it doesn't feel as if I'm the problem, it feels like the computer is the problem.
Maybe if there is more time between the computer moves so you can think about the right strategy and computer opponents that move in more predictable ways, would make the game feel less like a random loss.
Comments9
Too bad I'm terrible at it :(
I'll keep trying though!
The fundamental idea behind this (=player's input gets processed) could've been implemented better in a puzzle sort of way, with some predictability or a way to influence the processing. You'd probably end up making a turn-based game in that case. Right now it's just unplayable.
It's not necessarily about awkward controls, it's more about maintaining a constant rate of input. If you can get around 5 keystrokes a second you can maintain your direction pretty easily. The rest is just reading the enemy paths properly. Is it badly balanced? Yes. Is the control gimmick flawed? Definitely. And the sloppy level design doesn't help. I wouldn't say it's completely unplayable for a lot of people though. I like your idea about making it more puzzle based though. I don't think I'll revisit this concept, but if I do I'll keep that in mind.
Maybe that is because I lose because the computer moves my character, it doesn't feel as if I'm the problem, it feels like the computer is the problem.
Maybe if there is more time between the computer moves so you can think about the right strategy and computer opponents that move in more predictable ways, would make the game feel less like a random loss.
But I certainly like the way the game looks.