Lethal Reflection
This game is from the old Ludum Dare platform. You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive
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I struggled with this theme, in the end I decided to focus on the connected part and interpreted it as "everything in the world is connected".
I ended up making a shooter and attempted to link the spawn patterns to the players interactions with the world, thus the player would be connected to the world through their actions.
Unfortunately having the player completely dictate the tempo of the game made it feel a little lifeless, so after iterating to try and find the fun in the game I lost a lot of the connected world nature of it, but there's still some of it in there and as I added more mechanics I tried to add them on the principal of world interactions rather than player interaction.
The game is basically a dual stick shooter, I highly recommend playing with an Xbox 360 controller if you have one, but the game supports keyboard and mouse too if you don't. (the game is entirely balanced around using a controller though, so will be harder to play without - it's also possible to play keyboard only if you don't have a mouse)
As I was trying to keep to the theme the mechanics of this shooter are a little quirky, which unfortunately results in it being pretty brutal if you try to play against how the game wants you to play it!
Anyway, hope people have fun with this, cheers.
--
So after watching a few livestreams of people playing the game I realise it does perhaps warrant a little more explanation.
*spoilers!*
First off, avoid everything; it all hurts.
If you get hurt your ship will recharge health so long as you don't get hit again within 5 seconds.
To score in the game you need to collect the tiny green circles (pickups), you don't get any score from shooting things.
Shooting the blue enemies will give you a score multiplier increasing the value of collecting the pickups from 5 to 10 to 15 to (etc...).
Red enemies are indestructible, just dodge around them.
Any missed shots that hit the wall of the arena will cause the arena to shoot back at you with a fast moving enemy (shooting star).
Any shooting stars that collide with asteroids will be destroyed and will drop pickups.
If you find yourself overwhelmed by shooting stars, stop shooting and just dodge around the enemies for a few seconds, the chaos will abate.
Intentionally spawning shooting stars and causing them to hit asteroids is a great way to increase your score.
By encouraging the player to think about how their interaction with the game world affects the difficulty/scoring opportunities I was hoping to make the player feel "connected" to it.
I ended up making a shooter and attempted to link the spawn patterns to the players interactions with the world, thus the player would be connected to the world through their actions.
Unfortunately having the player completely dictate the tempo of the game made it feel a little lifeless, so after iterating to try and find the fun in the game I lost a lot of the connected world nature of it, but there's still some of it in there and as I added more mechanics I tried to add them on the principal of world interactions rather than player interaction.
The game is basically a dual stick shooter, I highly recommend playing with an Xbox 360 controller if you have one, but the game supports keyboard and mouse too if you don't. (the game is entirely balanced around using a controller though, so will be harder to play without - it's also possible to play keyboard only if you don't have a mouse)
As I was trying to keep to the theme the mechanics of this shooter are a little quirky, which unfortunately results in it being pretty brutal if you try to play against how the game wants you to play it!
Anyway, hope people have fun with this, cheers.
--
So after watching a few livestreams of people playing the game I realise it does perhaps warrant a little more explanation.
*spoilers!*
First off, avoid everything; it all hurts.
If you get hurt your ship will recharge health so long as you don't get hit again within 5 seconds.
To score in the game you need to collect the tiny green circles (pickups), you don't get any score from shooting things.
Shooting the blue enemies will give you a score multiplier increasing the value of collecting the pickups from 5 to 10 to 15 to (etc...).
Red enemies are indestructible, just dodge around them.
Any missed shots that hit the wall of the arena will cause the arena to shoot back at you with a fast moving enemy (shooting star).
Any shooting stars that collide with asteroids will be destroyed and will drop pickups.
If you find yourself overwhelmed by shooting stars, stop shooting and just dodge around the enemies for a few seconds, the chaos will abate.
Intentionally spawning shooting stars and causing them to hit asteroids is a great way to increase your score.
By encouraging the player to think about how their interaction with the game world affects the difficulty/scoring opportunities I was hoping to make the player feel "connected" to it.