The initial goal was to create a game where your minions would've been your only weapons. You should've been able to sacrifice them to kill your enemies minions. Due to bad planning and a lack of scope it became a simple "kill those things" game.
Your objective now is to locate and kill the skulls by digging a path to them and then safrifice one of your minions to kill them.
I wanted to submit nonetheless just for the voting spirit and because I'm a bit proud of the graphics. So please, tell me how awful it is. ;)
PS: Flash and Linux only at the moment. The flash version performs horrible. :( Hopefully a HTML5 build can follow. PS2: Source follows soon.
That you for checking it out. I think I've fixed the performance problems somewhat by embedding it in the page, so it runs with a smaller viewport. This speeds up digging a lot as I didn't fixed my timestep this time.
@Horsed You need to mark a valid digging path. On the walls, may you clicked the floor tiles?
some sort of minimap would have done wonders in guiding where my attention was seposed to go.
Its a shame some debug output is still in the game as well. It looks like the basis for something cool but the game isn't giving me enough to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing.
There does seem potential for more. I was never able to find a single skeleton. I do like how the dig is queued up and the minions are able to complete the digging on their own. The programming for that must have been interesting.
The skeletons are actually hidden on the 4 edges of the world, so the game is pretty easy to beat. It lacks any challenge, so I'm not too sad for those who exit early. I would've done the same. :)
I still have to look into the availability issue. I guess it is caused by a DNS change I did a few months back.
@inappropriatebeeguin: I implemented a minimap but dropped it, because it felt useless. May with 4 markers for the skulls, it would've helped.
@Larry: I think I'm going to write something about in in the entries post-mortem. The current behavior is pretty simple. When no task is assigned, each minions iterates through the list of open tasks and search for one it could reach (pathfind to), then it assigns itself to this task and start moving towards it. Since it doesn't search for the closest one, this could lead to interessting behaviors.
It took me a while to figure out how to do anything, but once I figured it out this was pretty cool. I definitely liked the graphics and the concept seems solid. Please keep working on this!
It's reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper. I realized I needed to collect a few of the enemies in the same area in order to kill them with fewer minions. The game was slower-paced than I would like, as it took awhile to search for them while scrolling around, and then another long time to find the minions again.
So was the digging working yet? Or maybe I couldn't figure it out :P But The looks of the game do set I nice theme, I like the dungeon keepery vibe of controlling minions :)
The art was cool though so I'll rate for that. :P