Ludum Dare #37compo
Alien Night
Please read the description or the game will probably be confusing for you!
In this game you have to destroy Alien portals in order to advance through the 3 levels while defending your spawn room.
Aliens spawn at the portals every 25 turns and go straight for the room that you spawned in. You lose if your health reaches 0 OR if alien touches the spawn point (you could say that you have to defend one room, eh?). Also you can regenerate health if at the end of the turn you are standing on spawn point.
I'd rather see you finish easier game than not finish at all so if you feel that the game is a bit too hard you can modify maps to include less spawners. Or you can delete all of them and just add pre-spawned aliens that you have to kill to advance. Or do something else! You can even make the game harder for yourself if you wish :P
Legend:
@ - player
A - alien
_ - dead alien (destroy it's body to gain some points)
O - portal
X - aim
. - aiming range
Controls:
WASD - movement
Spacebar - start/stop aiming
Tab - change weapon
Enter - fire/skip turn
Escape - go back to menu
Map editing:
first line has x and y size of the map
O - spawner
A - already spawned alien
anything else is empty space
If the game launches but you can't get out of menu please first cd into the directory the binary is in and only then launch the game!
In this game you have to destroy Alien portals in order to advance through the 3 levels while defending your spawn room.
Aliens spawn at the portals every 25 turns and go straight for the room that you spawned in. You lose if your health reaches 0 OR if alien touches the spawn point (you could say that you have to defend one room, eh?). Also you can regenerate health if at the end of the turn you are standing on spawn point.
I'd rather see you finish easier game than not finish at all so if you feel that the game is a bit too hard you can modify maps to include less spawners. Or you can delete all of them and just add pre-spawned aliens that you have to kill to advance. Or do something else! You can even make the game harder for yourself if you wish :P
Legend:
@ - player
A - alien
_ - dead alien (destroy it's body to gain some points)
O - portal
- wall
! - spawn pointX - aim
. - aiming range
Controls:
WASD - movement
Spacebar - start/stop aiming
Tab - change weapon
Enter - fire/skip turn
Escape - go back to menu
Map editing:
first line has x and y size of the map
- walls
! - spawn pointO - spawner
A - already spawned alien
anything else is empty space
If the game launches but you can't get out of menu please first cd into the directory the binary is in and only then launch the game!
Comments26
It took a bit to understand what I was doing, but I did finally understand it.
I didn't like the fact that canceling commands would also count as a turn, so if I accidentally left aiming mode, the enemies would all have their turns. I also wasn't too sure if I was doing it wrong, but I couldn't shoot diagonally or one position above me like the enemies were doing.
Congrats on getting it done within 48 hours though dude :)
Anyway I like the original graphics of it :) not easy to find something like this nowadays.
I would also like to point out a bug with a granade - I tried throwing one and it kept flying for eternity and never actually landed so I had to close the game and start over (please, fix that :) )
You have also captured the theme very nicely.
Now if you excuse me, I have to kill some aliens :D
Good job :)
@thedashdude
The different weapons and planning where to go makes it a strategic game, which is fun to play. I'm sure this has potential and can be extended very well.
While the animations look great, they really slow the game down and makes it tedious to play.
It's interesting to see, that you have used a square for range calculation, but I think there is no problem with that.
I guess I could have read the instructions better, but I thought that 'X' was the button I was supposed to press for fire starting aiming.
It would have been nice to have a modal legend that let you know what you were seeing only when you were seeing it in game. I did like the modal aspect of the aiming itself.
In the same vein, it would have been very nice if player, non-player turn was visible somehow in game since non-player turn took a little while (possibly change floor-tiles and/or player).
"_" wasn't explained, and I kind of wanted to loot it but there was no looting. I did get that it was dead alien though, but should probably be included.
When it comes to feedback, whenever health changed it would be good to flash it. Took me a while to notice I was getting hit. And here it would also be good if there was a feedback on hit. E.g. change background color temporarily. Also when hitting walls. After playing I wasn't clear on if all shots hit or if there was some chance involved.
On difficulty, because there were many things to get acquainted with, it started out too hard. I barely made it out of the room I started in. Downed a handful of aliens, but I would recommend first level be much much smaller and easier, so that you give the player a sense of progress and investment until you start to really corner and challenge them.
I died without understanding why, as others' have reported.
That was a long post of thoughts. Don't mistake them for me not liking the game though. I did like where it was heading!