This is my Jam entry. I usually go for Compo but I knew 100% life would be a factor so I figure why stress out. I took my time and a great deal of breaks and you know what, I'm really happy with this entry :)
This is based a bit on an old Intellivision game called "Atlantis", similar to Missile Command.
UPDATE #1: Based on feedback I've adjusted variables for the game balance. Enemies get harder faster now. I've corrected a few bugs such as how much damage was being done when impacted by an enemy (bad math). Also the Game Over screen takes 3 seconds before you can click so you don't just auto startover if spamming clicks. Same on the start screen. Hitboxes are more forgiving than they were.
Detail: The object of the game is to shoot down enemy's that are hurtling toward your city. Why are they doing this? They crave your power, or something like that. You must manage your power usage throughout. As you fire, power is consumed. Power is also what protects your city from the invaders so as you use power be careful not to run out. You can get power packs that randomly spawn from enemies to regain some of your reserves. If you stop shooting you'll recharge but at a slow rate. Enemies that make it through the shield will reduce your power and prevent recharging for about 1 seconds (firing your weapons also initiate a 1 second recharge delay). If you manage to get your power above 100%, you'll start to do more damage with your weapons as well. But be careful, the more power you have the more enemies will spawn ;)
The more enemies you kill the more of them will spawn. At level 4, their speed increases and their hit points as well. This will happen with each level after and there is no technical level cap, I've managed to get to Level 8.
There are a great deal of features I wanted to add but ran out of time but like I said, I'm really happy with this one and think I accomplished all of my "Must Haves".
Tools:
Unity/C#
Paint.Net
Bfxr.exe (sound)
Bosca Ceoil (music)
With the exception of that lovely shield, all Art from Kenney.nl.
There is a WebGL version and it should work fine in this game. Previously I mistakenly used the right mouse button for input and realized when it was too late that Mac users and Touchpad users were basically left unable to play. This time around the controls are hopefully much better:
Fire Left Cannon: Control's Fire 1 button, Left Mouse Button, or Keyboard "A"
Fire Right Cannon: Control's Fire 2 button, Right Mouse Button, or Keyboard "D"
Don't like the sound? Press Keyboard "M" to Mute it and press it again to turn it back on! Escape to Quit (Windows Version).
TIP 1: Aim where your target is going to be rather than where it is. You have to lead your targets.
TIP 2: You can fire both cannons at the same time and can even hold the button down for auto fire but don't run out of power!
It's a pretty cool game, it's hard on the beginning to known how to gain more power, but it's fun to play (i'm terrible at aiming the little spaceships xD)
this game was really good, it was really well balanced unlike alto of the other games. it was hard enough for me to be able to play for a long time but not too difficult that it didn't just want to make me give up. well done.
Fun game. One problem I encountered was that there is no penalty for having enemies hit your base.(If you took some energy damage as if they were running into your shields I think that would be good.) Secondly, I didn't like how after a game over if you click one too many times you skip the Game Over screen and stuff.
I like the left cannon / right cannon concept, makes it much more interesting to think about than if there were only one cannon. Aiming was difficult at first but I got used to shooting a little ahead of the enemies, and managed to get the hang of it. Some more variation in sound and graphics would've been nice, but for the rest, nice game!
One note:I saw in the description that there was music, but didn't hear any music (HTML5 version, & did hear sound effects), so will refrain on rating audio for now.
@Caleb-reinagel Thanks for the feedback! It actually does remove energy as they hit. It is a calculation based off how many hit points they had left. Crash Damage = 1% * Hit Points. Then that is removed from your energy pool. However you have energy regen too so in the early game it isn't as noticeable but the further into the game you get the enemies get faster, get more hit points, and there are more of them. So eventually letting them hit is detrimental. If you let them hit you'll notice your energy does go down. I should probably reduce regen or increase the damage though so it is more apparent. I noticed the Game Over screen not stilling up there too when I was playing it a second ago. I think I must not of saved the with my cooldown code in place. It should wait 5 seconds before allowing clicks.
@pilly Thanks to you as well! Regarding music, it is only on the title screen. I can hear it on my end in Firefox and Chrome. There is a Mute feature, perhaps you pressed "M", if you can't hear it on the title screen still, try pressing M to see if that takes care of it. I had music on the main game but it was too repetitive and clashed with the other sounds. Definitely needs to be added later. Yep, you need to lead them. I had the bullets going faster so it wasn't as necessary but that felt too easy so I changed it. Definitely more sound and graphics (original ones too) need added. I had planned for additional weapons, an animated shield, animations for destructions, etc... but I had to those features for the jam.
Very nice gameplay, kept me busy for a while. Has an addictive note. Became better when I realized that I can hold button rather than click, and that I can fire both at same time. Puts self control to the test as falling into rage and bursting around will often result in no enemies destroyed. Enemy complexity is on a decent level, shooting their droppings is fun. Graphics is good enough except I wish cannons themselves would look a bit better. It is very annoying that the game restarts right after you're dead if you were spamming click at the time, so you can't see your score, a 2 seconds pause there (not accepting input) would be great. GJ, solid casual.
@kr4ft3r Thanks for the feedback. When I'm home later I will check the code for the game over screen because others have mentioned it too. There should be a 5 second delay on that screen but I'm guessing it didn't get saved (unity crashed on me in the final hours)
The gameplay was solid and I had a lot of fun with the game for a while. I liked the use of the mouse and the controls were really straight forward. It was hard not spamming the mouse buttons because you really wanted to hit the enemy ships and rocks but you need to be careful as to not use all of the power.
Adding some sort of powerup would amplify the gameplay but as is this game was a nice entry. Good job!
The concept is really simple, yet it requires good multitasking. Well done !
If I may suggest, don't play the "alert" sound on loop, but rather only once every 30 seconds. If you absolutly want a constant cue so the player knows his energy is low, make it a visual cue so you can ignore it.
Otherwise, nice game overall. As was said above, it does get repetitive quite fast, especially seeing how forgiving the game is of spam. It's very easy to just missile barrage the whole screen and hit all enemies and collect all the bounties at the same time. Maybe the power absorbed by each shot should increase with a "heat" value ? Not sure.
I feel this is a very simple game mechanic that can get quite deep if applied correctly. Currently I couldn't really notice if the flying objects had any urgency that it would destroy my base so it feels a tad gimmicky that me taking action against these objects is what actually consumes power.
Thanks for all the feedback! I totally agree with everything said so far. Regarding being too easy, I think I messed up my math on that one, it should be reducing by 1% per hit point left on the enemy that collided with the base but I think what is actually happening (haven't looked at code yet, going on memory) is that it is probably reducing by a percent of the power left. So if an enemy has 4 hit points when it collides it should remove 4 points from the power but I bet what I actually coded in such a way that if I have 50% power rather than ending up with 46% power I bet I'm at 48% (4% of 50 is 2 rather than 4 that I want to get rid of). At that rate, in the early game your Power Regeneration is going to be able to overcome that. I bet I'm doing the same thing with the bullets as they should be reducing power per use as well.
All that said, when you get into higher level it should start to be more noticeable as the enemies get more hit points, move faster, and you have more of them on screen. Levels are increase based on how many enemies you kill, which is always double the last level requirement and I believe I have level 1 set at 5 enemies to advance.
Warning sound definitely needs toned down, not looped, removed, something. It was a last minute addition when a play tester told me they had no idea they were about out of power.
Positive stuff : - The Graphics looked good (shame you didn't want any rating ) - The simple controls felt intuitive - The energy recharge mechanic instead of a finite amount
Negative stuff : - The lack of music (it would improve the mood to have at least some in the background)
Quite solid, i really dig the "old computer game" vibe this one has the space physics where you have to take into account trajectory when aiming was a nice touch as well as independant controls for left and right turrets
@nokusu thanks! Regarding graphics, it was a jam entry and this time around I used assets from Kenney.nl so he'd deserve the credit for those. I agree background music would much improve it
I don't know why I found really hard to hit the targets, perhaps it was so long that I played missile command. Anyway, good job, very nice. I don't know if you tried different configurations of speed and enemy health, perhaps this one wasn't the most fun. Perhaps a Difficulty selection could be interesting?
@elmismopancho i did try other speeds, this seemed best for my play testers. I do like the idea of difficulty settings, I'll add that to my to-do list!
Not really my kind of game, but it was well executed. I found that not knowing how many health points the enemies have make me spam a lot of bullets just to be sure, which is a bit sad in a game where you are supposed to try to keep your energy consumption to the minimum. Maybe some indication of health on the enemy ships would help. Good work anyway.
Ah, really like this game. Simple but great and challenging in many ways. Think I got to level 5 or 6 at on my best run.
The shoot-sound though almost made me crazy though. Put a random pitch on it or something so it doesn't get so repetative. Great job, really well done.
Please have a look at our game as well, we're below the scoring score! :disappointed:
Basic, but fun concept. The slow movement of the projectiles adds a nice element as you have to carefully lead your targets. I did find the random satellites that pop out of some enemies to be a little odd, as I was never sure if it was random or if I was just missing some pattern.
Good concept. It was to be awesome to see your own graphics, but it was cool, I like those kenney assets. The sounds was nice. The menu music was so nice, better than mine ! It was so hard to shhot enemies, the bullets was too slow. I dont know if it's due to my intel HD graphic card which reduces the frame rate. Otherwise, good work on it even if it needs more polish !
I didn't really get the point of two cannons at first, but it became apparent very quickly when I had to chose to shoot an enemy going across one cannon's line-of-site but into the other's. It's actually pretty genius.
Really the first criticism to come to mind is to make the power aspect a bit more obvious. Some GUI improvements could help with that.
Comments37
One note:I saw in the description that there was music, but didn't hear any music (HTML5 version, & did hear sound effects), so will refrain on rating audio for now.
@pilly Thanks to you as well! Regarding music, it is only on the title screen. I can hear it on my end in Firefox and Chrome. There is a Mute feature, perhaps you pressed "M", if you can't hear it on the title screen still, try pressing M to see if that takes care of it. I had music on the main game but it was too repetitive and clashed with the other sounds. Definitely needs to be added later. Yep, you need to lead them. I had the bullets going faster so it wasn't as necessary but that felt too easy so I changed it. Definitely more sound and graphics (original ones too) need added. I had planned for additional weapons, an animated shield, animations for destructions, etc... but I had to those features for the jam.
Great feedback all! Keep it coming :)
Adding some sort of powerup would amplify the gameplay but as is this game was a nice entry. Good job!
The concept is really simple, yet it requires good multitasking. Well done !
If I may suggest, don't play the "alert" sound on loop, but rather only once every 30 seconds. If you absolutly want a constant cue so the player knows his energy is low, make it a visual cue so you can ignore it.
Otherwise, nice game overall. As was said above, it does get repetitive quite fast, especially seeing how forgiving the game is of spam. It's very easy to just missile barrage the whole screen and hit all enemies and collect all the bounties at the same time. Maybe the power absorbed by each shot should increase with a "heat" value ? Not sure.
Great entry :)
Feel free to check our game out : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/berzerk-hunt We need some criticism too !
All that said, when you get into higher level it should start to be more noticeable as the enemies get more hit points, move faster, and you have more of them on screen. Levels are increase based on how many enemies you kill, which is always double the last level requirement and I believe I have level 1 set at 5 enemies to advance.
Warning sound definitely needs toned down, not looped, removed, something. It was a last minute addition when a play tester told me they had no idea they were about out of power.
Keep the feedback coming!
Positive stuff :
- The Graphics looked good (shame you didn't want any rating )
- The simple controls felt intuitive
- The energy recharge mechanic instead of a finite amount
Negative stuff :
- The lack of music (it would improve the mood to have at least some in the background)
Quite solid, i really dig the "old computer game" vibe this one has the space physics where you have to take into account trajectory when aiming was a nice touch as well as independant controls for left and right turrets
Good job overall ! :)
Positives -
Easy to pickup game
Graphicly looked nice and clean
Felt polished
Negative stuff :
Maybe just some background music.
The shoot-sound though almost made me crazy though. Put a random pitch on it or something so it doesn't get so repetative. Great job, really well done.
Please have a look at our game as well, we're below the scoring score! :disappointed:
Really the first criticism to come to mind is to make the power aspect a bit more obvious. Some GUI improvements could help with that.