Ludum Dare #40compo

Mutoid

by adrenallen

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.74

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.84

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.29

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.59

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.07

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.22

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.00

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.54

Mutoid

PLAY IT HERE

Description

This game fits the theme by giving players the option to obtain temporary allies via an "antidote" to dead mutants. When an ally is revived via this method, they convert back to being a monster after a small amount of time and come back as an even stronger enemy. The idea was, you can use allies, but the more you have the worse the difficulty.

Everything in this game was created from scratch between 9PM Friday (December 1, 2017) and 9PM Sunday (December 3, 2017).

Controls

- WASD to move
- E to inject antidote into a dead mutant (only green bodies can be revived)
- C to destroy a body (beat to a pulp)
- Mouse to aim, left click to shoot
- P pauses and un-pauses

Screenshots

Issues

- The body beat functionality is extremely timid looking
- Sound effects may be missing from some actions

Completed Features

- Game director-esque feature to send enemies as you progress through the level
- Ability to "revive" dead mutants by pressing E to turn them into an ally soldier (see above *Convert* enemy)
- Ability to "beat" dead bodies. This removes the bodies from the game, so they cannot be consumed by the bagger enemies. See the bagger enemy features listed under planned features for more details on why this was originally added.
- Blocking objects in road
- Scrolling map
- Finale event
- Game win, lose, and main menu screens
- 4 enemy types
- Basic Mutant
- These are the slow green guys that waddle around
- Bagger
- A bug like enemy that devours bodies to become stronger. See below for his original plan.
- Snek
- A snake like monster that fires spit at you. He will attack from range unless he is within a certain distance.
- Convert
- A revived ally will "convert" back into a monster after a random amount of time(he has tentacles burst through his stomach)
- Allies that follow you around, including aiming their gun where they shoot
- Animations for anything and everything
- Medkits spawn randomly, pickup for health
- *TurboGun/ChainGun* pickup, greatly increases the rate of fire for a number of bullets
- Score tracking and distance tracking
- Sound effects for various actions and enemies

Planned features that did not make it

- More objects to spawn in the road (some bullet blocking and some explosive)
- Map was supposed to stop scrolling when the director "fired" events, but it was causing some weird jerkiness if you were standing on the right side when the scroll was re-enabled. Therefore I just removed the temporary scroll locks and the lock only occurs during the finale.
- Bagger evolution implementation
- The bagger enemy (Guy that steals bodies) is supposed to morph into a stronger aggressive enemy when he gathers so many bodies. His default behavior is to gather bodies and escape off screen, returning later as a stronger enemy based on the number of bodies he gathered. His escape behaviour is disabled so that he can be found and killed due to the second version of him not being complete.
- Atleast one boss
- The finale DOES exist, you CAN win the game if you get to it and kill everything. Originally there were going to be two bosses, however time did not allow for that to happen.
- Local score tracking/leaderboard
- Random events throughout level progression (i.e. helicopter crash with upgrades)
- Better variety of weapon pickups
- Try out reloading mechanism

Technical details

This was my first ever Game Jam, and it was awesome! I opted for the Compo to challenge myself and force more creativity by exploring every aspect of game dev (sounds I'm looking at you).

I created this using CraftyJS (http://craftyjs.com/). I had never used this library prior to this game, so I lost some time learning it, but what's the point of the LD if not to learn?

http://sfbgames.com/chiptone was used for sfx creation. Great tool for quick sounds.

http://soundtrap.com was used for creating the background music.

I used Piskel (https://www.piskelapp.com/) to create all of my sprites. It did a fantastic job and was a life saver.

GIMP was used at the end to create quick single images (i.e. box/car objects, menus, and logo)

Github is obviously hosting the code, the game can be played directly at https://adrenallen.github.io/ld40/

Genres: action

Tools: ChipTone, GIMP, Piskel

Comments24

Luxorix Games4 Dec 2017, 12:32

Very nice! 151m left)

wsKilljoy4 Dec 2017, 12:36

Quite fun! I like the art and sound. However, the game is very blurry, and wavers in and out of sharpness.

Adrenallenauthor4 Dec 2017, 13:12

@wskilljoy The blurriness stems from my mistake of trying to keep the total game pixels small. I knew I wanted to do a 16x16 character, what I didn't consider was how small the game viewport would be in that case. Next time I will draw everything larger and scale it down to have the same effect without causing it to be blurry. Thanks for the feedback!

meatpudding4 Dec 2017, 13:34

Great game. Keeps getting better.

fashionbatman5 Dec 2017, 23:36

This was fun. The game escalated very quickly and it was surprising. Good job.

Tim Eriksen5 Dec 2017, 23:38

Cool game! I like the different types of enemies :) The artwork could perhaps use some polishing and the sounds should in my opinion be a bit more varied. But for the short timeframe I must say I am impressed with how well it plays!

Abilean6 Dec 2017, 00:42

Great first submission. Its a lot of fun and I didn't read your post before playing it... so the snake was a huge (but good) surprise. A lot of content for the Compo. The one suggestion I would have would be to make the cars and boxes block bullets.

WoooWooo6 Dec 2017, 01:18

Quite good, though the snakes were super tough! Couldnt get past them.

batmanasb6 Dec 2017, 01:29

Nice concept, you need allies but your allies are also a liability! But the difficulty scale is a bit high and it would be nice if you could hold a key to revive instead of tapping it while trying to walk over the tiny bodies.

KunoNoOni6 Dec 2017, 01:37

That was really cool. really enjoyed the music, also liked the animation for destroying the bodies. The controls were tight and responsive. Well done!

IllaBom6 Dec 2017, 01:44

Good concept the art is little blurry at times and good use some polishing but overall very nice!

Check out my game if you would like!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected

LimeniusTeam6 Dec 2017, 14:58

The game is fun, the idea is simple but you had time to introduce a few actions that add some variation. Good work! Especially taking into account that it was your first one and you chose Combo. Well done.

Ham and Swiss6 Dec 2017, 16:12

Awesome! Really simple but effective graphics. I really like mini pixel characters.
Great job on the monsters, those guys that come out and eat corpses are creepy, and then the sneks show up and it gets real. Good job.

tulipekoni6 Dec 2017, 17:04

nice entry! Best tactic is to kill the current wave before going to the next one ;-) record 346ft

Noxbuds6 Dec 2017, 17:48

Interesting idea. Antidote felt a bit slow when you had multiple dead zombies, and the background art felt like it didn't quite match the characters. But it was quite fun, and I liked the idea of building up your team, but they have a chance to mutate and kill you. Good job:)

unfinished6 Dec 2017, 18:01

This is a fun game :). Damn these snakes are hard. I finally managed to kill a few of these bastards :). Great game!

Rongo Matane6 Dec 2017, 18:07

Good game, feels quite completed. The music is moody, the controls are tight and i really like the animations. I wasn't sure when "waves" would spawn - at first only when i moved, later it seemed to happen all the time. Good job :)

lexi6 Dec 2017, 18:16

Fun game! Initially I didn't like the graphics too much, but they kind of grew on me. I especially thought the animations were pretty nicely done.

The controls also feel really good.

I wasn't quite sure whether something triggered my allies mutating. Adding some sort of trigger would have been cool I think, but that's debatable.

Byron Bowen8 Dec 2017, 03:00

I like the antidote mechanic. The one thing that's stopping me from playing this game more is the really fast difficulty scaling. It felt good for half a second to finally kill the three snake guys, and then six more instantly appear. IMO you should just drag it all out longer - smaller numbers of mutants for a while, then one snake, etc.

Fahim Faysal8 Dec 2017, 06:09

The core mechanic is very interesting. I do think that there should be an indicator before your allies start transforming. maybe a color transition.

Graphics are good considering that this was made for the compo. The animations are nice and the sound effects are satisfying.

I think you have a good game to build up on here.This would work really well as a roguelike survival game. It'd be interesting to see how you improve on this.

Flubz14 Dec 2017, 04:13

I love games of this genre. Your interpretation of the theme is brilliant, but I will say it needs some balancing having 3-4 squad mates is risky enough! Having anymore is just asking for trouble. Does the game have a winning strategy? The graphics are quite good, lovely animations and I do like the audio. Overall brilliant game, well done! :clap:

Artur Hawkwing14 Dec 2017, 04:38

This was quite fun. Just as I got ~160 feet, I was thinking "this is too easy"...and then fire-breathing snakes killed me! It was surprising and fun to see the swarms of enemies, and became quite challenging at the end. Nice job!

Adrenallenauthor17 Dec 2017, 20:26

@illabom @wskilljoy I have updated the submission to have all graphics scaled up 3x. I did this on the actual graphics side, so all the logic had to be tweaked to accommodate. Give it another shot now, graphics are much clearer.