Ludum Dare #43compo

Pigheaded Pirate

by shawn-moore

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.11

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.15

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.96

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.13

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.74

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.39

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.25

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.64

🐷 Play now in your browser! 🏴‍☠️

Pigheaded Pirate is a sidescrolling beat-em-up with a twist: your weapon is your _partner_. Sacrifice them to complete three progressively harder levels for treasure and an important lesson about life, money, and love.

Even though it's a browser based game, you can still use a gamepad. :) The game should take about 15 minutes to get to the end cutscene. My best score is 559.2s, 36 deaths, 39 sacrifices. What's yours?

(Note, this game plays best in Chrome and Firefox. Safari won't play the sound effects)

Built in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 43’s compo theme: Sacrifices must be made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQG4oNJIwn0

I published a postmortem of Pigheaded Pirate!

edit: fixed a physics bug (by simply deleting two lines of code!) and a particularly sticky area of the map

Comments30

Rikun4 Dec 2018, 05:47

Original and very funny game, it will little better if it has bgm, very well :D

Yirggzmb4 Dec 2018, 05:52

An interesting concept! I, alas, don't have time to play through the whole thing at this very moment. But I like what I played.
I find it really interesting that you can use both your partner's and your own life to damage enemies. Kinda makes you think about what kind of person you are. Bit of an odd choice to make the end of level chests damage you, but I assume that's kinda just a side effect of making them an enemy so you can use your partner to open them.

Shawn Mooreauthor4 Dec 2018, 05:59

@Yirggzmb the end cutscene may explain the treasure chest a little more :) you're on the right track though!

Shawn Mooreauthor4 Dec 2018, 06:00

thanks @Rikun! I have never written music before so I ended up not finishing any songs, but it's at the top of my list to practice for next LD! :)

FireSlash4 Dec 2018, 08:56

Mechanically, I found more often than not enemies get stuck together, or the pig head gets stuck on enemies, or some combination of these. The pig head dying also seems to complicate things. In general, I suspect you're fighting the physics engine more than it's helping you.

For future games, you might look into using just a gravity constant with more traditional collision detection. I suspect it'll solve a lot of your problems here.

As for the gameplay, it's weirdly enjoyable to shoot pig heads at things.

Shawn Mooreauthor4 Dec 2018, 09:00

Absolutely right @fireslash. For example I had pixel-perfect collision detection, but that significantly reduced the mass of each object, which in turn affected collisions, which ended up making the game a lot less fun. After sinking an hour or two into it, I realized I could just revert back to rectangular bodies. Definitely a double-edged sword, physics engines are! In the end, at least the pig head rotates fairly accurately. :D

I'm so happy to hear you enjoyed the main mechanic :)

BenBurgh4 Dec 2018, 17:26

Really cool! I loved the goofy aesthetic and theme, it's a really cool exploration of sacrifice as a mutually beneficial relationship. There were several times when we got stuck though, and I died multiple times. With more time than 48 hours to work on this I could see it being really fun!

adventureislands4 Dec 2018, 20:07

Interesting take on the theme, using your own partner as a weapon. I think the game is a bit too reliant on the physics, it's very difficult to get through with few deaths or sacrifices and sometimes enemies just gang up where you spawn killing you instantly again. I think you should make the levels a lot shorter, because they feel like they go on and on and throwing around the partner over and over again gets a little tedious after a while. I am glad death doesn't punish you for dying and doesn't send you back to the start of the level, though.

Shawn Mooreauthor4 Dec 2018, 20:38

Thanks @benburgh and @adventureislands! Nice score!

I think I just fixed a lot of the physics problems by deleting two lines of debug code. :head_bandage:

Shorter levels is a good idea, especially the third one. But hopefully now with that physics fix it's a little less tedious.

BenBurgh4 Dec 2018, 21:19

Oh man there's a third level? The second one went on so long, haha!

BTW, I played your game on stream! The vod is available https://www.twitch.tv/videos/344544405##, this game starts about one hour ten minutes in.

Shawn Mooreauthor5 Dec 2018, 02:33

Thank you so much @benburgh!! I'm glad you liked the humor :)

I agree that levels two and three are too long, but I'm not comfortable making changes to them after the deadline :)

frenchie5 Dec 2018, 07:30

Hah. That ending. My sides! Worth it just for that. I won't spoil it for others :slight_smile: Thank you for giving us infinite lives! At first I got mad that the pig would sometimes get stuck where I couldn't get it without dying but once I realized I could die as many times as I wanted I'd just jump right in! 493.4s, 34 deaths, 24 sacrifices.

Thanks for submitting this game to be on my Play & Improve dev stream. Unfortunately, I'm only doing it for games written in Unity. It would be too hard to learn both a codebase and an engine in one sitting!

Bit5 Dec 2018, 12:31

This game cheered me up. Nothing more to add in regards to feedback. Good stuff.

jihem5 Dec 2018, 18:03

Nice game :-) The only default is having to fight pingouins.
Why? I like Tux! lol

Shawn Mooreauthor5 Dec 2018, 18:39

@frenchie Glad you liked Pigheaded Pirate! :D I think when I saved your submission form you hadn't yet clarified that it was limited to Unity. No worries though.

@bit Hope you feel better buddy

Cannedtuna6 Dec 2018, 02:08

It was a cute game, I started feeling bad for the pig I was throwing around it was tragic. The only thing that bugged me was getting spawn camped by the seahorses every once in a while, but the infinite lives made it not really a problem.

Shawn Mooreauthor6 Dec 2018, 02:12

Thanks @cannedtuna! Yeah if I'd had time for more playtesting I probably would've ended up pushing all the enemies away from the left side of the screen when you respawn. Oh well :)

incobalt6 Dec 2018, 02:28

This was interesting! I think I had a bug where the pig never spawned in happy after a few times. I also found that sometimes you could shove the pig into an enemy instead of throwing and that seemed to do little damage to the pig. I was a bit frustrated at needing to destroy enemies to progress each time, as it felt like I should have been able to just run ahead, but that is probably my perception of the level design (the platforms in the levels looked like ways to avoid enemies).

Shawn Mooreauthor6 Dec 2018, 02:37

@incobalt: The pig's maximum possible happiness goes down by a grade each level, so by the last level you've upset your partner a lot and they're never happy again. The damage also depends on how hard the impact was, so I'm not surprised that shoving did only little damage :) The platforms were intended to make slightly more dynamic combat situations rather than just a single ground area. Finally, I modeled my game off of old school beat em ups which typically require you to defeat all enemies to proceed between each area, but I appreciate a lot of modern games give the player more choice. Glad to hear you thought it was interesting, thanks for playing! :D

kantieno6 Dec 2018, 04:31

I appreciate the inspiration from old school beat em ups and I think it worked well with the theme overall. I'm not a huge fan of the delay on the health bars when taking damage and occasionally the pig would fly off to the other side of the map leaving me to try and force my way back over to him which was a little frustrating but overall it was a nice entry, good job!

Shawn Mooreauthor6 Dec 2018, 05:18

Thank you @kantieno! It was intentional to allow your partner get as far as a screen's width ahead of you, but whether that was a good idea is definitely unclear :)

ursagames6 Dec 2018, 07:33

Your game was played on my stream ( twitch.tv/ursagames ) for the second day of Ludum Dare streams - you can find the timestamp of your game here: https://goo.gl/N2rkr8

Shawn Mooreauthor7 Dec 2018, 05:22

@ursagames thanks so much for playing Pigheaded Pirate! I'm glad you enjoyed it! Your review had me giggling throughout since your laugh is contagious. _gotta pig em all_

The level transition effect didn't take too much time, it was only about 15 lines of code. I did spend a _lot_ of time on the physics though, but there's only so much a QA Pig can do in 48 hours, so there are definitely still a lot of quirks I didn't have time to iron out.

The game was made in JavaScript using the Phaser engine.

Jupiter_Hadley8 Dec 2018, 15:04

Silly game! I included it in my compilation video series of games from the Ludum Dare, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/cFpZDUQu-Js

Shawn Mooreauthor8 Dec 2018, 23:45

@jupiter-hadley: Thanks for playing Pigheaded Pirate, Jupi! Glad you thought it was silly 😄

bbaf11 Dec 2018, 16:58

Hey, pretty art and funny concept.
Unfortunately I had a very low FPS in the browser, but still, this game has a great potential.

Arvejeitor12 Dec 2018, 17:38

Fun mechanics!

mgsx22 Dec 2018, 16:32

level transitions are very nice compared to overall graphics :D

MKnooihuisen23 Dec 2018, 21:54

Wasn't quite sure I followed the story throughout, but enjoyed the classic feel and sound effects a lot. You're welcome to watch my playthrough at the end of my latest VOD "Dare To Play" Episode 7 https://twitch.tv/cyberlightgames

Shawn Mooreauthor24 Dec 2018, 16:45

@mgsx haha yep, I am rubbish at graphic design, but I can animate box positions pretty okay :laughing: