Ludum Dare #46compo

It Hungers

by arkinrev

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.00

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.75

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.27

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.11

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.27

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.24

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.68

Feed your Harbinger of the Apocalypse

You must deliver genetic sustenance and protect the ancient evil that will bring about death and ruin to the Galaxy. Shoot the enemies before they gun down the larva as it sequences their consumed genes, or deploy your energy shield to block incoming enemies.

Randomly created levels in a top-down arena shooter, three difficulty settings, and a swarm of enemies.

Controls

- Movement: WASD or Arrows
- Aim: Turns to mouse pointer
- Shoot: Left Click
- Shield: Right Click
- Objective: Pick up and deliver purple gene slices back to your larva (purple egg looking thing)

Give it a try and good luck!

My Notes

*New for me: Unity asynchronous scene management, events. The implementation of a difficulty slider was also new, and definitely makes a difference in the game.*

*Regretting no sound, and more visibility on gene helix would have been better.*

*My scene changing has some small issues, so if you happen to fall out of the world, sorry! And, a refresh should fix. Another minor issue, depending on resolution, if a button goes out of view when playing full screen, resizing will bring it back. (wasn't sure if this was a critical thing to fix post-compo submission)*

Genres: shooter

Tools: Unity

Comments23

dg_20 Apr 2020, 18:04

The game was incredibly difficult, and the number of enemies quickly got out of hand, I would have liked a slower ramp of difficulty.

arkinrevauthor20 Apr 2020, 18:47

Thanks for giving it a try @dg! You're right about the difficulty. I'm sure "normal" is a bit rough for the first time. If I had a little bit more time I might have gotten those dialed in a bit better. Conversely, Easy is fairly easy, and Hard is... I'm not going to say unwinnable, but, can be punishing. Thanks again!

43sam21 Apr 2020, 16:14

This games looks great, especially the lighting and effects. I like that there are so many enemies but the damage feels too low to deal with so many on the harder difficulties. The gameplay and movement is quite fun though and overall it's an enjoyable game :)

arkinrevauthor21 Apr 2020, 17:40

@43sam Thanks for giving it a try! I really rushed at the end to get my primitive shapes replaced with something. If I had just a little bit more time with them, I could have made more varied randomness in the levels, and maybe the enemies would have been a little bit less swarmy. Thanks again!

NEKORUMA21 Apr 2020, 22:02

good job! i like the graphics !!

ROBOWARRIOR198223 Apr 2020, 18:21

A lot of work for a compo game, modelisation in low poly is good, but without animation that shame. And no sound that impact directly the mood.But the concept is solid, maybe reduce the number of ennemy at the beginning, and i clicked on intro and the game started directly, there is an intro?

teamIndot23 Apr 2020, 18:25

very dificult!

arkinrevauthor23 Apr 2020, 21:25

@robowarrior1982 The push for the intro was going to activate each of those things one at a time. So... "intro" is sort of incomplete with fewer enemies.

@teamindot yes, very difficult. Easy is fairly straight forward. Normal is a bit difficult, and Hard is frustratingly hard.

Thanks for trying it out!

Somniac25 Apr 2020, 05:38

Starting on normal I didn't survive long enough to understand the game. At easy difficulty it started to make sense. Could maybe do with an indicator to show where the spawn is but the gameplay was intense and fun once I knew what was going on.

Barbiche25 Apr 2020, 17:25

Great works, you put a lot of efforts in the effects of combat, and it was fun to play! Indeed would be awesome with sound effects, it would add a lot of punch in the fight. Cool compo game, keep creating !

Alexey Akulovich28 Apr 2020, 22:48

After first game over UI didn't reload correctly:

And yes, game is too hard on normal difficult :) I like camera movements and view of game in common.

arkinrevauthor5 May 2020, 00:02

@alexey-akulovich Yeah, I've got some timing issues with the scene loading, and out of time to troubleshoot. The scene timing was fine on local builds, so I didn't see it until the uploaded version.

@somniac Just needed a little more time to balance!

@barbiche So close to getting sound effects in. I randomized the level instead, and now that I've done it the way that I did, I can probably fit that in any time.

Thanks all for playing!

pee-thief7 May 2020, 21:21

gestation sensation! rad game friend!

Larnin7 May 2020, 22:15

You need to test your game, it's frustrating a lot, and tooooooo hard.
Ennemies start to fire at you 0.1s after you started the game, from out of screen.
YOu don't have the time to see the projectile comming at you that you are hit everytimes and can't anticipate.
Controles are oks, you can understand easily what to do.
With some good balancing, it can be a lot better !

arkinrevauthor7 May 2020, 22:23

@larnin Thanks for giving it a shot! Yes, the curve is steep. Easy is very manageable, normal is winnable with a little luck, and hard is.... I've won once. I was hoping to get some balancing features in, but I didn't want to touch anything until all of the votes are in. Thanks for checking it out!

Larnin7 May 2020, 22:34

You can send a 2nd version if you want.
Just create a 2nd itch.io page or with github.io, and link it here as a post jam version.

Evan Minto7 May 2020, 23:55

I like the concept and the controls are smooth enough. Definitely too many enemies though, and I never really figured out how to effectively use my shield.

With a few tweaks to enemy spawn rates and something to make the shield more tactically useful (possibly making enemy bullets slower and making the shield stop enemies from moving past it), this would be pretty great!

GameOverMexico8 May 2020, 00:22

it's fun protect the larva!

arkinrevauthor8 May 2020, 00:40

@evan-minto You're absolutely right, need tweaking on the stop distance of enemies, and be a little more forgiving for the normal difficulty.

@gameovermexico It's the only way to end the world!

Thanks to both for playing!

cheesepencil8 May 2020, 02:11

The models and effects were very cool!

LarsDu8 May 2020, 05:27

Its quite difficult and the lack of sound is a bit offputting

arkinrevauthor8 May 2020, 16:42

@larsdu I agree, and like every compo I end up doing something in a completely different way that I am comfortable with, and sound suffered as a result.

@cheesepencil Thanks! They were all a rush with about 2 hours to go.

Thank you both for checking it out!

Tim Eriksen10 May 2020, 21:30

Nice game! As I see others have mentioned already, the difficulty was a bit high to begin with, but I liked the movements and the look of the game. Good job!

Other games by @arkinrev

★2.97