Petri Plate Potpourri
On this NES/Famicom game you are a laboratory assistant. Your laboratory is studying some microscopic creatures in Petri plates, but they have been contaminated by "impostor" organisms, which try to mimic the real creatures. You need to examine these Petri plates with a microscope and inject antibiotics on the impostors.
You can recognize an impostor by looking at the creatures on the plate - they should have one or more features in common, but the impostors won't have the same features. For example, you may notice all creatures are squareish with two fangs... except for one round guy and another one with small teeth. Exterminate these!
After eliminating all the impostors you get to see the whole plate. Let's get to the next one!
When the time's up - or if you make too many mistakes - your performance will be evaluated. Will you get to keep your job?
Controls
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On the web emulator, "X" or "Z" can be used to start the game and to inject the antibiotics. Arrow keys will move the lens around the Petri plate.
You can recognize an impostor by looking at the creatures on the plate - they should have one or more features in common, but the impostors won't have the same features. For example, you may notice all creatures are squareish with two fangs... except for one round guy and another one with small teeth. Exterminate these!
After eliminating all the impostors you get to see the whole plate. Let's get to the next one!
When the time's up - or if you make too many mistakes - your performance will be evaluated. Will you get to keep your job?
Controls
========
On the web emulator, "X" or "Z" can be used to start the game and to inject the antibiotics. Arrow keys will move the lens around the Petri plate.
Genres: puzzle
Comments46
Wish to see more content.
The floatiness of the controls wasn’t very fun for me at least, but maybe it’s part of the idea of the game ?
I did play several levels though, so it’s engaging and fun to play. Congrats on your submission !
Loved this one a lot!! :3
I really love that your game is easy to understand yet hard to master.
No começo é fácil e depois começa a dar um nó na cabeça. Achar a diferença começa a ser desafiador.
Há um final? Eu fui até a fase 8, acho.
Bom trabalho amigo!
I managed to score 6 in a few tries.
I'm always a fan of how much you embody the not only the LOOK of NES games, but also the FEEL and design philosophy of them. Lean, focused, and creative as always! Wonderful job. :thumbsup:
Also Wanted to ask if youre fine with me using gameplay from the game in this LDs score chasers tournament intermission video. (Would play in the breaks of the tournament on my stream). Last year for reference
But first, thank you everyone for your kind words :)
> @magopian: (...) The floatiness of the controls wasn’t very fun for me at least, but maybe it’s part of the idea of the game? (...)
> @samuli: (...) Heaviness of the movement was a bit much (...)
The floatiness was a bit intentional yes. I have no experience with a microscope, but I had used a small telescope a long time ago, and more recently a camera with x20 zoom, and in both cases it's hard to move exactly where you want to. Although TBH in those cases it's more "overshooting" than "floatiness". The exact parameters I used were not intentional though, I would've balanced them if I had more time (the current acceleration, max speed and drag were pretty much the first or second guesses I made)
> @andreia: (...) A small improvement could be to show the controls (...)
I'm not against the idea of showing controls, but it's a bit complicated to do it in my case 😅 (for LD54 I tried this by making two separate builds, one that shows the NES controls and another for the WebGL emulator showing keyboard keys)
> @euler-moises: (...) Há um final? (...)
Não tem final não; tem uns 11 níveis de dificuldade, mas depois deles os últimos 4 se repetem indefinidamente. Mas em compensação há o timer de 180 segundos, e a pessoa ganha só 5s para cada placa limpa, então o jogo não é tão infinito assim.
> @moonlightbomber: Looks like this is the only NES game for LD56, based from my itch.io search (...)
You can also check the Platforms page here on LD: https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/nintendo-famicom (admittedly it's a very hidden page; if it wasn't already on my browser history I couldn't even tell you how to find it 😅). Sometimes I check it to see which unusual platforms got entries; I collected some from this LD here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/petri-plate-potpourri/entries-for-unusual-platforms-ld-56-edition (there's even a game for the Pokémon Mini console, which I didn't know was a thing)
First play through made it to plate 8 without any mistakes until panic selecting on 8 due to running out of time.
Second play through made it plate 7 because I didn't realize incorrect guesses carried over and was being more careless for speed.
Third play through made it to 10, I did have some mistakes I was surprised at where there was a single color one I was sure was the imposter but wasn't, I realized I need to be more careful at looking at matching traits.
Clearly lots of replayability for the game.
I love the audio, it's excellent and set a very good mood! I also love how the game is a great fit for the theme, observing tiny creatures under a microscope. Somehow, I get "Dr. Mario" feeling when playing this game :).
The gameplay is very fun, once you get the hang of it, times becomes on enemy, and it's hard to "race" clearing the plates without making mistakes. My best score is 11 plates after several tries.
As a fellow homebrew developer, thanks for keeping the NES alive! And congrats for this great entry :)
it's a really cool idea tho with great execution and the sound effects + music are perfect! The gameplay kinda reminds me of those sniper shooter games with a memorization twist
update: well, they said that it wasn't intentional in the comments of this post: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/its-a-bees-world/yeah-im-dealing-with-spam-ratings-too
Well done!
Love good old NES games :)
~XpMonster
That's awesome you did this for the NES ! I unfortunately don't have one but I still have tried on a Nintendo console thanks to the virtual console (Twilight menu to be honest ^^).
The game is impressive technically annnnnd, also very good ! I like the graphics and the music, there is little animations, sound effects, you made an high score handle, there is a menu screen, the game is well polished !
I saw that we lose immediately when an error happens, even if there is a "mistakes" counter on the top right, that would have be a cool feature but I guess you didn't had enough time to do everything.
Congratulations for this entry !
But at the same time, it makes me feel very clever to learn those things on my own, so maybe not :D