mini pushillade

This is actually cheating -- I made a fast ~8h remix of my older (sokoban-like, arduino-based) game the_pchanina (https://github.com/drcz/dercz9000)

Eliminate all the niderite crystals by pushing one onto another. Avoid ants, open doors with keys, oh my. You can even try to kill ants with niderite, but it's not easy.

Controls: arrow keys, or WSAD.

Gfx from the_pchanina, excluding fonts made today [everything drawn in emacs].
Annoying tune made in ModPlug Tracker some 11 years ago, slightly uglified today.
Level design from the_pchanina.

In short, it's an ugly collage of previous stuff, shame on me ;)

Comments5

JoshDBB29 May 2016, 22:40
Interesting combination of timing and puzzling. I often ended up trying to kill the ants and failing the puzzle because of it. I like the puzzle mechanic. I feel that the game may be more fun without the ants.
CyberStarLight
CyberStarLight29 May 2016, 23:27
collage or not, the result is nice, this art is simple but effective.

a retry/reset button could have helped, as you can easily stuck yourself.
Persimonn Pomelo
Persimonn Pomelo30 May 2016, 08:36
Cool little game, I like the look a lot. Music I quite liked but got overwhelming eventually. I would of liked an option to turn it off and keep sound the effects. I would be tempted to drop the 3 hearts. For me going back to level 1 is not adding anything. Can I ask what language you made this in? Always good to see people keeping it real emacs style. Good work.
theOnlyGoodDrcz
theOnlyGoodDrczauthor31 May 2016, 15:46
Wow, so much feedback, I didn't expect anyone to play it, thanks a lot!

As of ants and 3 lives: when I was a kid I had commodore64 and grew up on games which require patience and keep you on the border of frustration and satisfaction. They aimed at what are now called "hardcore players"; two great examples are R-type and contra/gryzor -- you play the same level over and over again, until you master it. Sometimes you find shorter route, or better strategy to pass without losing life -- that's the whole point of playing these games. Becoming proficient in a particular task is always very rewarding -- walking through a level in video game is no exception. I feel that when everything goes smooth and easy, there's no real fun.
BUT if you'd like to play very similar (a bit simplier) levels, with no killing obstacles, a restart button [esc], and unlimited lives, you can play my old experiment here http://drcz.github.io/pchanina.html (it looks way better though the sprites I stole from C64 version of Shahid Ahmad's "Chimera").

@JoshBB: actually you can pass every level without killing a single ant; killing them allows using some shortcuts. In general I agree with you, whole life would be more fun without ants, but they do a great job cleaning the forests.

@CyberStarLight: you can restart level by walking into ant; of course, you loose life then.

@Persimonn Pomelo: you can turn the tune off (but keeping sfx) with pause button below the game screen; as of language I did it in js (only with some scheme manners, as I'm a schemer, AND with some ugly impure tricks to save time, as I had just 1 afternoon to do the thing) -- you can check out the source on github (link above) or by view-source in browser. A less junky version of the same idea you can find here https://github.com/drcz/ludum-dare-35 -- feel free to reuse that code if you like.

Cheers!
josehzz31 May 2016, 19:50
The only thing that bugged me was the camera big snaps each time the player moves, but overall nice work, graphics and sounds are in tune with each other.

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