FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD23 → Bactarium

Bactarium

By csanyk

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness356
Innovation2043.41
Theme2593.34
Mood4312.68
Graphics5112.75
Humor5202.07
Fun5452.62
Overall5622.76
Audio5872.07

Comments

khaotom 2012-04-23 02:32

Cool. Is the only thing to do is point at where they should move?

csanyk 2012-04-23 02:44

Right-click and your nearby bacteria become hungry. Left-click and they move close to the point where you clicked. Bacteria with no target will follow your mouse, albeit slowly. I would have liked to add a little more variety but this was all I could come up with in 48hrs -- had a few other things I had to do over the weekend:)

allusion 2012-04-24 01:57

Very cool. Took me a second to see what was going on. I like the message when you win.

csanyk 2012-04-24 02:34

Thanks, Scott! I liked your game as well!

csanyk 2012-04-24 04:03

Just patched a few bugs with the scoring and an important one with the collision(enemy). Game is now more challenging.

devwil 2012-04-24 22:15

***I'm posting this on all non-browser games I bring up in an attempt to encourage folks to make browser games next time around. Do not take it personally.***

When hundreds of people make non-browser games, that means that, to play all of the entries, I would need to download hundreds of games to my computer. I typically use OS X, so Windows-only entries are particularly inconvenient.

Please consider making a browser game next time.

csanyk 2012-04-24 22:30

Hey, devwil, sorry I couldn't target multiple platforms this time around. It's possible this will get ported to OS X and HTML5 once I am more comfortable with Game Maker Studio.

mach60kas 2012-04-24 22:47

I found the idea for the game very innovative, and it fits the theme well. I thought the graphics looked very nice, so that's a bonus - though maybe some music would have been nice? Still, a fun game to play! And the petri dish is ours, indeed...

lukerissacher 2012-04-24 22:53

Cool - liked the concept, would be fun to experiment with that more. Didn't understand which side I was or how to control at first, but then I got it. My strategy was to eat a path and make sure the bad colony was always in my wake.

csanyk 2012-04-25 01:10

@Mach60KAS, thanks! I would have loved to put some ambient music in this game, but I just didn't have the time or skill for it. It's definitely an addition I would like to put in.

@LukeRissacher, you have the winning strategy: eat the food before the enemy gets to it. Once you figure that out the game isn't very deep, but if I continue developing this I'll be sure to add a few features to make the gameplay a little deeper.

davedobson 2012-04-26 03:15

Interesting idea, and fun to watch it play out. The gameplay is very hard to understand without reading the comments below, and even then, the motion of your guys isn't clearly connected to the mouse commands. But it's a cool idea, well-executed; would have to be a bit deeper to be really great.

jomomomo 2012-04-26 14:43

Can't play on my mac. /sadface

xblinkedx 2012-04-27 07:50

Interesting. It gets a bit noisy though. I like the graphic style, not bad overall.

hungyg 2012-04-29 08:10

too much text, but still unclear

tomalla 2012-04-29 10:44

I'm pretty sure that's not what the game should look like:
http://i.imgur.com/fPiZV.jpg
... so I'll refrain from rating Graphics for now. But other than that, it's neat.

jaj 2012-04-29 16:49

I'm king of the petri dish!!
A bit easy and not much replayability after you win, but pretty fun the first time you play it.

csanyk 2012-05-01 02:19

Tomalla, yeah that looks like some kind of video card issue, maybe check your drivers? The bottom of the screen below the glitchy noise looks correct.

tomalla 2012-05-02 10:06

Few weeks ago I've updated my video drivers on another opportunity. The weird thing is that only this game behaves so oddly to me. I wonder why.

csanyk 2012-05-04 05:42

Tomalla, I couldn't tell ya -- sorry! It's built in Game Maker, which is a pretty high level language -- not like I wrote it in OpenGL or something. The game does employ a great deal of alpha channel blending, but I wouldn't think that would cause a problem.

robcozzens 2012-05-05 20:55

I would play it, but I'm on an iMac.

supersoul 2012-05-08 04:55

Really nice graphics. Seemed like my bacteria only really wanted to respond some of the time, it never moved all the way to the mouse cursor. Visually interesting though and a nice idea. A bit on the easy side, but nice work!

csanyk 2012-05-09 04:31

Thanks, Super Soul. I liked the way the graphics came out quite a bit. I felt the randomized color selection, transparency, and simple geometric shapes worked very well, but what really sells the graphics for me is the behavior of the individual cells -- to me they really evoke the way microbes look under a microscope, with the way they wiggle and cluster. It's more than enough to make you forget that they're just a bunch of circles and squares:)

egerlach 2012-05-12 21:46

The graphics had a random seeming background, which was odd. Controls were hard to get used to, and didn't seem that responsive.

icefox 2012-05-13 00:59

Oh hey, I'm the squares, not the circles...

csanyk 2012-05-13 01:53

egerlach, there is only a solid black backround. The triangles are food; eat them to grow more. The dark brown stains are dead bacteria. They don't do anything, but they give you some idea of where your battles took place.

maxman43 2012-05-13 04:18

I like the concept, but I feel a different, more direct, control scheme would have helped.

scgrn 2012-05-13 04:46

The graphics seemes kinda glitchy and the sound got pretty loud, but cool concept.

oye-beto 2012-05-13 07:32

It wasn't intuitive for me even with instructions but after understanding it, I replayed it some times :)

I liked the speed up feature. It was more fun when the game advanced fast.

xsmalldeadguyx 2012-05-13 09:04

Pretty fun, quite an original game idea you have. Would have been nice for more depth though, and a more obvious indication of what is food and what is enemy

jiddo 2012-05-13 10:15

Cool idea. I think it would be more fun if you could move a bit faster tho. It looks cool when one of the "teams" converges on the other tho.

thegamingproject 2012-05-13 17:47

I really like games like this, I just wish I felt like I had more control of the bacteria, just a slight more tho.