FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD25 → Centipede 2013

Centipede 2013

By robashton

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness291
Fun1673.27
Overall2763.15
Mood3982.71
Innovation4602.65
Graphics5012.59
Humor5102.09
Theme5212.85
Audio5421.65

Comments

adokhugi 2012-12-16 16:56

Quite fun and not too hard! Well done!

jurnacsr 2012-12-17 00:31

Simple, fun, effective - good game! Nice to play the game from a different angle this time around.

jurnacsr 2012-12-17 00:32

Also, as a fellow Impactjs owner, make sure to bake your game before you ship it, especially for the source.

robashton 2012-12-17 13:04

Oh yeah, I forgot to run the bake stuff - this is my first ImpactJS game, I bought it a few weeks ago specially for this.

alink 2012-12-17 13:16

Classic are always effective, and the twist is cool. Maybe add more rocks for obstacles and cover?

catmoo 2012-12-17 13:20

Loads of fun, I was hoping people would switch round games like this for the theme :)

Also thought I'd say I couldn't get it to run in IE9 :)

gwozdziu 2012-12-17 13:23

893 for first time. I really like it.

robashton 2012-12-17 13:37

Catmoo - sadface! I hoped by using an off the shelf engine I'd be able to mitigate such issues, I'm going to guess it's due to the sound support in IE9 as I had to explicitly disable it on mobile devices for the same reason.

I'm glad you apparently pulled out another browser to give it a real go :)

robashton 2012-12-17 13:37

Alink, I should have probably given a note of that, the faster you pick up the flowers the more cover you'll get as you will crap out rocks when you're hit and when you pick up a flower (about 33% of the time)

har_g 2012-12-17 13:59

the loading bar doesn't reach the end. game doesn't start. I will not interfer in the vote (blank vote)

foksa 2012-12-17 14:02

This should be game mode in original centipede :)

robashton 2012-12-17 14:03

har_g :: Which browser and OS? Most likely it's because of the audio which is really naff in IE and on mobile browsers

schnerble 2012-12-17 14:22

Cool :) Works quite well, like a combination of snake plus space invader bullet dodging. One minor bug: I couldn't get to one of the flowers at one point because it spawned between two close-together rocks.

robashton 2012-12-17 14:29

Ah, I decided that was a "feature" because you can get the rocks destroyed by the defender :P

arhpositive 2012-12-17 15:24

763 points. Enjoyed it a lot! Haven't played centipede before but the reversal of it is appearently a snake game with some spaceship shooting at you. It was addictive and the difficulty was well-adjusted. Was there sound used in the game? Cause I've heard it in the beginning and it stopped after that.

shatterhand 2012-12-17 15:24

It's worthy noting Centiped is originally an arcade game :) And old favourite of mine.

Pretty cool concept, fun to play for a while :)

robashton 2012-12-17 15:31

arhpositive - there was sound but the world of HTML5 audio is a murky one and apparently even using an engine isn't enough to mitigate that :(

har_g 2012-12-17 16:51

(Firefox and win7)

bwdevel 2012-12-17 17:15

FYI, doesn't load in Firefox or IE.

robashton 2012-12-17 17:20

Okay, well I've no way of testing in IE but I'll have a look at Firefox

birchmountain 2012-12-17 17:22

Couldn't load for some reason, got stuck at 75 %.

simianlogic 2012-12-17 17:26

Simple and fun! Could've been made 20 years ago, just not in javascript.

robashton 2012-12-17 17:30

Right folk, append ?disablesounds=true to the end of the URL and it will work in Firefox/IE (ImpactJS is having issues apparently)

l 2012-12-17 17:45

Thank goodness you chose an arcade game with an actually interesting villain. (Sorry Donkey Kong.)

birchmountain 2012-12-17 18:18

It loads fine now and i'm glad you made me try again! Easily gets into my top 3 of LD25! Keep it up!

robashton 2012-12-17 18:27

Thanks! I'm glad I chased after you now then :-)

rumachine 2012-12-17 18:54

Really fun game and well done.

the-jack 2012-12-17 19:14

This was amazingly fun. It only fired one SFX and then was silent for the rest of the play (Chrome). Always nice to play a complete game during the compo.

biped 2012-12-17 19:17

Lots of fun.

robashton 2012-12-17 20:07

Dark acre jack, yeah - I'm really not happy that impactjs hasn't seemed to sort the browser audio out as well as I have in the past when doing it manually - lesson learned :(

beerman 2012-12-17 21:53

That was fun, really nice job. Shame about the sound problems but yeah, that's html5 for you.

cthu 2012-12-17 21:58

Nice and simple, I like it.

mava 2012-12-17 23:32

Its quite addictive, well done I like it :)

My game has leveling up too it really adds alot to the game, that was a nice touch.

stigmawall 2012-12-18 00:06

I started the game thinking how i can win if i'll aways lost the tail, but the main objective in not "grow up" as the common centipede game. Very good mechanics.

meep 2012-12-18 00:45

A very well implemented idea. :) It was a little too easy in my opinion, but still enjoyable.

iamorim 2012-12-18 01:23

Good job my friend :D

aa 2012-12-18 01:33

Fun.
Would be great if it was 2 player, with one playing hero, one playing villain.

robashton 2012-12-18 01:37

Haha yes - I thought the same thing, perhaps I'll set that up once this is all over as it shouldn't be too hard

saguaro 2012-12-18 03:10

Really Fun, and challenging.

tdrgames 2012-12-18 05:34

+1 for being the first HTML5/JS entry I've seen besides our own. Runs fine! (Except for the audio issue.. yep, I did it manually.. there's a trick to it.. and you need OGG for Firefox and MP3 for everything else, unless you use uncompressed WAVs. But it's manageable :)

svenardo 2012-12-18 07:47

Good, responsive gameplay! Plays a bit more like snakes than reverse centipede though, but good fun nevertheless.

robashton 2012-12-18 10:03

TDR - impact is meant to do that selection or you, it has both ogg and mp3 available :(

When I did it manually, it worked fine - I guess impact is a bit buggy - will be reporting on the forums!!

namuol 2012-12-18 12:12

Great gameplay! Graphics are nice too. My high score was a (pathetic?) 518. Overall, a very solid entry!

====

I did experience some sound problems in Chromium in Linux (audio just stopped altogether eventually).

I've experienced this before with HTML5 audio. Here's my advice: with ImpactJS include MP3, OGG, and M4A files for all your sounds and use the SoundFile.* syntax to load them. Also make sure to enable M4A support with ig.Sound.use (check the docs); I found this is required for the newer versions of Safari.

Lastly, if your audio files are very short (< 100ms or so) try "padding" them with 100-200ms of silence at the end. This will not increase the filesize by much at all. I've solved almost all of my sound problems cross-browser by following those steps.

robashton 2012-12-18 12:23

Hi Namuol - thanks for the pointers, I'm using the .* syntax and that's why Firefox falls over (apparently). I'm only using MP3 and OGG though, perhaps I should have tried M4A as well as that would have helped with my Safari issues.

The audio files were indeed very short, I haven't heard that padding advice before so I'll give it a go next time - thanks.

robashton 2012-12-18 12:24

(The way I fixed my audio issues last time was to Base64 encode all the data and keep them as Data URIs, that means that they don't need reloading all the time and I think that probably mitigates the issue you're talking about with regards to small audio sizes too)

robashton 2012-12-18 12:28

(And nobody has ever accused me of having nice graphics before, *sniff* I AM SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW)

digiraze 2012-12-18 12:50

Nice and simple, I probably got the lowest score of 386.

loren 2012-12-18 15:58

Nice job, love centipede! Solid controls :)

namuol 2012-12-18 20:57

@robashton -- the Base64 encoding trick is very clever. You could "bundle" sounds in a single .js that way. This never occurred to me. The same goes for images. *mind blown*

shaneshanekavanagh 2012-12-18 20:59

Nice and solid. Cheers!

robashton 2012-12-18 21:15

Namuol - take a look at GitHub.com/robashton/swallow :)

stryphe 2012-12-19 04:51

Fun game, Nicely done!

mscottmcbee 2012-12-19 04:52

Simple and enjoyable. I thought you did a very good job on the difficulty scaling. I went from "This is too easy" to "oh shit oh shit" in an effectively short amount of time.

gnx 2012-12-19 06:43

It is interesting to see how different classics work reversed. This one works pretty well.

bigbadwofl 2012-12-19 13:04

Very cool idea and well executed. Well done.

sev_inf 2012-12-19 20:10

Timeless classics + some original features + good implementation = awesome game.

davidwparker 2012-12-20 18:14

I like how it's Centipede, but you're the Centipede... Well played!

What framework did you use (ImpactJS?)

robashton 2012-12-20 19:31

ImpactJS :)

skiddings 2012-12-22 18:04

Great work!

voidstar69 2012-12-26 21:49

Works quite well on an iPad. Hard but fun.

datw 2013-01-04 23:05

The fun comes from it's simplicity. Nice work!