FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD27 → Short Circuit

Short Circuit

By nickc

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Fun1853.20
Overall2763.15
Audio3302.70
Mood4032.59
Graphics4342.76
Innovation4822.44
Theme5582.26
Coolness152833

Comments

nickw 2013-08-27 02:53

Source only..? : (

epiplon 2013-08-27 03:08

Provide us with a link that doesn't need repository cloning.

nickc 2013-08-27 04:03

It does say in the description that we are in the process of making a distro. Pyinstaller is being a jerk, so it will be a little bit.

nickc 2013-08-27 05:14

A distribution is now available for Windows. Please let us know if you find any bugs! :)

lordhellmax 2013-08-29 23:37

Game is pretty cool. Works great, except the SHIFT key didn't seem to make any difference in the speed. I'm bad at these kinda games, but the fact that the power-ups trigger themselves without me doing anything helps me greatly, so I can concentrate on dodging the bullets. Nice job overall!

soulrot 2013-08-29 23:40

Way too chaotic for my taste, so I naturally didn't get far, but it's a nice game to play as a break. The sprites are pretty nice!

mklee 2013-08-30 00:58

Interesting concept, the stacking powerups lends a little bit of strategy to the proceedings. There's a little too much going on with the bullets unfortunately, it's super easy to die accidentally. Still good job!

nickc 2013-08-30 01:19

@LordHellMaX - I looked back in the repository and it looks like the whole SHIFT to move slower thing got wiped out by someone when some functionality got moved to a different file. Thanks for pointing it out! It got wiped out so early that we apparently never noticed it was gone :P

l0gical1nsanity 2013-08-30 01:41

Cool concept. Seem pretty nicely polished. Was pretty hard >.<

gazok 2013-08-30 02:37

I found at first i couldn't tell enemies apart from canisters, but once I realised what they looked like it was fine. Not personally into bullet hells, though :/

nathanhoffer 2013-08-30 02:48

Fun little game. I really liked it.

reyn 2013-09-03 13:50

Mouse movement would have been nice, with maybe a capped velocity. Was fun thanks!

bassarisse 2013-09-04 03:39

I really liked it. The ship moved a bit faster to me, but I guess it's all part of plan =)

purplescape 2013-09-04 03:52

Fun game! It's pretty difficult too. It's cool that the auto-fire and changing powerups make you think about positioning the ship differently. Nice music.

aidanak47 2013-09-06 17:46

I really like the idea. Bullet hell shooters are primarily about dodging and shooting second so having to put yourself at risk by collecting power ups is an interesting way to go about it.
Really all it needs is some polish. The ships movement was too fast. Understandable as it needs to dodge quickly but the speed just doesn't look natural. In shooters it's best if the enemy explodes instead of disappears. I know it's just for looks sake but it feels cheap to just see any enemy disappear after shooting them.
If you were planning on expanding on this, an upgrade system and boss battles would be beneficial. Boss battles in particular could be very interesting as you would need to collect your weapons to defeat them.
Fun game.

nickc 2013-09-08 09:17

Thanks for the feedback everyone :)

@AidanAK47 - The ship was supposed to be able to alternate between the speed it has now and half of that for more precise dodging, but it got botched in the repository and did not get added back in before submission.

As for the enemies disappearing, this was simply because we didn't have enough time to implement an explosion. The sound effect triggers, but we didn't have an explosion animation to use and we ran out of time to make a decent one.

Our initial concept included much more elaborate levels and boss battles, but again, we ran out of time. We actually made a system to allow level creation using Tiled to define enemy spawn points, but due to real life things some of our team got called away and most of us work on the Monday after LD, thus making the Jam effectively 48 hours anyway.

I definitely agree with your points though. The ship should move slower like it was initially capable of, there should be legitimate explosions not just for enemies that explode, but for the little missiles that get fired, and there should be actual levels with bosses.

nickc 2013-09-18 21:07

The timelapse has been uploaded to Youtube if anyone is curious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxeNHZIASGI