AL One - Artificial Lifeform #001 by s0ulcrusher 2011-12-19T08:43:00
Hey CplMustard, I'll run XP from VirtualBox and see what's missing, thanks for the heads up!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → s0ulcrusher
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | MIN | compo | 406 | 3.31 | 2.80 | 2.95 | 2.63 | 4.16 | 3.35 | 2.21 | 3.51 | 100 | ||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Planetship | compo | 74 | 3.70 | 3.21 | 3.98 | 3.35 | 3.88 | 3.15 | 2.39 | 3.37 | 80 | ||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | AL One - Artificial Lifeform #001 | compo | 532 | 2.25 | 1.75 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.67 | 2.13 | 1.17 | 2.29 | 1.83 |
Hey CplMustard, I'll run XP from VirtualBox and see what's missing, thanks for the heads up!
Neat game! I found a bug - you can still be killed while on the help screen.
I like the cute retro style! It seems like the input for double and super jumps is inconsistent, am I doing something wrong?
Hmmm, sorry to say but it looks like the game has a lot of bugs... I tried using the 'E' key on everything but the only thing that responded was the button on the column.
Not sure what you mean by don't turn your back, I cannot interact with anything in the level except the button on the column. I tried the blue/grey boxes, and the red target boxes, the mechanisms on the far off platforms and even the walls. No response.
Criticisms:
-You have to jump up each step of what look like walkable stairs
-There seems to be no way to leave the starting platform
-The first button you have to select is 4x4 pixels on my screen and the high mouse sensitivity made something as simple as toggling a button really difficult
It was tough steering the ships at first but after a while I learned to be more delicate with the input. Nice work!
I made the world 286m wide and am feeling pretty good about it :)
I captured everything but the CPU and ports, then got a C++ Runtime Library crash. Still a cool idea, I like hacking games :)
The restart anim is pretty slick aaaand I almost broke a finger getting to 94% destruction. Nice work!
I was so pumped to play when I saw the intro graphics and heard the sweet music, but unfortunately I die in 1 second every time the game starts. A few status messages draw on top of each other when that happens, telling me to hold spacebar. I've tried holding spacebar when the game starts, and I can rotate the world 5 degrees or so before I die. I gave it a shot, I died 20 times in about 20 seconds. Too bad, I really wanted to see what this was all about...
Damn, the music and style are awesome. I like that you kept Q in for collision debug :) I'm confused as to how to make a 2nd level down, none of the things I try seem to work after I make my first row.
Criticisms:
-The intro is a bit too long
-Make sure the random generation doesn't lock you in on the first turn, that happened on my first try and I had no idea what was going on
-Add tooltips to the resources at the bottom, I didn't know what some of them were
Wow this is fun. Hard but fun, not sure how to use the monsters I collect or how the apples do anything but the platforming, shooting, collecting, enemy & level design are fantastic.
One bug though - I couldn't exit the program except by alt-tab'ing out and closing it through task manager.
Nice work!
Playing both characters at the same time was a fun brain twister. Smashing fun wotwot!
Neat music and deadly animated objects! I like that you had the columns synced to the track, had a nice club feel to it.
I could get through the pink zone but when you get to the blue zone it looks like there's a screw hazard you have to jump over. I tried a bunch of buttons but none would jump :(
Lots of pew here, you should add score!
Warping is a rad mechanic for a shmup, nice work. Great bullet swarms too, it was pretty tough.
Decent puzzler for 6-7 hours work, I dig the look too.
Nice, I got a score of 370. It plays much better than it looks :)
I love the NES style/palette, feels like I just blew dust out of my cartridge if you know what I mean (wink wink nudge nudge). I also like how twisted the dialog text is, so.. good work on that?!
Make more of this and make sure you include the control scheme somewhere in the game, I was lost too until I read over your description again.
Hell yeah this is badass! Feels like the gijoe arcade game but with more ridiculous, excellent work!
The collision detection is wacky, at first I could pass 5 pixels into another object and not get a response, and later on they could be 40 pixels away from my blob and would get picked up.
Also if you're holding a button down during the endgame state the "game over screen" flickers on and goes away after 1 frame.
Also since they're small and green and from Mars I'm guessing the accepted term for beings from that planet is "Martians".
The collecting and building is nice though :)
I have a pretty beefy gaming rig and for some reason I could barely play this over 4 frames a second, I think it's all the alpha blended stuff you have going on with the stars in the background. Nice music though.
Wow, great way to spin the game of life! One note - the web player's resolution seems to be limited horizontally, it says there are enemy units left but I can't see them on the screen. It also says I have 64 units but I only see 12. Thanks for a cool game!
Wow, this is an awesome twist on tower defense, I got past day 25 and enjoyed maxing out my defenses. This is the best entry I've played yet!
Very artsy but what would be really cool is a win condition and more of your weird illustrations to go with it :)
This is a tough game, I died with a score of 110. Pretty cool mechanics :)
In some ways this is even better than Binding of Isaac, seriously nice work. The boss is so brutally hard!! I like switching between ranged and melee and the pace of the game is really rapid so dying isn't such a bummer. Great work!
I ran the .NET 4.0 installer you included but whenever I try to run the game nothing happens, the process starts and immediately stops. I tried running in admin mode and no-go. I'm running Windows 7 Pro SP1, sounds like other people are able to play it though...
I like the plant growing mechanic and the bot death puff fx.
Not sure if this is a lose condition but when you miss a jump the level just scales down (I assume I'm falling?) until it's 1 green pixel. I'm not sure what's going on but I dig the music and the weirdness!
The music seems really pro and the level design isn't too shabby. One question - why does Lord British want to know about my feats? It's true I'm a mighty ant slayer but he's been to space and looked down upon us like we were ants. What I'm trying to say is, nice job!
Visually awesome and great theme! One suggestion - the controls are slidey and floaty and that makes precision platforming pretty tough. Maybe dampen the player's momentum?
The shooting is pretty confusing, I'm not sure if I have a mine or a brown block when I pick up a weapon. Also the projectile seems to go in a random direction, is it using your current momentum?
It was fun drop catching, but a tooltip saying "Uncle Istvan Game" kept popping up in Chrome if I let my mouse still for longer than 1/10th of a second so keeping that from popping up was a meta-game in itself. To fix that set the Title attribute in the Object tag to "".
38.9s is my best, dang what a punishing game.
I'm trying not to be a dick, but you have a huge pro-looking logo for your "company" and then... no game? Why would you submit this?
Nice! It's kinda like smash tv but with dudes who say something like "Gutentag" all the time. It's also hard as hell!
I tried playing a few times but ran into a bug that wouldn't let me get past the church. Interesting entry though.
Thanks Matthias :) Let me know if you have any suggestions, I want to keep working on this after the competition's over.
Ah crap, quick note - the UI gets messed up at a resolution lower than 1280x720 just in case anyone is having a tough time reading the interface text. Is it too late to submit fixes for stuff like that?
AlwaysGeeky - Agreed, I threw a lot of the UI together last minute without much thought. Should I put some background UI images in to separate the UI from gameplay? I kinda like the alpha/cutout aspect though, so the UI doesn't obscure objects ingame. Maybe just repositioning the text in a more grokkable manner would help. If you have any suggestions let me know!
Wow! I really appreciate the feedback everybody :) As for shooting planets I didn't want this to be a pewpew type of game, more exploration and discovery. The ship and sun's scale are being modulated by the audio peaks in the background music, so if you have your sound turned off it's going to look like they're flickering for no reason.
D.man - great ideas!! I'm going to try to implement all of that and put you in the credits! :)
When you encounter a hostile planet, just stay away from the missiles and if shit gets too real just hop through a warp gate and hopefully you'll get sent to a safer system.
Here's a how to play / commentary youtube post I made for the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/planetship-how-to-play-commentary/
<a href="http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/planetship-how-to-play-commentary/">http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/planetship-how-to-play-commentary/</a>
Jack - I posted a how to play video 3 posts up from your comment.
VDOgamez - I agree, I have a huge unfinished todo list that I wanted to knock out but I only had enough time to get the basics going.
It is my solemn vow to finish the rest of this game. I had so much fun making it, putting polish and real content in would make it ROCK!
Kharza - Right on! That's so cool to hear :) Thanks for the high praise, I'm glad you got some good runs in!
Great feedback y'all, I have a lot of work to do before this thing is primetime.
Jedi - 35 Years left? That was a close shave! I think adding more content between start and finding a habitable planet will make the exploration more fun. It takes 5-20 minutes for me to find one and I've been playing non-stop so I could see it taking a while on your first time.
Jeffalisk - The shuttles pick up crew from populated planets and the miners pick up thorium from the blue text planets. The stats in the upper left will increase when you successfully land the correct one. I have a few ideas on making that more obvious, I'll give them a try!
Oye Beto - I also wrote a medium sized pile of code, I included it along with the game if you want to check it out.
There are probably too many factors for finding a habitable planet (atmosphere contents,vegetation,water,near earth scale, uninhabited), I'm thinking of making it easier and easier to find one as you scan and hop through systems but that would detract from the pure chaos of it all...
What do you guys think?
Danik - Thanks for the advice, I might use icons instead of giant text blocks to fix the clutter and the latest version I put together lets you hold spacebar to cut out camera rotation which makes picking stuff with the mouse much easier. Wish I had thought about it during the 48 hours!
As far as the web player goes I tried it last week but my game always loads super slow and either looks awful with the graphics settings turned down or doesn't run in half the browsers I tested with the graphics settings turned up so I'm sticking with native platform builds. If I had focused on the web player to begin with I think it would have worked out ok though. I'll keep it in mind for next time :)
Thanks again for the suggestions!
Thanks everyone for being honest and helpful, I'll post a video of my progress so far in a bit. You were all super rad for playing and giving me important criticism, it will be a much better game because of it!
I love that you've got local multiplayer on the same keyboard :) Very rad game, I had a lot of fun with this!
Ghost toast... delicious!!
One day I will kill red monster!! Man that boss is hard.
The boss fight is rad! Love the music too.
Almost done writing my 1-letter strategy guide for this game! This definitely scratched the progression itch :)
Adding detail to the world is a cool mechanic :)
The flame breath is awesome!!
Nice puzzle! Setting Screen.lockCursor to true will fix the mouse bug in the webplayer, also it won't work in the Start() method of an object that's created when the app initializes, so you gotta do this in your Update():
if(Screen.lockCursor == false)
if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0))
Screen.lockCursor = true;
Nice! Scored 602 :) I really dig the background music, fits the visuals perfectly.
This looks cool, I'd like to play it but I'm getting the same problem as Joror in Win7 64-bit. I have both pre-reqs installed.
I think the reason people (myself included) are confused is that your rules are "after he have take/kill all the potatoes in the universe" which is confusing to begin with. Then when you play the game you pick up what look like treasure boxes and cat masks and then nothing happens.
The 3-pixel tail wag is cute and your style is great though!
Like others here I kept getting stuck in rocks, visually really impressive though!
Whoa I like how the environment rearranges itself between matches, very cool.
Is it possible that the initial puzzle could be generated in a way to be unwinnable or am I just doing it wrong? :)
The turret's bullet trails look really awesome, I found myself just watching the disco floor patterns for a bit. It's a pretty sneaky way to dispatch enemies by removing adjacent floor tiles, I like it!
I agree with Sos, this would be pretty cool for mobile too.
It keeps crashing on me after I kill 1/2 of the enemies, are you ever experiencing that? Also could you make Z rapid fire? My fingers are tired and I think I need a replacement Z key :) Nice work!
Man this game must be popular, the host at cgame.juplo.com is now unresponsive :)
I can't even ping the machine, getting this: "TTL expired in transit."
If you're hosting this from home it looks like a router / switch error. I'll come back tomorrow to give it a try.
Can you host the android .apk file somewhere? I can't access google play on my device :( Thanks!
After a few tries I got to lvl21, the distance counter & bombs make for really fun maze nav, excellent work! Runs great on kindle btw, really responsive. Thanks for uploading the .apk :)
Having a hard time playing it, the jump peaks immediately and I keep dying on the end of the first platform but I'm not sure why. I tried taking the lower route but it's blocked.
Wow this is crushingly brutal for a game about sleepy cats :)
Cool effect on picking up those orbs, I like it.
Pretty scary when you turn around and there's a crowd of 100 ninjas coming for you :)
So to fire the weapon you have to:
1) Load shells individually by hitting the 'R' key 8 times
2) HOLD space to chamber a shell, not just tap it
3) LMB to fire, goto #2 until empty, then goto #1
It's pretty tricky...
Falling into hell is hilarious
Great platforming, controls are tight and responsive! Level design is nice too, all around excellent job :)
Ran into a bug: You can drop a cube while it's halfway through a wall and break a puzzle. Other than that minor thing this is really cool, has a great cheery colorful vibe.
I'm a perfect potato idiot with a finger cramp.
Spent a long time getting crushed by the double rotating cubes. Very fitting game for the theme!
Pretty cool! If you want to make it easier for players to gauge depth try enabling fog in the render settings, or you could also add some varied point lights throughout the tunnel and make the obstacles a darker color so you can see the lights play along the surface as they move towards you.
This is hilarious, "Verdict: Quilty" ending cracked me up!
Got up to 35.5s, this is difficult!
Haha I think the scale of game's economy makes me feel very poor. It took about 7 minutes just to get 1 fish. I think the collision volumes are a bit too small as well, I was right on top of fish hitting spacebar and kept dying trying to kill a single one per run. Nice music + theme though, I had fun playing it, very chill. Excellent work!
Cool idea! My only gripe is when I had 4 paddles going it felt like the game was running @ 3-4fps, which made the game difficult to play.
Wow that was deep.. great dialogue during questioning, nice work.
I think the collision for the main character is a little too big, I was exploring exploded/revealed sections of the map and had no idea why I was dying over and over again. Are there other things besides the red and white characters that can kill you?
Interesting idea and the mood is killer but I hate to say overall it's pretty frustrating to play. I think with some tuning and tweaking this could be really cool :)
Incredible, such a strange concept to play a game on 2 open browser windows but this was really cool. Great piano track and I loved the extended info on the kiwi, hilarious!!
Wish this had backspace input working, my dyslexia/crap spelling made it hard not to fatfinger commands. I picked everything up and LOOK'ed every room, am I missing something?
Wow that's a really cute game, nice tune too.
Is there any interactivity with this or do you just watch/meditate?
Great style and the swipe mechanic is cool. I agree with Thein though, there were a few times I died when there was nothing visually colliding with the bee.
Dang the double-bat is totally OP! Now I know if I ever have a ninja problem in my neighborhood just go see the friendly potato goddess for the ultimate boon. Great game :)
Got to the end with 1hp left. This is frantic and fun, nice work!
Scored 1120! The soft music doesn't prepare you for how hard it gets :) This is really cool, nice work!
Sorry, all I get is a blank blue screen. I'm running latest Firefox & flash player on Win7 64-bit if that helps.
Switched to chrome, works!
This is really fantastic, the screenshot prepared me for the pong part but it's all awesome insanity afterwards. Nice work, this is the best I've played so far :)
zeus' balls I'm tired, gonna play some of your games and catch some zzz's. this was really fun to work on, hope you have as much fun playing it :) Comment if there's any serious problems, I only had 2 people to test it before submission.
@NiallM - Thanks that means a lot coming from you, I really dig your LD games :) Did you use the hold spacebar to glide function in the game? That makes the platforming a lot easier I think. Going to play your game right now!
@Sebastian yeah I chose the lesser of 2 evils with that bug - if the friction is too low you fall of the platform, if it's too high you can hang onto the platform by constantly moving towards it when you're not standing on it. I should write that up as a feature, you can actually hang onto an upper platform and drop onto a lower one :)
@voxel - Whew good to hear the platforming isn't that rough. I just watched your dev footage, from your spotify playlist in the background I can tell we have the same musical tastes :) I'm off to play your game "unessential"!
@gokuhd - Thanks! Wait, you don't use a mouse? I just played your game ZIN and it requires a mouse :)
@nintendoeats - Xen? Did someone else make a similar game this LD? Weak gameplay with worse weapons? The theme was minimalism, so the design followed..
@eteeski - Awesome, thanks! I used all built-in unity shaders, that one is the "reflective specular" shader with a cubemap made out of 6 of the same perlin noise texture + no diffuse/gloss texture + full green diffuse color + full blue specular color.
@lulzfish_4 - Oh gotcha! Thanks for the info, been a long time since I played that.
@ThreeUp - Not on point in what way? The theme was minimalism and that was reflected in the art style and game design. I was going to add smaller flying enemies but I felt that went against the theme.
@ataxkt - Are you running the osx version? Try the web player instead if you can.
@wccrawford - Both of our LD games end in the exact same way, a chunk of text on screen with no way to restart. Did you try holding space to glide during the platforming?
@pansapiens - The project files are a bit of a mess right now, I'm in the process of finishing it up myself for the post-compo version :) Lots of good feedback here for me to build the todo list out of, thanks everybody!
For image effects, it's mostly the Contrast(Enhance) that's getting that glow/color shift. Add that to your camera, set Intensity to 6.0, Threshold to 0.01 & Blur spread to 12.0 or higher. You can also bring the threshold to a negative number to get a really weird effect.
The terrain is just flat grey diffuse with some subtle light baked in, the orange glow at the top is from the Contrast(Enhance) factoring in the blue from the sky.
As for the rest, the quality settings have shadow resolution set to low to get that weird chunky look. The reflective surfaces are all set up like the post above describes with different color params.
@64Mega - I agree about the music switch, didn't have enough time to make a 2nd track. That's on the todo list for the post-compo version though. Hey your game is wicked fun btw, I made some of my buds play it :)
@Pixelsalt - ahaha that's an awesome bug! Not fixing that one, it's a keeper!
@Tozy - that's very nice of you to say :)
I feel the same way about a lot of the games submitted this time around, not to get too mushy but I think we're all helping each other to make better and more expressive games each time we participate. For a global group of gamedev nerds to do this together is inspiring and at times hard to believe possible.
That and the joy of playing games that aren't watered down by focus groups or designed by committee, it's clear each game has a clear nugget of core gameplay which is unique and sometimes very deep. I've played so many incredible games already but have only seen 5% of them so far! The effort and creativity of LD is just staggering in it's scale.
After getting a handle on the controls it got pretty fun, but my eyes hurt trying to see a black square on a mostly black background. Really cool and weird idea for a game, I've never played anything like it!