Your game just gave me a freaking heart attack.
MY SQUARES!!!
Seriously, I loved playing, but I can’t imagine playing again, any more than I’d ever watch The Passion of the Christ again, despite finding it beyond gripping.
I loved the +25 population drops idea.
I also admire that you taught me the game via a tutorial that never felt like a tutorial.
And I will play it again – I was kidding. But first, an adult diaper.
That’s really cool! I played half a dozen games. Got to the last level, but could never beat it (16/20 gold).
- I didn’t understand until halfway through the second game that the members of my swarm were the currency for buying gold; until then I thought you needed to pick up the +25 things to get currency, and the only benefit to a large swarm was increased redundancy. It was probably just me being stupid, rather than a failure of the tutorial.
- The economic system of the game seems solid (wouldn’t have realized that the core parts of it were added late, if you hadn’t said so). The one exception is losing the gold pieces seems kind of punitive. Is it ever possible to recover from that?
- My best results came from farming the earlier levels. Like hang out on second level until I had enough squares to buy to 5 gold, then on third level just buy spawners until things start getting too hot, and buy the missing gold. Is that a legit tactic?
I liked this a lot. Beat it on first try, so it felt a little short :P . But the rhythm and specially the tutorial really works. I understood everything in like 20 seconds!!!
Because there’s an exponential increasing growth rate, it is sort of easy to get into an optimal strategy of buying as many greens as possible. I think the issue is that there’s nothing that gives you a general short term gain (blues kill triangles, but it’s easy to just spawn blues when you are ar 45 dots to get a new green). Maybe if the game was harder and there were bombs of some sort you could buy (or if buying gold would give you a respite by clearing the screen, for example) there might be more incentive to move in any other direction than maximizing growth. also, stuff that went away after each level but was cheaper versus more expensive permanent stuff???
As for the devastating setbacks, I think intensity could be not on a timer, but related to player progress (amount of green and gold cubes, for example) so you can recover from a bad explosion and also so levels can be more puzzle-like on the proper growth strategy to beat them (some levels might be better to rush, other you want to boom).
And of course different blocks with different abilities, and new enemies, could give it a lot of legs.
Anyway, I though it was a great idea well implemented. I would love to see you expand on it and give us the other 7 minutes that are left :P
EDIT: This was in response to jsnell.
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I was hoping the transform animation would explain the units as currency, but there’s so much going on in the game it’s probably getting lost in the noise. (A tweak on the opening text might help.)
Not really. If I lose more than a gold or two, I hit the reset button. This is I think my primary issue with the game. It death spirals quite often, but can take a while before you realize you lost when, for example, a few of your gold died.
That’s my strategy too. I thought it might make the early levels more fun to play through on subsequent times knowing how much they can help you later.
Wow that’s impressive!
Interesting ideas! I had some similar thoughts on how it might be expanded…
If there was a cooldown on making spawners, that could incentivize creating things other than econ. I don’t know exactly what those things would be. Maybe mid-level tech boosts? or stationary invincible areas that last for X seconds? Different enemy types could help here as well. There could be enemies that shoot lasers and grenades, rather than them appearing randomly. Then you have to juggle the increasing number of laser shooting enemies against your desire to grow?
Another possible idea would be between level upgrades. For instance, if you have 100 crowd left you could spend them to increase your crowds speed, or allow them to crowd closer together (to make their targeting zone smaller).
Oh that’s a great idea! I hadn’t though of that. If crowd size related to difficulty it sort of puts the difficulty in the hands of the player. Perhaps higher value transforms require dipping into really difficult situations to be able to pull them off.
Thanks for feedback!
My time has been very limited over the past two weeks and now I have a hideous cold. Anyhow… I added the framework for arms for the people in the game. They will be able to hold things, but for now, I’ve only coded them up to be in position as if they aren’t holding anything.
edit: @Dave_Perkins bullied me into working on it when I was feeling sick.
Still noodling along. Added combat so the aircraft are now destroying each other as they conflict over airspace (at present UK sector). Currently adding multiple sectors so you can decide where to send your strength, home defence, attack german cities, North Africa, far East etc.
Slow progress, when I have a few minutes to work on it. That tends to be when my eldest is in gymnastics class. :)
Animations for the passengers are coming together. They can be left or right handed. Here’s one holding a plane ticket. I’m now working on their carry-on luggage.
One limitation of LOVE2d is that it cannot properly do fills of concave polygons. There’s a triangulate method that breaks convex shapes into triangles, but in the case of the arm here, you’ll see that I’ve outlined it in a slightly lighter shade so that it’s visible when the person is facing to the side. I haven’t figured out how to outline a shape if I triangulate. That’s not really something I’m going to tackle right now.
You go, guys!
Can I ask how you are doing the outlining currently? I’ve been messing with Love2d for this, although it will be a long time before I have anything to show.
Sure. The code for everything I’ve done so far is on github, here. It’s sort of a mess. I had an extended coding session while somewhat high on flu medication, which wasn’t a great idea. :p
Basically, I just draw the rectangle I want, in fill mode and then I draw it again, with a different color set, in line mode. I created a few convenience functions to make this a little easier.
First of all, I store colors in the colors.lua file so that I can reference them in multiple places. I created this convenience function:
function setColor(color)
love.graphics.setColor(color[1],color[2],color[3])
end
I also created two other convenience functions that make the outlining easier. They are:
function darker_shade(color,amt)
local r = math.max(0,color[1]-amt)
local g = math.max(0,color[2]-amt)
local b = math.max(0,color[2]-amt)
return {r,g,b}
end
function lighter_shade(color,amt)
local r = math.min(240,color[1]+amt)
local g = math.min(240,color[2]+amt)
local b = math.min(240,color[2]+amt)
return {r,g,b}
end
That allows me to just pass a color to lighter_shade(), for instance, and get a slightly lighter color back. For outlining, I do this (simplified, slightly):
-- Draw the arm
setColor(arm_color)
love.graphics.rectangle("fill",x,y,width,height)
-- Outline the arm
setColor(lighter_shade(arm_color,30))
love.graphics.setLineWidth(0.5)
love.graphics.rectangle("line",x,y,width,height)
Hope that helps. I’m not used to needing to call a function twice to fill and then outline, but it seems to work pretty well here. The LOVE2D primitive drawing APIs aren’t very sophisticated. You can do much fancier things in openFrameworks or Processing, for instance.
Nice! Thanks Clay. I’ll be referencing this.
I don’t have a game to share yet although I hope to in time.
I can however share my Super Amazing Die Roll Program which I coded all by myself in Visual Basic!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65206644/DieRoll.exe
I stake my entire reputation on the assurance that this binary link will not destroy your computer.
You have bugs in your convenience functions - the “local b” lines should reference color[3].
Oh yeah, thanks! That’s what coding with the flu will get you. :)
I finally had time (on family vacation) to finish up the people for the game. They’re all procedurally generated and have walking animations. I may add some additional parameters to change the sizes of the luggage, etc. Basically, they can be right or left handed and can have a duffel bag, a roller board, or a backpack.
These are cool!
One of them looks just like me and my luggage!