[Ludum Dare 31] Glassacre - A game in 12 hours

Kobusvdwalt9

Hey people,

So I had quite the crappy Jam experience this Ludum Dare. So firstly the snowman theme almost won. Then we had scheduled load shedding which was about 4 hours which was
followed with a internet blackout of another 5 hours. When the internet came back I only had a little bit of time before.. yes another 3 hours of load shedding hit.
When the power was supposed to come back it naturally didn't and it turns out our local municipality had a power failure which lasted
some 8 hours. After the power came back the internet was still missing, and I could not submit my entry. It only came back today.
SO in total about a crapload of time was lost in this jam.

Ok the bitching is over..
Here is the game, I call it Glassacre because I can and I am not particularly good with names.
Its a monochrome avoid em up arcade game where you only use the arrow keys. I like the visual design in this game but the gameplay still needs work.
Here is a short video :

I am only including the web build because the file is incredibly small (<0.1mb) but if you would like a standalone just say so.
Web build : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/91837167/Glassacre/Glassacre web build.html

electrov

Very nice Kobus. I would say the score UI was a bit confusing as it looked like part of the gameplay, and I really wanted to be able to bounce off the walls!

Kobusvdwalt9

@electrov thanks for playing. At first you were able to bounce of walls or at least against them (now that you mention it bouncing sounds like it would be fun to try) but I took that out because of some issues I had regarding the visual narrative (basically stuff needed to make sense).

The problem was that I wanted a clear indication that the circle that randomly spawns, changes your color. So the obvious way to show that is have the circle alternate between the two colors. Later on I wanted random levels and random geometry in the center to make the game a little bit more interesting. I wanted the stuff in the middle to be obstacles that you would have to avoid and since you have to avoid the opposite color bullets I decided to create a world rule that anything of the opposite color should be instant death.
So that's how I came to that decision, but I would like to implement a pattern sort of thing on the geometry in the middle and keep the sides bounce able like you suggested.
The middle stuff would have a texture like this :


On the UI score thing. I received the same feedback from others as well. I personally really liked it cause I wanted everything to be in between the sides of the game (symbolizing the entire game is on one screen) but I also wanted the camera to give the sense of motion by slightly following your avatar. So I decided on that. At the moment the only thing I can think about to make the score thing less confusing, is to have it faded out a bit and every time you collect a bullet it flashes into opacity and slowly interpolates out again.

I would just like to state that I am very grateful for the feedback and I am evaluating it in full but I like to explain my thinking behind certain aspects of a game and that sometimes comes of like I am brushing off the feedback and being unwilling to change when that is not the case. Thanks again.

electrov

Kobusvdwalt9 said:

I would just like to state that I am very grateful for the feedback and I am evaluating it in full but I like to explain my thinking behind certain aspects of a game and that sometimes comes of like I am brushing off the feedback and being unwilling to change when that is not the case.

Your comment did not come across like this at all, it is good that you explain your thinking :)

I'm guessing you might have tried this, but I thought it might be cool if instead of you being able to change the colour yourself (which doesn't seem to have a have major strategic advantage from what I could see?), the game instead automatically changes colour every once in a while (with a short countdown or flashing or something to indicate that this is going to happen). This could perhaps add a bit more tension.

WRT to the UI, I think it might be partially the circle around the score that might be the problem. Perhaps if you remove that and just have the score, but bigger and bit more "faded out" as you mentioned, that might help.

Tuism

I like the idea of this - it harkens back to the days of the bullet hell shooters, except those often have patterns and this is utterly random.

Some immediate reactions:

Initially I thought I'd collect circles and dodge squares, because there were circles and squares. After a while I realised oh it's based solely on colour. BUT THEN why were they different shapes?! If it's just and only about the colour then there's absolutely no need nor reason to confuse matters with shape.

Then the controls are good, but lack finesse when trying to move small increments. I think you may need a slight acceleration to accommodate for small movements. Small movements are what makes bullet hells.

Maybe look at Jamestown - I was really impressed by that because they had made the collision box on the player TINY. Definitely smaller than the sprite. And it feels amazing. Maybe it'll work maybe it won't, I'm not sure.

Cool and simple :)

Kobusvdwalt9

electrov said:

WRT to the UI, I think it might be partially the circle around the score that might be the problem. Perhaps if you remove that and just have the score, but bigger and bit more "faded out" as you mentioned, that might help.

@electrov Nice idea there. I will definitely try this.

@Tuism I think you are right about the shape confusion. I think every bullet should be a circle and then you can have different versions. For example a bullet that is a square but it alternates between color.
On the controls : yes later on I saw that small increments were a problem. I had a weird setup with the physics in this game so I will look into that again.

Thanks for playing.

vintar

Super fun and tricky at the same time. I agree with Tuism that the aim of the game isn't initially apparent until you've died a few times then get the "ooooooh that's how it works" stage :D

Elyaradine

I think one potentially nice reason to have varying shapes is to make the bounce is less predictable (assuming the shape does actually affect how it bounces off of walls/each other), but if it feels too random it may not be much fun.

I felt that there was something quite nice about the game naturally becoming more difficult as there were more of the opposite colour appearing, so I was a bit disappointed when you could just switch colours and reduce the majority of the stuff that was making the game harder.

Nandrew

Smooth idea. I'd like to see faster escalation of the bullet count, so that the beginning of each game session gets to the skill test a little faster. Also think that more careful avatar control would match well with this.

vintar

Might also be interesting , if possible, to increase your size after every ball "swallowed" and have "power UPS" available to reduce your size. And by size I don't mean add segments like snake, instead the diameter should increase.

Kobusvdwalt9

vintar said:

Might also be interesting , if possible, to increase your size after every ball "swallowed" and have "power UPS" available to reduce your size. And by size I don't mean add segments like snake, instead the diameter should increase.

Again this seems like a great idea to test out. This in my mind is a free online flash game so I want to keep the complexity down to a minimum but this sort of game also lends itself well to various enemies and pickups like The Binding of Isaac.

Elyaradine said:

I felt that there was something quite nice about the game naturally becoming more difficult as there were more of the opposite colour appearing, so I was a bit disappointed when you could just switch colours and reduce the majority of the stuff that was making the game harder.

This comes down to balance. For some reason my random didn't seem random. So I think I will do a weighted random system so that when you are black there is a higher chance of a white ball spawning and vice versa.

@Nandrew Yes I am thinking about having various levels that get incrementally harder that I can hand design with the blocks (kinda like Samurai Gunn, i like the idea of local muliplayer in this). Because like you said the beginning is a bit boring. Also want to add a sort of waves system.

Thanks for feedback. I should be able to implement most of the new features this weekend.

Kobusvdwalt9

Just a update on this. I spent a couple more hours on the game that weekend but I just didn't feel it, so I am not going to be doing anymore work on this.

Ive launched it for free on itch.io here http://kobusvdwalt9.itch.io/glassacre primarily because I want to check out how itch.io works before I launch Cluster. And I also thought that compared to most games on itch its not half bad.

So check out the final version.
*Edit* It now has : actual physics, a wave spawning system, extra thing to avoid.