[LD35] Elemental Shifters

Zaphire

We thought of having 2 games in one. The bottom game is controlled by the player and affects the game at the top. More info on itch.io and ludumdare.

Play on itch.io: https://obsessivenotion.itch.io/elemental-shifters
Ludum Dare entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=92905

This was our first ever Ludum Dare we have taken part in and it is definitely exhausting. The deadline forces you to put in overtime and not watch a single YouTube video which made me and my partner very productive.

We would really like to take this game further and polish it off so criticism and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Zaphire

Please take note that when you go through a wall shape successfully your monster on the left side will attack. If you crash into a wall all the enemies will attack your monster. Circle shape = Water that will do more damage to fire monsters.

francoisvn

Hm... I don't think your images are coming through (I can't see any of them). Maybe upload them to imgur.com instead of dropbox?

Zaphire

Thanks for letting me know. I updated them to imgur

Pomb

@Zaphire, this is cool :D I really like the combat that plays out at the top based on your progress below, I've wanted to make a couple games with a similar dynamic. One thing I didn't like is the depth perception gets a little tough close to impact, so I think the camera angle could be higher up which would solve this because you only dealing with z and x axis. I didn't look at the top part of the screen mostly because the game at the bottom played out too fast for me.
I find the menu screen quite jarring because the information is all over the screen real estate with little space for your eye to rest, which is to say every element is competing in weight because of value contrast and relative sizing. Time is an issue during a jam so totally understandable to put the information in quickly!
The Shatter effect is pretty neat how did you achieve that?

Zaphire

Thanks for the feedback. I will agree that when playing the game myself I focus mainly on the bottom part of the screen. Will work on getting more focus to both sides once we start working on it further.

Pomb said:

The Shatter effect is pretty neat how did you achieve that?

Im not 100% how @sonicay did it inside of blender but he did the entire animation in blender itself. Then for each wall we had 2 models, a solid one and the broken animation one. When the shape hits it then the solid one would go inactive, the broken one would go active and play its animation.

Sonicay

@Pomb Hey mate, the shatter effect was made in blender. What i did was something that i read about. I did it with physics and keyframes, as physics in unity needs a rigidbody to land on, i couldn't make it just go about and roll all over the show, so what i did i took the existing solid wall and made a plain for the ground for it to crumble on, i gave the wall more subdivisions and then i added the addon called "Object: Cell Fracture" this will break the mesh into more objects and make it look like rubble, u just click it and click ok then it does the magic by itself. After i did that i gave the plain physics that is passive so that it doesnt fall to the infinite space with gravity, so i took the wall that is in lots of objects now which gets transfered to layer 2 in blender when u do the cell fracture and i added physics to one block and that was it, no settings changed extra just added physics so that it has gravity to fall. Then i selected all the other objects and went to physics on the toolbar and added the physics to all other objects with the selected objects settings.

No u can play the animation and see how the wall crumbles to the ground, even if there is pieces falling through the ground, it is still fine. So what i did was active automatic keyframe placement and went from fram 0 Grabbed all the objects of the wall and just pressed enter to place the keyframe and then i played the animation a bit more so that it breaks more to frame 10 and then i grabbed it again and pressed enter again till i was happy, after i was happy i removed the physics from the objects and deleted the plane and then it was like a normal animation playing.

Ill gladly clear up anything i said right now. Because i dont know if this explanation sounds like greek :D

Regards
Sonicay

Pomb

@Sonicay, Hey That's neat indeed, I've been fooling around with cell fracture myself, and is actually what I used to make quick rock shapes for my LD entry. I must play more with baking out simulations it works well.
Not greek at all thanks.

Sonicay

What i am still aiming to do is get low poly objects to look amazing with the ambient occlusion. Like this game for example. The models are not the best but the cartoonish layout of the game and the shadows makes it look wonderfull : http://ludumdare.com/compo/2016/04/19/shapeshifter-biker/

If i can get a good read on how to do this, then i will be happy as a chappy and use it to improve our other game called Survival of the Hobo :)

SUGBOERIE

Cool concept of the dual game stuff that link together. I had a quick play through.

I'd like to see the 2 games merged in some way. Like instead of having the bottom game happen entirely separate. You put the concepts together. Like the enemies you're destroying are throwing at you the walls and your spell is the different shapes. If you get through the wall the wall destroys and the shape goes on to kill the enemy and vice versa for if you miss the wall shape combination. It's mainly because I stopped looking at the top and just focused on the bottom game. Which is a shame because the theming and art are better at the top.

Otherwise the game is cool for an LD jam. :)

francoisvn

Nice concept. It immediately made me think of Super Hyper Cube which you should definitely have a look at.

I think you could make it a little more "forgiving" in terms of how close your positioning needs to be. Like, if you're 80% of the way through a move to a correct place, I think it should pass.

You could try highlighting the shapes you need at the bottom, maybe with a glow or something.

Zaphire

#109 Theme(Jam) 3.97
#160 Fun(Jam) 3.60
#163 Innovation(Jam) 3.63
#229 Overall(Jam) 3.60
#454 Graphics(Jam) 3.49
#474 Humor(Jam) 2.57
#611 Mood(Jam) 3.00

I don't think this is bad for our first ludumdare entry. I do feel that our Theme category should have been much better :P