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A jam submission

Magnetic TrekView game page

Control a charged particle and grow as big as you can
Submitted by Gene Pasquet — 13 hours, 15 minutes before the deadline
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Magnetic Trek's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Entertainment - how enjoyable/replayable is it?#192.6483.375
Creativity - how original is the idea?#192.8443.625
Overall#252.5503.250
Presentation - how does it look/feel?#282.1572.750

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

Very nice little concept! I'm more of an arrow keys man, but still had a great time!

Submitted(+1)

Ooh, a chicken scheme, nice. The binary run on my machine with no trouble at all.

An interesting gameplay mechanic! And clear sense of progression. Simple yet elegant :)

I’ve managed to score 13k points before my flabby reflexes let me down 😅

Submitted

Interesting game, reminds me of Agar.io. I managed to build the version on GitLab, so that’s what I played. While switching polarities to manipulate the dots is fun, the game’s two goals (avoid black + get larger) conflict with each other, because after getting to a certain size it just becomes impossible to fit through the gaps in the black. So eating the dots forces me to lose sooner.

Still, the game is fun, and if the objective was different I could see it being very addictive!

Developer

Thanks for your review!

You're absolutely right that the goals conflict. Originally I wanted to add a different type of particle that would make you shrink, or add some power-ups that you could activate to do that. The game is supposed to be happening on a hard disk platter and after passing a few black obstacles, you were supposed to meet the disk read head were you had to be at least a certain size to complete the level.

Unfortunately the time restrictions had me cut off on my ambitions and so that's the best I could come up with for now. I may add the rest after the Jam ends.

Submitted

I like this particle mechanic :) Though it seems that the goal should be not to consume them, but to avoid:


Developer(+1)

In my view you as the player need to make a compromise as to how much you can grow and when you decide to repel particles rather than consume them. I think that makes the game quite fun. Of course it's unfinished and there were supposed to be more of an ability to shrink which didn't make the cut.

Submitted

build / game works openbsd amd64

I gave my user write access to /usr/local/chicken/

$ make deps

$ CHICKEN=chicken-csc make

Fun game !

Developer (1 edit)

For anyone who would be experiencing graphical issues. Please use the latest version (on gitlab only atm) and try running with the command line arguments `-vsync` or `-software`.

Submitted

Simple mechanics and enjoyable!  Nice work!

Submitted

The movements are very smooth and the way opposite particles attract feels very natural. Well done! I hope I can get some points. :)

Submitted

My build resulted in a bugged game, but I loved your video of it: https://diode.zone/w/xo2R6LkdSexsDdaP5ubngF


Problem was probably me:

Developer

Oh gosh this is terrible. Could you share the operating system and architecture you're running it on so I can try and reproduce?

Submitted (2 edits)

I don't really want to admit my crappy test linux environment ;p

Debian bullseye linux container on an amd64 chromebook.

In general sdl2 works fine for me in my common lisp ffi .. Is it possible I did something really wrong with chicken-install ?


The *game* works fine- there's a long, black load time but then, despite the messed up graphics I can move around with wsad and the charges get attracted as expected (and I die when I hit the edge)

Developer(+1)

Hi, I just had a go at building and running the game on Debian 11 bullseye (amd64). I unfortunately cannot reproduce the bug you're experiencing. Sadly I don't own a chromebook so I'm not able to match your exact conditions. As it stands I don't have a solution to help you :(. I can only suggest that you try it out on a different setup.

With regards to the "loading time" at the start of the game, the game actually has a 3s wait time while it displays the instructions on how to play. This is probably what you're seeing as a "blank screen". The game is so simple it pretty much loads instantly otherwise.

Submitted

I think I just have to burn this laptop to the ground and put a modern linux on it