Looking at the database, a lot of people go to the same galaxy (number 4) for some reason. And in that galaxy most go to the same solar system as well - weird 🤷♀️
Maybe that's why some people stumble over named creatures surprisingly quickly.
Some also seem to follow certain rules - my mom always went to the leftmost option for example.
Thank you so much! I'm really glad you enjoyed it.
Everything is procedurally generated except for maybe the font, when typing in the names :P
The planet surfaces is what I spent most of my time on working. It uses open simplex noise, "domain warping" and a little spice that I came up with myself to get some more heterogeneity into the generation.
Basically in different parts of the terrain, different settings get plugged into the noise function. Here's a little toy version you can play with, if you are interested:
I did :) You can find creatures other people have named, but it's very rare.. I like that it kinda show how large one million really is! There's 1000 planets with 1000 creatures each so it's going to take a while for people to name even one percent of that number :3
let dt = 0.01; // stepsize
let t0 = random(0, TWO_PI); // random starting angle
let r; // star-positions in polar coordinates
let t; // as in: r * exp(t)
let x0 = width/2; // center of the galaxy
let y0 = height/2;
let scale = 40; // bigger numbers draw a bigger galaxy
let numberOfStars = 1000; // stars in one arm of the galaxy
// draw one spiral arm
for (let i = 0; i < numberOfStars; i++) {
// calculate polar coordinates of the next star to draw
t = t0 + i * dt;
let r = (t - t0) * scale;
let x = x0 + r * cos(t); // convert to cartesian coordinates
let y = y0 + r * sin(t);
let starRadius = 10;
DrawCircleAt(x, y, starRadius);
}
And then I have a for loop or whatever around this codeblock to draw as many spiral arms as I want. I also add some random noise to pretty much every calculation, just to make things seem a little more organic.
You can also squish the galaxy by deciding on some squishX and squishY factors before drawing any arms and then in your cartesian coordinate conversion you have
let x = x0 + (r/xSquish) * cos(t);
let y = y0 + (r/ySquish) * sin(t);
To make it more colorful, I pick a starting color and every time after I draw a star, I slightly change the color - I do the same after every spiral arm.
Hope that helps and thank you for checking it out and commenting:)
(I'm speaking generally here an not critiquing your game necessarily)
I think you should strive for realism as long as it enhances the gameplay/user-experience. You can fiddle with the physics in your game as much as you like.
Take the Super Mario Bros. jump arc for example. It feels great and responsive and it seems to make *sense* when I play the game, even tho it is not a perfect parabola, there is no drag (I assume the mushroom kingdom has air..), you don't die if you fall from a coin heaven and so on...
So I think drag, a maximum speed or similar non-physical things can make the gameplay more fun no matter the setting.
I enjoyed the presentation of the game. The music was chill but driving and the graphics were simple, yet effective.
I would maybe implement a tiny bit of drag for the ship, so
1. you don't go flying off every time you wanna turn around and
2. the "best" play is always to just keep floating and wait for something to perfectly cross your path, since it doesn't cost you any fuel to just wait - maybe some sort of time constraint would also fulfill this problem, though.
I love tower defenses! But it took me like 10 tries to get an actual run going... I think the beginning should be way less random and easier, so you can get into it.
Also it seemed that my usual TD instinct of building towers in the 'bends' was really bad in this game? not sure what that was about. In my mind a tower should be more effective, the more roads it touches, but maybe they had a cooldown of some sort?
Overall I enjoyed playing a little tower defense again, I haven't done that in so long, thanks for making this :3
Thank you for checking out the game. There are basically two fighting mechanics in the game:
1. melee by just walking into enemies.
2. Drinking blood with CTRL (or other materials) and spitting them back at enemies for massive damage with LMB.
The spitting does more damage the fuller your stomach is and oneshots everything at >50% stomach fullness, BUT if you overfill your stomach you vomit automatically and take a big chunk of damage yourself. (this also does a explosion in a big range around you killing most things.
I worked hard on everything having the same sized pixels (or no "mixels"), but didn't have time to incorporate a custom font sadly. The borders around UI elements are also just one "real" pixel wide, while everything else is upscaled 600% pixelart.
Thanks again for playing my game and glad you liked some parts of it :)
The player character and the environment had nice pixel art sprites, although I found it difficult to see when I touched the light or the "vision-cone" of the guards.
With some better telegraphing I could see this being a very nice stealth game with added time pressure - maybe even fun to speedrun!
Great effort -maybe expand on the game idea :)
If you have the time, I would really appreciate, if you checked out the game that I made for the jam. I also tried myself at pixel-art, but downsized to 8x8 textures on the last day, because I struggle with making bigger sprites like you did.
Good concept - would like to see it expanded on. The player and enemy sprites look nice and the controls feel very responsive.
I would've liked some more feedback from the game, when I hit enemies or myself with the shots - maybe a sound, some particles or tiny amount of screen-shake. I could see this becoming a nice hack and slash game :)
Good effort.
If you have the time, I would appreciate it, if you checked out the game that I made for the jam :3
The respawn animation and sound effects were nice and juice, the controls and enemy behavior made "sense". Really really hard tho. I barely got to 5 points. Maybe The player could wrap around - when they leave the screen to the right, they reappear on the left side? That would give the illusion of more room, without increasing level size.
Overall really nice effort. Good polish for a jam game! I enjoyed dying :3
If you got the time, I would really appreciate if you checked out the game I made for the jam.
I'm getting an error in the web version of this game sadly.
Unable to parse Build/WebGL.framework.js.br! This can happen if build compression
was enabled but web server hosting the content was misconfigured to not serve the
file with HTTP Response Header "Content-Encoding: br" present. Check browser
Console and Devtools Network tab to debug.
The .exe works fine tho :)
The player-controller is very nice. I like that you can still jump after you have walked off a platform for a few frames. Changing direction after a wall-jump takes some time getting used to tho.
The art is nice and the warm light makes it feel comfy. I would've really liked to see some more levels or an objective - maybe that is something you can expand on in the future. Hopefully we'll see more of your stuff in the future :3
If you have time I would really appreciate, if you checked out the game that I made for the jam :)
A simple flappy bird clone - I would've really liked to see you expand somewhat on the idea or incorporate the limitation into it.
I'm not familiar with Gdevelop, but in Unity and some other engines you gotta make sure to enable "Filter: Point" and "Compression: None" on your pixel art textures if you scale them up - otherwise they end up pretty blurry, like in your game.
Regarding the games physics, it seems you have implemented some sort of "velocity" (i.e. player.position.y -= 10 per frame or something similar), but if you want to make it feel more like a force, you really need acceleration.
I don't think the right-mouse-button attack worked for me? There was no animation, like with left mouse click.
Keep up the effort, very good for a first game :)
Maybe next time, there could be a ranged attack.
PS: Unity related issue: I think you have to click on your images in Unity and change the properties to "Compression: None" and "Filter: Point" for pixel art, but I'm not sure exactly what the options are called, haven't used unity in a while.
The platforming part was a little brutal without checkpoints, but I got through it after like 6 or 7 tries. The bossfight was a lot of fun - I enjoyed dodging all that stuff :)
If there were more levels and bosses, I would like to play more of the game.
If you still want to play my game, you would have to download and install processing (from https://processing.org/download), then download my source files from the game page and open the project yourself. Hit the play button and it *should* work, although I have never used a Mac and therefore can't speak for processing running on your system.
I understand if it's a little too convoluted for testing a gameJam game, but thank you anyways for your comment and your congratulations.
I could still make a build for Linux, but I don't think you missed anything. I had music in the game at one point, but there was a bug where very rarely two songs were playing at the same time, so I ripped out the music system entirely and didn't have time to reimplement it in the end.
Making a tutorial and telegraphing what is happening should've been more of a priority, you are right.
(Boomer and Spitter were actually a reference to C:DDA - but maybe they got it from L4D)
Edit: Made the Linux Version, but I have no way of testing it sadly
I liked the concept and tried it a few times, but I always got overrun after a few waves. If you rebalance it and make the beginning a little easier, then I think I would enjoy it a lot more.
Good effort, I enjoyed it :3
If you want, you can check out my game - I'd really appreciate it.
I enjoyed the simple artstyle and the concept of the game - I would've like more of a threat to the player as it was pretty easy to just keep going forever.
Really nice looking game, that had me hooked for a bit :)
If you want, you can check out my game, I would appreciate it.
Sadly, the game crashes when I die and then I have to restart from the beginning - from what I could see it looked very nice and killing enemies felt nice and juicy. Due to the crashing I wasn't really able to see that much of the game tho.
Best incorporation of the limitation I've seen. nice little management game - I enjoyed it quite a lot. I would've liked it, if the progression was a little faster in the beginning, so you get some rewards for doing your job.
