I both like it and am frustrated by it. The controls without up and down and with that flat perspective was actually nice, but I found the interactivity to be a bit... not obvious enough for me, which says nothing about the game. But I like the style of it, it's a bit crude, for sure, but how it is implemented was cool, if you know what I mean!
Lava Eater
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Very nice, controls are OK, you have accomplished soo much with so little time. I want to try 3d as well, in the near future. I couldn't muster hacking away until I get a gun, because I have ADHD and my attention span requires some reaaal action for me to get into it...
But very nice, cool that this can be accomplished using little old libGDX!
Thanks soo much for the positive feedback!
The planned scope for the game was that you were going to be able to have anti-missile defenses, like flares, perhaps Rudolph should be able to shoot lasers, perhaps roads between cities and, hey, why not some actual graphics for the background? And then, on top of that, the game was supposed to take on a grand scale where santa ensures world peace by delivering presents to mr P**in himself, but...
...I think re-scoping my jam games is what I need more than anything. Last jam I entered I got stuck on the functioning of the enemy in the game for seven days without progress, at all. This time I was very much set on "get a game done, then you can tweak whatever" and I think I managed to get that done.
I would also love a better intro - but that would require some more visual talent. I will actually try to get something like that to happen next, I want my games to look better in general and not look like I write them from absolute scratch every time...
Thanks, the generator is quite simple: I generate points that are 100 units "up" from the previous point in a list, then I shift the point a random amount sideways to create the turns, then I use all these points to create a spline curve (to smooth it out). From that curve I generate more points, randomize a width for every section and then I just draw everything using shapedrawer.
Oh, and I create a chain body in box2d for the walls.
Source code is here: https://github.com/lavaeater/created.by.a.robot.takeover
People seem to like the AI, which is fun. The AI is based on the concept Utility AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_system), basically all the robot cars have a list of actions they can do, and every action has a score. This list is then sorted according to the score and the highest ranking action is executed. I implemented the utility AI system myself and the source code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/lavaeater/gdx-lava).
For this game, the robots have three actions: Follow the center, Follow the Player, Fire Weapon.
They have basically static scoring, every action can supply a function to calculate the score based on environmental factors etc, I used the same system for fish and shark AI in Moist Regions (last game jam) where I made the first version of it.
Follow The Center simply makes the robot cars turn right if they are to the left of the center line, and left if they are to the right. Given the torque they can apply and them crashing into other cars, this creates some chaos.
Follow the player: if they are within some distance of the player, they will simply try to drive towards the player and ram him. If they are in front of the player, that means they will do an insane u-turn and most likely crash and create chaos.
Fire Weapon: If they pick up a weapon, they pull the trigger until they run out of ammo.
The Guided Missile Pickup is also a utility AI, and the same goes for the Barrel Bomb - which means they are quite similar to Actors in Scene2d, they basically have an act method that I utilized to control their behavior, instead of creating a specific component and system for them in Ashley.
I code in Kotlin and use a lot of Kotlin specific features like Sealed Classes that make creating "types" of objects and then switch-cases dependent on which type something is really powerful. Like enums but with extra stuff.
Thanks for all the kind words.
I don't know how to reply to this. Thanks so much. I wanted to do "more" in terms of game mechanics, but I am very happy that the mechanics I managed to do in the extremely limited time frame I had (my dedicated 24 h timeslot evaporated so I did it in brakes during worktime) came out as good as they did.
The only thing it lacks is... multiplayer! :D
The only thing the game lacks is an inverted mouse look mode. I nearly lost my mind from not being able to play like I know I could. Apart from that, how good is this. Not only is it in 3D, it looks amazing thanks to the cool monitor effect. Very nice work.
Gameplay slightly repetitive after a while, but hey, I want to play as this drone some more. Five stars!