So I finished this game yesterday since I knew I wasn't going to be able to work on it on mothers day. This week was a bit rushed and there was more that I would have liked to add, but so goes life. Completely forgot to post it here yesterday and haven't gotten around to posting it on my website yet. So I guess this counts as week #6??? Hope you guys enjoy and will gladly take any feedback you can offer.
Off to start this week's game...still have no ideas...doomed!!
I'm going on vacation for a week today so I scrambled to put something together as quickly as I could. The game was built in around 30 minutes. It's nothing too special, but it's a completed game and it keeps the streak alive.
Keep doing awesome work everyone and I'll have something better for you next week...hopefully!
I made two games / prototypes this week. One isn't all that great, the other feels like it might have some potential. I'll let you decide. Both games were made in 1-2 days.
If you're only going to play one, I'd suggest Every Bullet Counts.
WARNING about "Every Bullet Counts": It can be brutally difficult, but it is very beatable with enough patience. It may be the hardest game I've built, but I tried to keep it fair.
Music:
"Ouroboros" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
My week six post was posted in Week 7, so this update will include extra gifs of the experiments I worked on over the last two weeks. I won't post the builds as most of the experiments are garbage, but if you really feel like playing one, just shoot me a message and I'll send you a build.
This week's game is Night Krawlers. I spent 2 days on it after massive procrastination ensued this week. Controls are WASD and the goal is to collect as many chests as you can. Short and simple. An awesome buddy of mine created the music for the game. You can find his music here: https://soundcloud.com/collzayfu
Cheers!
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Really nice idea and fine done!
Dude, you've made my entire day! You're the first person to ever make a Youtube video of one of my games. Thanks so much.
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. I just realized that you need a specific font in order to see the fonts properly in-game. I feel like such a rookie! Anyways, if you want to play the game with the fonts intended, here's the link http://www.dafont.com/8bit-wonder.font.
@Stephan That's a great point about the Return to restart. I never thought about the usability from that perspective. The bullet bug could be an issue, thanks for bringing that up.
Very interesting game. That's great work for a weekly project. Was a bit difficult for me, but I tried nonetheless countless times. ;)
A minor complaint from me would be that I have to use 'Return' to Restart the level instead of one of the keys/mouse buttons where my fingers already are.
Minor bug: Bullets get spawned before player is on scene.
Great presentation and the level generation seems to be working good.
You can shoot https://twitter.com/moonscript a message if you want your entry moved to week 6. He is the creator of streak.club and a helpful person.
This is so hard and amazing!
Runs on Linux with wine by the way. :)
@starvingindie Optimization is a slippery slope. Once you start looking for places where things could be better you never stop seeing them. Then you never get everything done because each hour of development has 15 hours of optimization :)
I'm not sure what application you are using, but off the top of my head I would guess that the music loop you are using is a .wav file. You might check to see if you can compress it to an mp3 or an ogg file and get it to play in the engine of your choice. The file size is not a big deal for a quick experiment, but a large download can turn players off. You'd hate to lose players over something that could be fixed easily in the future with an hour or two investment up front!
@Bobbo this feedback was amazing! Yes, once you discover the optimal way to play the game it can get quite dull. A timer to get through the level was absolutely on the list of things to add, unfortunately I didn't have time.
The file size is huge because I have no idea how to optimize in the program I'm using...or any program for that matter. As a designer primarily, my approach to code is "if it works, it works." Surely it's going to bite me in the ass sooner or later and I will need to do something about it.
Thank you so much for the feedback. It's extremely helpful and much appreciated.
This was fun! I made it through about 4 levels at the highest (I'm not sure if the difficulty resets after you die, but if not I made it through about 7). I liked the smooth movement (although it felt a little fast and hard to control) and the central game mechanic was fun.
I found that the best way to win was to slowly walk through the level and only shoot as vertically as possible. That way the bullets never bounce around and only stay in the areas that you have already cleared. That got boring after awhile, so then I switched to the run in and shoot everything method that quickly killed me.
For me the main problem with the game is that optimal play goes against the concept. It seems the optimal way to play is to either really slowly walk and shoot only up, down,left, or right so you never cross your bullets paths again, or to only fire on bullet at a time (preferably behind you) and just let it bounce around and kill as much as possible. So the central mechanic of "dodge your own bullets" is countered by optimal play "fire as little as you can and in the most controlled manner possible".
Maybe adding a timer would be an easy way to increase player's need to fire more often and stop the slow wait. Either a "You have 15 seconds to beat this level" timer or a "Your last time was 15 seconds. See if you can do better" timer.
Also, this is a small thing, but why is the file size so large? Are you using uncompressed audio or something?
Great job!
EDIT - Oh and about inspiration for the next game, the theme over at One Game a Month for this month is Childhood. I think I'm going to make a game that my kids can play (the oldest is 5) on an Android that will teach them something. Maybe shift gears and make something for kids? Or just a toy without a win loss condition?