Ludum Dare 18 is over. The theme was “Enemies as Weapons”. My entry is called “Protractor”, it’s a katamari shmup!
Competition Entry
Updates
- Download newest version: http://www.frankforce.com/downloads/protractor.zip
- I fixed some bugs and made some tweaks. If you aren’t playing for review purposes I recommend the newest version.
- You WILL need latest DirectX! Update DirectX at Microsoft’s website.
Video
Instructions
- Kill enemies and collect their parts to build.
- Use left mouse to pull parts to you to attach them.
- Colors indicate health level. Purple is super high health, red is about to die.
- Weapons are randomized but also normalized to all have the same DPS. So on average they will cause the same amount of damage over time. Larger bullets represent more damage.
- Try to keep your ship balanced or it will become difficult to control.
- Triangle – Weapon (random but normalized to the same DPS)
- Square – Healer (auto repairs ship and attached parts)
- Pentagon – Speed Booster (increases speed and turn rate)
- Circle – Extender (allows for expansion)
Controls
- Left Mouse – Tractor beam
- Spacebar or Right Mouse – Shoot
- Mouse Wheel – Zoom
- WASD – Move your ship
- Alt+Enter – Go fullscreen (recommended)
Screenshots
Saturday Night Progress Report
Core functionality is in. Enemies are composed of parts. Enemies drop parts when they die and player can attach them. Part types are: shooter, engine, healer, and extend. Tomorrow: weapon randomization, better AI, tweaking and game flow.
Sunday Afternoon Progress Report
I finished first playable. All the basics are in. 5 hours left for tweaking and adding more weapons.
Final Report
The name of my entry is “Protractor”. I’m happy with how it turned out.Β Visually I hit exactly the mark I was going for. I didn’t get much time to play when I was actually working on it but after playing it a bit now I can safely say that it’s pretty fun.
Looks very slick. Some nice visual touches and polish on what appears to be a solid idea.
I finally got around to playing it after I said I would this morning and then the whole day disappeared. :o
I like the idea a lot; it’s a bit reminiscent of Captain Forever. Strapping loads of stuff onto my ship and flying around dealing death from my ridiculous junkmobile is definitely appealing. ;)
One thing that really messes with my head in this game though — and even though I quickly realized what was going on, it still keeps screwing me — is that I have a mouse cursor, and I use a mouse button to shoot, but my bullets don’t shoot toward the cursor. They shoot along the forward vector of the component, which I can only control using the A and D keys. It feels like all my components should orient toward my cursor position, and then those which are blocked by other parts of my ship simply don’t fire.
I also wish the default rate of fire was, like, 5x faster, even if that meant each bullet’s damage was 1/5 to compensate.
But overall, not a bad effort for your first Ludum Dare. ^_^
Thanks! I’m working on some ideas for how to improve controls. Using the mouse to aim is something I want to incorporate but am still working out the details.
The weapon fire rate was a little low in the actual submission version, I’ve turned it up a little bit since then. But I’m trying not to have it high for 2 reasons. 1. I like the player to be able to dodge at least some shots and gaps between projectiles allows for this. 2. Adding all these projectiles and trail effects impacts performance.