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Cart #tailpipe-3 | 2019-10-06 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | No License
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I've been working on this game based on my webcomic "B-Lab."
https://twitter.com/elstono

Pico 8 has been such a joy to learn!

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Cool game, I managed to kill all the flies after realizing I need to water the plants to refill my CO2. I was confused at first as to why I started without a gun, but I ended up quite liking the mechanic of picking up different guns depending on what I needed to do, and having the guns marked on the (circular!) map is really nice.

The scrolling background on the menu screen has a little too much contrast maybe. The tips screen is great, I really like it. Reminds me of old arcade games.

And nice touch having a music toggle in the pause menu, I will definitely steal that idea. =)

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback, @iaoth, and glad you figured out the idea behind the game mechanic.

I want the game to be fun but "harried," so I'm probably going to build on that more by introducing additional elements to keep track of. (For example, it's kinda weird having a water gun that never needs refilling, if you see where I'm going with that!)

Yeah, I should tone down that title screen a bit.

Thanks again! Now to go give your game "oh my blob" a spin!

Updated to version 0.4

1) No more unlimited H2O. Water gun now needs to be refilled.
2) Added Killer Drones.
3) Added laser gun to defend against said Killer Drones.

TIP: When shooting the laser gun, keep in mind: the lab is a circular ring!
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I've played v0.4 half a dozen times now. It's much tougher this way; at the moment I'm unlikely to get past the drones.

This is how my plays went:

When I'm lined up with a drone and it goes off the screen while I'm shooting it, if it continued to exist my laser should hit it. It doesn't - the laser comes back round (intentional, sure) and hits me. I could look at the drone ceasing to exist when it's out of sight as a physics joke.

Once when flying low to take out a low flying drone, shooting at it resulted in me picking up the other guns as I flew over them. =/

I believe I saw some laser fire go through the very top of a drone, perhaps when there was an overlap of gun and drone, perhaps not.

I didn't get much use out of the water gun and the Nerf gun (on most of my plays today).

I wanted to try out the new laser gun and hunt down drones, which of course is silly because the more you hunt them the longer they're on screen and the more opportunity to shoot you they have. Maybe.

When I tried to use the other guns instead of the laser gun, well I got to the water fountain once (that is: a grand total of one time), and refilled my water gun, and died shortly after that.

The few mutant fruit flies I killed mostly got killed by my laser fire accidentally or incidentally as I tried to protect myself from the drones. Okay, I fried a few on purpose.

Here I'll say you will find many people who are better players than I am, or just willing to put in the time to get a successful run.

My best play through I of course ignored the laser gun and the drones and went mutant fruit fly hunting with the Nerf gun - the game mechanics help here, so that's really great. But there came the time when I had to switch to the water gun, water some plants, refill the water gun, and while doing that flies and drones got me.

There's a little slow down when there are a lot of water droplets on screen.

I've sometimes used this to my advantage to give me effectively more reaction time; it's like the time component of Bullet Time, and it now occurs to me that maybe Neo didn't have any special abilities at all, and it just seemed he did because the Matrix was too overloaded to cope with all that was happening, so everything really was going slowly.

A couple of times I've seen low flying fruit flies get stuck on the edge of a flowerpot, rather than collide and turn around they just stay flying right at the edge.

The music, graphics, controls, ideas are all great.

My suggestion to make it a little easier/balanced (because I'm bad at this game) would be that you let the player kill a couple of mutant fruit flies then introduce the drones. Have them come out of a drone release point and release them periodically (but not too infrequently) one or two at a time so there is time in between to swap to the other guns and maybe Nerf a fly or two before the next drone or drone pair shows up. Give each drone-release/appearance-on-screen some accompanying menacing character music as well.

I've given it a star and a heart for the BBS recommends. It's a lot of fun, thanks.

Thank you @remcode! This feedback is gold.

1) Re the lasers not hitting offscreen drones -- yes, that's intentional. Because lasers fly so far (even wrapping around) I want to avoid making it too easy for the user to strafe up and down and too-quickly kill all the drones. But I think I could stand to be less strict. Maybe a hit can register an additional screen-width away. Also, once I start spawning drones in a more metered way, that will be less of an issue.

2) Yeah, I can see how that's totally annoying to accidentally pick up guns. I was trying to keep the controls dead simple by having pickup and fire be the same, but I may switch to having only X fire and Z for pick up / put down.

Speaking of which, did you ever use a strategy of "moving" guns around?

3) I kind of liked when flies got caught in flower pots -- sort of an occasional "gimme." But I can't claim that was intentional!

4) Totally agree on your comment about making the game easier / more balanced. Up until now I've been focused on the ideas and game mechanics. Next is to really dive deep into level design.

Thanks for playing (a half dozen times!) and again for the really great feedback!

Hi @lazzoak

gameplay strategy spoiler ...


I've used the strategy of moving the guns around, but more the day you first posted the game. I left the water gun near the flower pots so I could get back to it where it was needed.

At the moment I guess it needs to be near the water fountain. The CO2 comes down quite quickly and there are plenty of flower pots so once the water gun has water in it, it should be easy enough to find a flower pot and get things back to a safe level, but whichever one is nearest the water fountain.

I never exhausted the laser gun so didn't need to recharge it. (I'm guessing that's possible.)

Because the game is about managment of which gun you've swapped into your one available "hold slot" it makes sense to try to keep them reasonably close together, within the limitations that they also be close to their recharge point or/and close to where they most need to be used. All of which gives a nice feel to the gameplay.

Dozy flies land wherever they want ... you don't want to give us a fly swatter for flies stuck on the flowerpots? ;-p



 
Dozy flies land wherever they want ... 
you don't want to give us a fly swatter for flies stuck on the flowerpots? ;-p

LOL. The possibilities are endless. One of the challenges making this game is knowing when to stop!

Updated to version 0.5

This version has levels and a narrative!

Game starts easier, then gets progressively harder by introducing new mechanics along the way.

Sorry @remcode -- no flyswatter.

I laughed at no flyswatter.

It looks good, with the messages and the progression. I only got to the third generation in a quick play just now; I'll get further later.



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