SWEAT by reheated
SWEAT is a turn based stealth puzzle game. You can see guards' patrol routes and you try and sneak around between their fields of vision. The story has four characters with different special abilities, and 12 levels with 3 different mission types. Levels were produced using a metaheuristic (a subject I am fairly new at, having only previously tried it at the last LD).
In my two previous LD entries I didn't write a story so it was an interesting new thing for me. I kept all the levels unlocked so you can get the whole story by watching the intro to each level, then just finishing the last level to see the ending.
Tested on Windows 7 in Firefox, IE10 and Chrome.
In my two previous LD entries I didn't write a story so it was an interesting new thing for me. I kept all the levels unlocked so you can get the whole story by watching the intro to each level, then just finishing the last level to see the ending.
Tested on Windows 7 in Firefox, IE10 and Chrome.
| Web | http://reheated.org/sweat/ |
| Source | http://reheated.org/sweat.zip |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=15514 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 61% | 3 |
| Overall | 3.14 | 471 |
| Audio | 2.60 | 527 |
| Fun | 2.91 | 572 |
| Graphics | 2.40 | 846 |
| Humor | 3.03 | 198 |
| Innovation | 3.20 | 384 |
| Mood | 2.77 | 522 |
| Theme | 2.88 | 806 |
Not to mention the puzzles were really solid. Very well done. One of my favorites, and I'm going on 100 games.
Not to mention the puzzles were really solid. Very well done. One of my favorites, and I'm going on 100 games.
With creating puzzle games like this, you want to design the levels in a way that leads the player into solving them by how they are structured. You want to show off interesting bits of emergent gameplay within the level, rather than making the player feel lost and like they just stumble upon the answer like how I felt.
Sandy III for example, it feels like the guard patterns don't make sense, so the only way to solve it is by brute-forcing different paths until you get the way that works.
You can very easily smooth out the difficulty curve by doing this which I felt would have helped a lot too. Removing mechanics helps improve clarity too, as the player has less 'wrong' choices available to them at times.
Good attempt at the comp though, the code looks very well written too.
Thanks to everyone for the interesting comments and ideas. The difficulty seems to have polarised people. In future I would like to slowly ramp up the difficulty and hopefully have a clearer structure to each level, but I want to computer-generate my levels, so it will be an interesting challenge to work out a scoring system that incorporates these things.
I wonder whether it was a conscious decision to make the player vulnerable at two points during the turn (before and after the enemy moves). Intuitively I'd say that removing one of these checks would improve the player's mobility, but might make it hard to create nontrivial puzzles.