Vacuous by Rhinoceros

[raw]
made by Rhinoceros for LD27 (COMPO)
!!Press escape to unpause at the beginning, allowing the game to start.

You are a spaceship!

Shoot down all orange objects for maximum point scorage. New enemies come every 10 seconds. Upon death, you will be given 5 seconds of shields. This will block bullets and normal enemies, but don't go hug any bosses.

Pick up powerups to be better at shooting orange objects. Bombs will destroy all orange on the screen (except bosses, but they'll take a lot of damage from it). You can have 3 powerups (not including additional bombs), picking up more powerups will replace the oldest one with the one you just picked up.

Powerups:
speed - makes you and your bullets faster
big bullets - makes your bullets bigger. Bigger bullets do more damage to bosses.
firing speed - increases firing speed
more bullets - makes you shoot more bullets. More bullets do not do more damage to bosses.
bomb - gives you another bomb.

Controls:

WASD/arrow keys/PoV hat/joystick 1 - movement
O/button 2 - shoot
P/button 3 - bomb
escape/button 10 - pause
C - configure controller
spacebar - skip reconfiguring button in controller setup

Addenda:
-If it starts complaining about controller configuration, go to %appdata%/roaming/LOVE/RTDSE/config and delete it.
-Joysticks won't work unless they're plugged in when the program starts.
-See if you can find the hidden pun relating to the theme.
-The "(almost) entirely" is meant to refer to the fact I didn't make HardonCollider or LOVE. Hah. Didn't make LOVE.
Huh. Had to remove the umlauts. Guess this box doesn't like UTF-8 or something.
-The .love is an archive, so you can unpack it to look at the source. It's alllll in main.lua because I'm lazy. Don't look at it if you've had a large lunch. It's... not pretty. It's not very optimized and barely legible. The legibility issue is partly because I almost never comment my code. Which is a habit I should probably break (right now, when I DO comment, it usually gets ridiculous. Go look at the first 5-6 lines of love.draw()).

V1.1 - renamed a variable, fixing occasional crashes on boss #3.

The post mortem is over here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/08/28/vacuous-post-mortem/

Ratings

Coolness 61% 3
Overall 2.85 771
Audio 2.23 718
Fun 2.91 572
Graphics 2.70 676
Humor 1.59 906
Innovation 1.65 1188
Mood 2.35 841
Theme 2.25 1110

Feedback

namrog84
26. Aug 2013 · 03:10 UTC
Nice clean graphics, solid gameplay, great controls
It was very to the point and was executed perfectly.

The powerups didn't really seem to change anything though?
CogentInvalid
26. Aug 2013 · 03:12 UTC
The gameplay is pretty standard but I liked the vector-style graphics, and the powerups were a nice addition.
HeyChinaski
26. Aug 2013 · 03:19 UTC
Nice solid enjoyable shooter. Very replayable. I need to beet boss 2! I like the graphical style as well.
HeyChinaski
26. Aug 2013 · 03:20 UTC
er ... beat not beet :)
caranha
26. Aug 2013 · 03:25 UTC
Huh... I could not start the game :-( I see the title screen, but the game won't respond to me pressing keys or clicking.
dalbinblue
26. Aug 2013 · 03:45 UTC
I like the Vectrex style. Unfortunately got an error after defeating the level three boss:

main.lua:905: attempt to perform arithmetric on global 'num' (a null value)

Traceback

main.lua:905: in function 'activephase'
main.lua:1530: in function 'update'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
🎤 Rhinoceros
26. Aug 2013 · 04:04 UTC
1) Ah, god damnit, I thought I renamed all those variables.

-Should- be fixed now. had to rename num2 to num on 903 & 907.

2) yeah, to start the game you need to unpause it (escape). I probably should have made that more clear.
Kerinova Studios
26. Aug 2013 · 05:34 UTC
I love the art style. Nice simplistic shooter!
Conflei
26. Aug 2013 · 05:34 UTC
Shooter yes!
leafo
26. Aug 2013 · 06:45 UTC
Pretty nice. You've got a good amount of levels which is not an easy feat.
poohshoes
26. Aug 2013 · 10:09 UTC
The windows version crashes whey I try to load it up.
josefnpat
26. Aug 2013 · 11:02 UTC
Very nice, lots of levels!
🎤 Rhinoceros
26. Aug 2013 · 19:06 UTC
@poohshoes, could you give a more detailed crash report? Does it crash before opening the window, does it open the game, but the window turns blue and gives while text and tracebacks and main.lua?

Otherwise, I'm really relieved that 3 planned levels was enough. I'd originally planned to do 5, but couldn't even start doing the last two because polishing was more important to me.
Still never did add in an animation for bombs, though that was something I'd thought about doing for about half the I was coding.
ddionisio
26. Aug 2013 · 20:03 UTC
Nice work on the vector-art, it looked great! The pacing is a little slow for a shoot-em-up though. Needs more things to come at the screen and shoot at you. But those bosses are freaking hard! The boss fights are the fun parts.
FireZenk
27. Aug 2013 · 08:14 UTC
Really nice game! A lot of bullets on screen at the same time!
But on OSX: bombs doesn't show and the keys "O" and "P" are inverted :S
recursor
27. Aug 2013 · 11:59 UTC
Nice vector art.
Latcarf
27. Aug 2013 · 13:42 UTC
Nice game! (and it works well with an Xbox 360 gamepad (on Linux))
Kragnir
28. Aug 2013 · 01:30 UTC
Nice shooter a bit too much waiting.
alts
28. Aug 2013 · 04:07 UTC
Wow, this feels really polished. Made it to wave 56 with 5 lives left before I quit. I feel like it could use a bit more challenge or a faster pace to keep me really interested. One other recommendation is having a dedicated HUD area. Having enemies and bullets behind text is kind of upset.

Other than that, this is a really well executed game. Good job. Really impressed with the bullet patterns too.
Pixelfan Games
28. Aug 2013 · 10:50 UTC
i like the graphics, gameplay, but no theme here, good sounds. Very funny.
withoutpillow
30. Aug 2013 · 14:38 UTC
Like a rudimentary bullet hell shmup, not to hard, fun, and good although repetitive boss battles. The button-layout felt very natural, and controls were responsive. Took me a while to get used to the hit box, but i'm not sure if i really want it to be smaller. Managed to get to wave 80 and got a score of 12640; i like that the game continues with random waves, cause i didn't want it to spot after those three stages. Good work!
anotheryeti
04. Sep 2013 · 06:00 UTC
Felt super clean and complete. Nice job!
GVmakesGames
10. Sep 2013 · 10:53 UTC
Nice graphics, very very simple. I don't know what the powerups do (but I downloaded only the .love and edited it, so I think I've destroyed something). I'll download the original again, and see what do they do.
Almax27
11. Sep 2013 · 20:59 UTC
I didn't get the power up effect =/