Pincers by ggiraldez
PINCERS - Instructions
Use the mouse, arrow keys or WASD to guide your creature. Eat the red and blue pills to regain life and energy. Attack other creatures to destroy them. Evolve your creature by taking the remains of your enemy. Red improves life, green improves speed and blue improves attack strength. Energy is currently unused (didn't have time to add the skill system).
Press Escape to quit or restart the game. Press P to pause.
The game is programmed in Lua using the Love 0.8.0 game framework. Graphics were drawn with the Gimp. The in-game font is Victor-Pixel grabbed from http://www.dafont.com/victors-pixel-font.font. Sound effects were created with sfxr from http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html. I took inspiration from flOw http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ and threw the progression system of an aRPG to the mix :)
Update: uploaded a new .zip for Windows which should fix a crash from Love with certain ATI cards (this AFAIK https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10104).
Update (Aug 28): Fixed a bug where the game would sometimes crash when the player died.
Linux users: running the Windows version through Wine works perfectly (although is a bit slow to start up). Otherwise download the .love file and run with Love 0.8.0 or later.
Use the mouse, arrow keys or WASD to guide your creature. Eat the red and blue pills to regain life and energy. Attack other creatures to destroy them. Evolve your creature by taking the remains of your enemy. Red improves life, green improves speed and blue improves attack strength. Energy is currently unused (didn't have time to add the skill system).
Press Escape to quit or restart the game. Press P to pause.
The game is programmed in Lua using the Love 0.8.0 game framework. Graphics were drawn with the Gimp. The in-game font is Victor-Pixel grabbed from http://www.dafont.com/victors-pixel-font.font. Sound effects were created with sfxr from http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html. I took inspiration from flOw http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ and threw the progression system of an aRPG to the mix :)
Update: uploaded a new .zip for Windows which should fix a crash from Love with certain ATI cards (this AFAIK https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10104).
Update (Aug 28): Fixed a bug where the game would sometimes crash when the player died.
Linux users: running the Windows version through Wine works perfectly (although is a bit slow to start up). Otherwise download the .love file and run with Love 0.8.0 or later.
Ratings
| Coolness | 80% | 2 |
| Overall | 3.72 | 51 |
| Audio | 2.71 | 262 |
| Fun | 3.54 | 67 |
| Graphics | 3.59 | 141 |
| Humor | 1.82 | 464 |
| Innovation | 3.13 | 260 |
| Mood | 3.10 | 152 |
| Theme | 4.00 | 29 |
Very clever how the various body parts make for a large variety of different creatures, from tiny particles to menacing scorpion-like things.
Graphics look great, and it was wonderful to see my creature grow until I got overconfident and died at level 18.
One complaint would be that the game is maybe too easy. A carrion-eating strategy works quite well, but then, it's the same in nature!
The world is really large with many AI driven enemies and evolving material to collect.
I got a fairly long tail in the end and would try it again later to see how I do.
Controls are quite hard but that makes challenge.
Reminds me of Flow.
@Frozen Fractal: better AI fell out of the time budget, as well as a proper skill system that makes use of energy. But I'll definitely continue to work on this.
@thewiseguy99: I had a great time making it. Thanks for playing.
@SecondDimension: funny, I haven't played Spore :) Will have to check it out.
@Andy Go: flOw was my starting point. Then I added variation from the three types of body parts. The progression system is not immediately clear though and I should have added some kind of tutorial.
Well done, I especially liked the evolution phases.
But this is the LD game I spent the most time on. I loved how you can play a badass killer or a swift carrion feeder (not sure it's the word).
Obvious inspiration from flOw, but the gameplay felt really different, and that's awesome.
There were enough different creatures and I liked the way the world (unexpectedly) got darker and the monsters bigger when you started wandering outwards.
Nice job.
In my own experience it felt a bit monotonous after some minutes, and I wonder if some level design wouldn't create a bit of structure that would make it more fun, now that you've set the mechanics.
But nicely done!