Cubic Explorer by glitchy-pixel
Cubic explorer is our entry for the #LDJam38!
We used a personal framework based on the Machinations and Mission/Space frameworks (by Joris Dormans), created inside Unity for my master's thesis called MaruGen!
GameJolt: https://glitchypixel.gamejolt.io/CubicExplorer
Itch: https://glitchypixel.itch.io/cubic-explorer
Check out the source code here:
https://bitbucket.org/glitchypixel/cubic-explorer-ldjam-38-and-basic-marugen
Description
You are a space explorer. Looking into strange, cubicle worlds! Cubic Explorer is a procedural game about a Magical space dude! Travel through different cubic worlds, and full-fill different objectives!. Enemies and item will react differently, according to random parameters. Random planets, keys, mystery boxes, conditions and objectives await you!
How we made this game
One of the central ideas of this game was to use a framework I developed for my master's thesis. Right now its called MaruGen, which means MAchinations RUleset GENerator.
I took ideas from the concepts of Micro-Machinations and Mission/Space frameworks by Joris Dormans, an created a tool that can be used to "generate" Worlds, mechanics and objectives, given a series of user defined rules and a series of packaded rulesets executed in a certain order to create procedural spaces and mechanichs.
The idea is to find a way to explore the concept of "emergence in games", mainly described by Dormans in his frameworks, and by other game designer such as Keith Burgun and Raph Koster. And in the end this is an attempt to codify those frameworks and ideas in a useful tool.
Screenshots
A Possible world space that this system generates.
A Machinations diagram for the player. This can be extended with rulesets.
Ratings
| Overall | 38th | 4.118⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 244th | 3.441⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 28th | 4.088⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 63th | 4.088⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 357th | 3.618⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 391th | 2.571⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 117th | 3.828⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 54🗨️ |
The marugen is also a very nice feature here, we can see the potential of that kind of generation. The music helped a lot setting the atmosphere of the game.
I had some issue passing the door as I would have love being able to enter a door from the back of it, and sometime I just didn't wanted to enter a door and did it anyway.
Maybe adding a button press to interact with the door could be a good idea.
I was also sometimes confuse due to the lack of information the game give you, for instance for the "good" and "bad" boxes, it's unclear what are the real effect of them without an explanation text poping up in the ui.
Overall, a very enjoyable game! Congratulations
(You can see me playing this game for the first time on the vod https://youtu.be/lXUmif8KKxM?t=1m10s )
Not immediately obvious that you can get different goals if you play again unless you've read the full description here. Some mission objectives were considerably more interesting than others. Great entry!
In which the heroes are trapped in a cyberspace and the computer force them to complete random tasks in different virtual worlds.
the gameplay mechanics are very interesting and innovative. Graphics and sound are doin' just fine.
It's very difficult, but not impossible to beat the game ;)
I've noticed a little thing:
The text in the Objectives and Conditions panel seems blurred. I have the same issue in my game, and while investigating it I've found out that unity renders blurred text when the position or size of the game object or parent game object contains decimal places. This might be the cause.
A couple of possible improvements I could suggest: (1) Enemies don't seem to have i-frames even though they do flash, so you can hack them down really quickly. They could probably afford to be a little tougher too. I liked the range of animations on them a lot though. (2) As mentioned earlier in the thread there were a few bugs, although one I noticed is that sometimes you enter doors while not walking toward them (just by getting close enough, as though there's a square hitbox right in front but it doesn't check whether you're walking "north" w.r.t. the camera).
Thanks a lot for the cool and really interesting submission! Great luck on the rest of the LD and on your thesis submission. Hope you enjoy the rest of your LD and we see you again! :D
The procedural generation of cubic worlds is interesting but after seeing a couple it felt like every world was the same aside from their texture and what assortment of random doors or objects appeared. Different objects and enemies unique to a particular type of world (ie - ice) would add a feeling of each world being special in its own way; the enemies could use have their appearance and an attack (to add to the challenge and avoid the feeling of "oh, just another block enemy") randomly chosen based on the world type.
http://imgur.com/a/Hdq4B
It is a very innovative game. Tough, but addictive. Overall, nice work. :slight_smile:
Rate me also https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/survival-game
This was really neat with how you handled rotations, but I got a little lost. I think it might be worth compressing the gameplay down a little and having the player's actions be a bit more guided. Good entry!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjIIPVrvYI
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hype-time