America 2018 by Antti Tiihonen

A bleak and dystopian FPS. You need to collect stars to gain score but the more you do so, the more monsters will be spawned!
PS. The monsters are definitely up to no good :(
Controls: WASD and left mouse button.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkcj12wyRhA
Engine: Unity
3d modeling: Houdini + custom painting tools for generating lowpoly meshes.
2d: Photoshop. Although there's only like 3 or 4 textures in the game...
Music and SFX: Ableton Live with a handful of VSTs and some trusted presets.
Post-compo update: WebGL build added
Notes: - Depending on browser, the mouse look might have a limited rotation. If using the fullscreen mode doesn't fix this, downloading the desktop version is recommended. - There's a gap somewhere on the outside wall which lets the player fall outside the world. When encountered, the game needs to be restarted. Oops! :slightsmile: - The AI gets stuck on the walls frequently. :dizzyface: - Mouse sensitivity or inverty Y cannot be adjusted :slight_frown:
Feel free to say hello on Twitter :wave: : https://twitter.com/antti_tiihonen
| HTML5 (web) | https://peeba.itch.io/america-2018 |
| Source code | https://www.dropbox.com/s/an7216tfw1adyj4/LD40.zip?dl=0 |
| Other (document) | https://soundcloud.com/john-peeba/ld40-music/s-bc4Y3 |
| Windows | https://peeba.itch.io/america-2018 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/america-2018 |
Ratings
| Overall | 123th | 3.761⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 176th | 3.614⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 554th | 2.682⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 291th | 3.534⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 58th | 4.102⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 17th | 4.114⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 315th | 2.763⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 32th | 3.907⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
It achieves so much with so little and looks so darn stylish to boot.
The controls felt a little bit weird at times (a little like sliding but not really) but it didn't detract from the experience for me and almost contributed to the atmosphere a bit.
I'm gonna bookmark this so I can give you some good review scores when scoring unlocks :thumbsup:
PS: My socre is 1189
AI Path-finding could use a little more work, or it's on purpose left that way? Anyway it has made the game not that hard in a good manner.
The only slight immersion breaker: (maybe webgl only?) the "invisible" mouse gets stuck at the edges of the screen, preventing me from turning further, which is a little bit problematic if there is a monster coming from that direction ^^
@11tomi12 Good call, I somehow managed to completely forget about that. Inverse Y too :)
@tmpxyz It's bad, yeah :). Once a monster sees you for the first time, it'll try to walk directly towards you without any pathfinding.
@likitus Could be browser specific since it doesn't happen to me (Chrome on Windows). A fullscreen button should be available in the corner of thhe webgl player and if all else fails, the standalone Windows build shouldn't have this issue.
But you can't rotate 360°? The camera got stuck at about 270° and I had to rotate back. Because of that the monsters got me! ;)
(I played the web-version)
The music and sounds were great, the atmosphere is moody, and the shooting is satisfying. Amazing entry! Thanks for sharing
Really best music in a game so far. I also think the "sketching into reality" effect of building level elements is really well done, and has great synergies with the art effect.
The shooter mechanics are very simple and the controls are just shy of being snappy and juicy enough to give you that Quake vibe that the music and the pentagrams single handedly do.
But dyamn, that synth. 5 goosebumps out of 5 for audio.
It could have been interesting to foresee several types of collectable objects bringing more varieties in the effects of monsters' spawning.
Great game overall :)
I really liked this! With a more interesting level design and more advanced AI it could be a great leaderboard-oriented game.
I love the art and the lighting you used.
The music is great as well
I'm not sure if this is a bug or it was intended, the HTML 5 version has a behavior where the direction you're looking at changes spontaneously into unpredictable areas, making it very misleading to understand where you are looking at.
Also, one last thing, the map is great, it feels like a maze :) but be careful about filling in holes. On my second play through, I was hiding in corners and ended up falling off the map because one of the walls had an opening
Good job! :)
Hiscore of 1998.
Love the juice in this, the music was entrancing and the art was squishy and evil and consistent. I really felt like you made a cohesive world here way above the range a typical compo game can approach. Outstanding!
Of course the concept of the gameplay was not fresh, but that's not what you were after here.
Regarding the nuances of the game feel, most importantly the act of shooting felt satisfying. The randomization of the spray was a really nice touch that gave your excellent visuals some room to breathe. Moving was good when it was nonstop, but there was a bit of weirdness in the deceleration. At first I thought it was simply a matter of decelerating too slowly... but what happens is stranger than that. It seems that the motion glides a bit more past where you let go, then instantly stops. But only once you've already moved for a certain amount of time. I couldn't quite feel out the math.
Also I wished the death of the enemies was a bit different, they seemed to turn away and linger a moment before dying, but it was not instant satisfying feedback when the fatal shot hit them. I was overshooting them a while not realizing quite yet that they had already died.
Lastly on the nitpick list, I fell off the map and had no way to restart better than refreshing the browser.
Coming back to the best part, the art and sound! I can't say how much I like the music, and I especially like that it feels comfortable coming down to nothing, like it wants to be music in a video game, instead of trying to be so "interesting" to take my full attention like album music might.
Loved that the blocks were empty inside, spotted, and rotting/cracked. Later when I pushed the limits of the gameplay, I came to REALLY appreciate the sky-bound sparkles over the stars, and I frantically wove between hordes of enemies.
I really enjoyed this one, and I'm impressed by the look you achieved.
One issue I noticed while playing your game is that the audio was only on my right side. I then went back and found out that the problem is something with my computer. yay...
Anyways, I'm not finding much to comment on about this game. I think it was a super solid LD entry. With the limited time given you split your attention across all of the important elements and didn't let anything get dropped. Good job!
@thygrrr Thanks! All the synth sounds are made with U-He Hive. It's not the most feature packed of all the VST synths out there but it's easy to get it sounding good.
@drnoir Wow, awesome! Thank you very much for the video! :thumbsup:
@pkenney Very insightful and detailed review. Thanks! :slight_smile:
..And sorry everyone for leaving a gap in the map. Ooops! :smile:
Great job!

I felt like the difficulty didn't ramp up properly. It was way too easy to dodge even a large pack of the monsters because you needed to be pretty much standing on the same pixel with them to get hurt. The constant health pickups (which I'm not even sure where they came from) also made it kinda easy and lessened the consequences of actually getting hit. They should get less frequent the further you get.
I also feel like the shooting should have some kind of downside to not allow the player to be shooting all the time. Sure, the shooting sound made it harder to hear the monsters but once you got far enough, couldn't really rely on the sounds anyway.
And as you yourself said, the AI is dumb and gets stuck easily. That would actually benefit the gameplay if they could unstuck themselves when gaining the line of sight to the player. Would get some cool jump scares when going around a corner and suddenly a monster that was stuck there just bounces on you.
Good job!
I was considering adding reloading to the gun to make the player be more careful with shooting but then I "forgot" about it once I started running out of steam when working on the game :slight_smile:. The AI getting unstuck once player is seen is a pretty neat idea! It would feel like they were sort of intentionally ambushing the player and would definitely add more flavor than just fixing the original bug of them getting stuck.
The odds are that I won't return to developing this game but the ideas are very interesting regardless. Thanks again! :thumbsup:
Anyways, good to see a fellow Antti here. I've done LD three times now and seen at least one every time. There's a lot of us... :dizzy_face:
:thumbsup: The music and visuals fit together very nicely. I really liked the spark/light beacons that showed you where the stars were, it kept me from wondering aimlessly, but didn't feel out of place like the FPS go to follow the compass needle.
:point_right: The framerate seemed a bit lower than it should have been. If you had had some time to optimize things I think the game (WebGL) would have ran a bit smoother. **Edit:** I think the usage of the theme could have been improved, since it is fairly standard for FPS monsters to get harder as your score increases. ^_^
:bug: I'm not sure if I had to reload or something, but on the WebGL build in chrome, on my laptop with a touchpad, I would occasionally lose the ability to shoot. That was alright though, it just caused me to run around without shotting much, and it was an avoid the guys game.
:star: All in all, great work, this game felt very coherent!
@hitchh1k3r Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, seems like the webGL build isn't as solid as I first thought. At least it's a lot better than a year ago since I last used it. I spent absolutely zero effort in optimizing things so I'm happy that the game even runs in browser. :smile: