Not the Pixels! by erikkire

[raw]
made by erikkire for LD 41 (COMPO)

Not the Pixels!

In the near future, pixels left their screens and went rogue. The current situation is dangerous and we have to defend ourselves. In this Top-Down Shooter, Tower Defence, Clicker with some rythm elements (towers try to keep a rythm) you have to defend your base using your ship to intercept the threat. Build defences and wall off the incoming horde. Also, you have to gather supplies and prepare the equipment by intense clicking. You will face different opponents using various tactics. Learn their weaknesses and prepare for more.

Controls:

While in air (Pick up supply boxes by colliding with them. Deliver them by landing in the base)

A/D - Rotate your ship

W/S - Increase/decrease your speed

Space - Fire

Left mouse button - Build a tower

Right mouse button - Build a wall

While landed (Land by approaching the landing strip in a straight angle. Lift by pressing any button)

Left mouse button - Click to convert supplies (orange bar) to the material used to build towers and walls (yellow bar)

Extra:

Shift - Activate aim

Ctrl - Hold down to rotate the ship slower

Good to know:

The pixels will eventually break walls Towers will only work against small pixels. Larger pixels require ship bullets to be removed Landing could be tricky, practice, you have to land straight

Game made within 48 hours, written in C++/OpenGL using CodeBlocks. Sound made and edited with Bfxr and Audacity. Music made with Rytmik. Drawing made with Paint.net. Other tools used, OpenAL, SOIL.

A Ludum dare 41 compo submission by Erik Hallin

screen1.png screen2.png screen3.png

Ratings

Overall 503th 3.143⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Fun 517th 2.976⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 440th 3.167⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Theme 551th 3.119⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 542th 2.738⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Audio 361th 2.767⭐ 17🧑‍⚖️
Humor 395th 2.472⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Mood 359th 3⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 22🗳️ 16🗨️

Feedback

incobalt
24. Apr 2018 · 00:04 UTC
The game window is actually too tall for my screen, so I can't properly play the game :(
🎤 erikkire
24. Apr 2018 · 20:43 UTC
@incobalt, yes the game requires a screen height of 768 pixels, sorry. Still possible to play, just ignore the top/botton part.
impiaaa
04. May 2018 · 05:30 UTC
Windows detected it as a virus (Trojan:Win32/Emelent.B!cl) and deleted it before I could play :(
StarzzDrak
04. May 2018 · 15:35 UTC
I think you deserve more rates :) and the game is fun
🎤 erikkire
05. May 2018 · 22:49 UTC
@impiaaa No virus here. This is the problem with not using the standard game engines. I wrote this from scratch without any engines. I guess I have to pay Microsoft enough to not list all my software as virus... :)
saturn007
06. May 2018 · 00:05 UTC
Shucks, I don't have windows
impiaaa
06. May 2018 · 00:12 UTC
Okay, I restarted and it was fine, for some reason.

Neat use of you engine to handle so many entities. But as for gameplay, I found it really hard to land, the clicking felt pointless (could have just been a timer, clicker games let you unlock those at least), and resources were very scarce once the pixels started to become a threat. Nice work regardless.
__init__.py
06. May 2018 · 02:22 UTC
Is your game supposed to have audio? I didn't hear any.

If it isn't, you can opt out of audio ratings in the settings.
nikincz
06. May 2018 · 10:31 UTC
Where should I click to convert resources to the building material? Wherever I tried to click, it was just building towers.
Siuler LM
06. May 2018 · 11:05 UTC
It's a bit hard to control it but the idea is fine. Nevertheless, since you did your own engine, it's a big work!
Congratulations!
🎤 erikkire
06. May 2018 · 20:13 UTC
@init-py Yes, sound and music is there. Maybe you have a problem with OpenAL. Could try and download and reinstall that.
🎤 erikkire
06. May 2018 · 20:16 UTC
@siuler-lm Click anywhere on the screen while the ship is landed to convert resources
Slashee the Cow
07. May 2018 · 06:36 UTC
I wish you hadn't required the click to convert resources - that just seems like pointless busy work (and I got tired of it - and my finger got sore - _real_ quick) - I'd have just set it so that while you're landed orange is converted slowly into yellow, that way you'd still have the genre combination of shooter/TD, and you'd be forcing people to make the tactical decision of how long to wait for resources vs. needing to be in the air to shoot stuff and place towers (which I think would be great if towers were built under your ship instead of where you click, it's sort of hard to keep track of the ship and the mouse cursor, plus I think it would force the TD into the shooter part more).

Also, is it that you can't land if you're not carrying a crate, or is it just really easy to take off in the same button press for when you land? Cause I was having a lot of trouble landing when I wasn't carrying a crate, and I needed to land to convert orange into yellow (because there only so much I could do at a time before thinking to myself "I'm sick of this").

Also, I think it would be better if you split up the instruction screen into more than one screen so it's not just a wall of text (my eyes just didn't know where to look and it was pretty hard to read).

All that being said - once I got the hang of it I did have a bit of fun, and it's certainly an interesting combination of genres, so excluding my complaints (which are mostly fairly minor, I'm just cursed with the innate ability to spend far more words on what I don't like about something than what I do, even when I generally like it overall, like in this case) it's a good entry.
🎤 erikkire
07. May 2018 · 19:10 UTC
@Slashee-the-Cow Thanks for the extensive comment. You can land at any time, you just have to land straight and if you push any buttons the plane will lift directly. Probably tricky in the beginning (I should have made this easier). The clicking was to add a sort of minigame to force the player to "work" for the resources and make the player having to plan times for resource conversion and fighting of the enemies.
TheCze
07. May 2018 · 20:04 UTC
This one is really fun, I like the simplistic pixel approach to the tower defense! I liked the idea with the clicking to convert resources but it would have been good if a single click converted more resources (like... 10 times or something like that).