Photagogue by ChuiGum
*Headphones Recommended*
*If you're going to play the game right here, then click the Fullscreen button.
Photagogue is my 9th Ludum Dare. If you were here for the last Ludum Dare, I made Arc, and just recently I submitted it to IndieCade.
Photagogue is a Pixelated Beat 'em up game. Why is the game called Photagogue (FO-TUH-GOG)? Read the story for the game and you'll see why.
Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to draw the Time Machine House, so that's why the house says "[Insert Time Machine House Here]"
INSTRUCTIONS: Left and Right Arrow Keys to move, Up Arrow Key to Jump (wall jump off walls, you can keep pressing Up as long as you're on a wall), and Z to Fight. You must kill all dinos to go further.
TIP: It's easier to fight the Dinos while moving.
If you've streamed this game on Twitch already, please let me know in the comments.
Story:
July, 2041: [Two guys in a small house]. Middle-Aged Scientist shows his young Assistant, Cycle, vials of an element that can harness light, and lead to Time Travel: Photagogue. He then explains how the Time Machine he made works and how the Photagogue goes with it. Cycle then stares him into the eye, pulls out a gun, says, "Why didn't you save him?! You could've saved him!" "You know why Cycle! I told you--" and then Cycle shoots him in the chest. The Scientist pulls out a small glass box with a button in, opens it, and presses the button as he starts to tear up. The set of vials of the Photogogue explodes. Cycle then shoots him more times in the chest till he collapses. After the Scientist has his last breath, Cycle heads over to the broken vials, and he's furious. As he walks back to the dead body, he stumbles across a glass cup on the floor, filled with some of the remains of the Photagogue. He sighs in relief. He then continues to walk to the dead body, and checks the Scientist's pockets for anything significant. He finds a piece of paper with a list that the Scientist has been hiding, in his left pocket. The list consists of Times and Locations, and is titled: Photagogue Checkpoints. Cycle desires for more fuel for the Time Machine, so he looks for one of the easiest Checkpoints: A mining site located in the Yucatan Peninsula, 2016. Before he goes on his expedition, he puts on a ski-mask. He's now ready to go, so he pours the remains of the Photagogue into the machine, presses a button, and the whole house rumbles. Then a loud noise goes off, and all of a sudden the year is 2016 and the house is near a mining site in the Yucatan Peninsula. Cycle holsters his gun, and walks out of the house. He heads off to the mines, and sees a guy mining slowly, with a huge smile on his face. Cycle sees a bright green rock in the miners pocket. He assumes it's a rock consisted of Photagogue, so he follows the miner as he leaves. When the miner is walking in a secluded area, Cycle comes up from behind, shoots him in the head, grabs the rock out of his pocket and runs off back to the house. He then melts the rock to get a liquid substance of the Photagogue. Since the Time Machine can also teleport, with less Photagogue needed than time traveling, Cycle pours a little bit of it into the Machine and teleports to California (Subject to change). He can't go back to all these locations alone, it's not safe. He wants someone else to do his dirty work for him. Cycle then goes to bed and sleeps.
Next day, scene cuts to a girl with the name of Rose, in her mid-twenties, in her apartment on the phone, saying "See you soon, I love you, bye." She walks out of her apartment, towards her car, and out of nowhere Cycle (with masked-face) puts a bag over her head, a gag around her mouth, and puts her in the backseat of a car, tied up, and drives off.
Same day, scene cuts to a well-dressed guy with the name of Kane, in his mid-twenties, in his apartment (different apartment complex). He walks out towards his car, and again Cycle puts a bag over his head, a gag around his mouth, and puts him next to the girl in the backseat of his car, tied up. Cycle then drives off to the Time Machine House, takes them both out of the car and brings them both in the house. He puts them both in fold out chairs, but puts the girl in the corner of the room and the guy in the center. Cycle takes the bag off Kane's head. Cycle says to him, "You're gonna need to do something for me. Well, many things but--" "Why do you figure that?" Cycle goes over to the girl, takes the bag off her head and says "Well you seem like a nice guy, I'm pretty sure you'll comply." "Don't you touch her!" "Nah I won't touch her, this may though *pulls out a knife*." "I'm listening..." "Good. Now shut up. Ok so what I'm about to tell you may sound like a joke but... What you're sitting in... *He scoffs* Is a time machine." "What?..." Kane says. "In 65.5 Million BC, in the Yucatan Peninsula, the element Photagogue was discovered. The element was inside the asteroids that lead to the massacre of the dinosaurs. You see this empty vial? You're going to go back there, retrieve the Photagogue, and come back here in 2016. Got it?" Kane is speechless. "The dinos may be a little nippy so be careful, because this isn't your only mission. Well, you just press this button when you're ready and you'll be off. Your girl and I will walk out of the house and wait for you to come back. Remember, retrieve the element, come back here, to this date, and the girl doesn't die." "What the hell is going on?!" "Hey! Retrieve the element and nobody dies, you hear?! Now again, I already set the date and location in here, you just press this button when you're ready. Have a good one." Cycle walks out the house with the girl. Kane breathes heavy in awe of what had just happened. "Well... No time to lose." He then presses the button, and it's now 65.5 million BC, in the Yucatan Peninsula.
There's more to the story after all the missions Kane has to do, but you'll have to wait till the game is complete (a long time).
Tools:
Language: HTML5 and JavaScript
Graphics: MS Paint (Yeah I know, I’m going to start looking at Pyxel Edit)
Audio: FL Studio & sfxr
Level Editor: Ogmo Editor
Follow me on Twitter: @ccolongames
Become a Patron: patreon.com/ccolongames
Check out my past LDs or some other games I've made, at: ccolongames.com
*If you're going to play the game right here, then click the Fullscreen button.
Photagogue is my 9th Ludum Dare. If you were here for the last Ludum Dare, I made Arc, and just recently I submitted it to IndieCade.
Photagogue is a Pixelated Beat 'em up game. Why is the game called Photagogue (FO-TUH-GOG)? Read the story for the game and you'll see why.
Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to draw the Time Machine House, so that's why the house says "[Insert Time Machine House Here]"
INSTRUCTIONS: Left and Right Arrow Keys to move, Up Arrow Key to Jump (wall jump off walls, you can keep pressing Up as long as you're on a wall), and Z to Fight. You must kill all dinos to go further.
TIP: It's easier to fight the Dinos while moving.
If you've streamed this game on Twitch already, please let me know in the comments.
Story:
July, 2041: [Two guys in a small house]. Middle-Aged Scientist shows his young Assistant, Cycle, vials of an element that can harness light, and lead to Time Travel: Photagogue. He then explains how the Time Machine he made works and how the Photagogue goes with it. Cycle then stares him into the eye, pulls out a gun, says, "Why didn't you save him?! You could've saved him!" "You know why Cycle! I told you--" and then Cycle shoots him in the chest. The Scientist pulls out a small glass box with a button in, opens it, and presses the button as he starts to tear up. The set of vials of the Photogogue explodes. Cycle then shoots him more times in the chest till he collapses. After the Scientist has his last breath, Cycle heads over to the broken vials, and he's furious. As he walks back to the dead body, he stumbles across a glass cup on the floor, filled with some of the remains of the Photagogue. He sighs in relief. He then continues to walk to the dead body, and checks the Scientist's pockets for anything significant. He finds a piece of paper with a list that the Scientist has been hiding, in his left pocket. The list consists of Times and Locations, and is titled: Photagogue Checkpoints. Cycle desires for more fuel for the Time Machine, so he looks for one of the easiest Checkpoints: A mining site located in the Yucatan Peninsula, 2016. Before he goes on his expedition, he puts on a ski-mask. He's now ready to go, so he pours the remains of the Photagogue into the machine, presses a button, and the whole house rumbles. Then a loud noise goes off, and all of a sudden the year is 2016 and the house is near a mining site in the Yucatan Peninsula. Cycle holsters his gun, and walks out of the house. He heads off to the mines, and sees a guy mining slowly, with a huge smile on his face. Cycle sees a bright green rock in the miners pocket. He assumes it's a rock consisted of Photagogue, so he follows the miner as he leaves. When the miner is walking in a secluded area, Cycle comes up from behind, shoots him in the head, grabs the rock out of his pocket and runs off back to the house. He then melts the rock to get a liquid substance of the Photagogue. Since the Time Machine can also teleport, with less Photagogue needed than time traveling, Cycle pours a little bit of it into the Machine and teleports to California (Subject to change). He can't go back to all these locations alone, it's not safe. He wants someone else to do his dirty work for him. Cycle then goes to bed and sleeps.
Next day, scene cuts to a girl with the name of Rose, in her mid-twenties, in her apartment on the phone, saying "See you soon, I love you, bye." She walks out of her apartment, towards her car, and out of nowhere Cycle (with masked-face) puts a bag over her head, a gag around her mouth, and puts her in the backseat of a car, tied up, and drives off.
Same day, scene cuts to a well-dressed guy with the name of Kane, in his mid-twenties, in his apartment (different apartment complex). He walks out towards his car, and again Cycle puts a bag over his head, a gag around his mouth, and puts him next to the girl in the backseat of his car, tied up. Cycle then drives off to the Time Machine House, takes them both out of the car and brings them both in the house. He puts them both in fold out chairs, but puts the girl in the corner of the room and the guy in the center. Cycle takes the bag off Kane's head. Cycle says to him, "You're gonna need to do something for me. Well, many things but--" "Why do you figure that?" Cycle goes over to the girl, takes the bag off her head and says "Well you seem like a nice guy, I'm pretty sure you'll comply." "Don't you touch her!" "Nah I won't touch her, this may though *pulls out a knife*." "I'm listening..." "Good. Now shut up. Ok so what I'm about to tell you may sound like a joke but... What you're sitting in... *He scoffs* Is a time machine." "What?..." Kane says. "In 65.5 Million BC, in the Yucatan Peninsula, the element Photagogue was discovered. The element was inside the asteroids that lead to the massacre of the dinosaurs. You see this empty vial? You're going to go back there, retrieve the Photagogue, and come back here in 2016. Got it?" Kane is speechless. "The dinos may be a little nippy so be careful, because this isn't your only mission. Well, you just press this button when you're ready and you'll be off. Your girl and I will walk out of the house and wait for you to come back. Remember, retrieve the element, come back here, to this date, and the girl doesn't die." "What the hell is going on?!" "Hey! Retrieve the element and nobody dies, you hear?! Now again, I already set the date and location in here, you just press this button when you're ready. Have a good one." Cycle walks out the house with the girl. Kane breathes heavy in awe of what had just happened. "Well... No time to lose." He then presses the button, and it's now 65.5 million BC, in the Yucatan Peninsula.
There's more to the story after all the missions Kane has to do, but you'll have to wait till the game is complete (a long time).
Tools:
Language: HTML5 and JavaScript
Graphics: MS Paint (Yeah I know, I’m going to start looking at Pyxel Edit)
Audio: FL Studio & sfxr
Level Editor: Ogmo Editor
Follow me on Twitter: @ccolongames
Become a Patron: patreon.com/ccolongames
Check out my past LDs or some other games I've made, at: ccolongames.com
| Web | https://c-games.itch.io/ld35 |
| Source | https://www.dropbox.com/s/upjcci7hi5082ap/photagogue.zip?dl=0 |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=22408 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 47% | 1248 |
| Overall | 2.99 | 661 |
| Audio | 3.28 | 210 |
| Fun | 2.99 | 569 |
| Graphics | 3.46 | 279 |
| Humor | 3.05 | 176 |
| Innovation | 2.30 | 864 |
| Mood | 2.92 | 481 |
| Theme | 1.92 | 924 |
I was rather looking forward to trying out the dino punching game after seeing the gif in your blog post, so I'll write this down so I can remember to check later if it's working.
I'll try again later.
nice funny little game!
Still planning to come back and take a look at it later, as it seems others have now been able to get it to play.
I really like this game! The controls are clean (wall jumping is really tough though...). The music was nice, did you make it yourself? And the art was cute!
There's nothing better than punching dino's, and flip jumping!
Execution was great, good job :)
I like this fights with dinos :P
There's something quite satisfying about watching that final punch send a dino flying.
The controls are really nice. I see a lot of platformers with really bad controls here on LD. But you've nailed it!
Overall, fun!
Auto Saves before and after certain parts would probably work - by the 4th time I die on the dinos after the spikes I'm pretty much "kool that was fun" and quit.
DEFINITELY go to itchi.io and find the embed link for the game to use instead, it will look a lot better on the Ludum Are site.
The dino in the third wave kinda got stuck in the air and I died trying to jump up and punch him :/
Music is really great!
Everything seems to work though, good job. :)
Also I couldn't see any shapeshifting elements
But punching the dinos out of the screen feels really awesome
Besides that, it's a good platform game, with a great music. Funny and enjoyable.
All that being said, more frequent checkpoints or at least some way to recover health would be appreciated.
Looks good, although I had no idea when the dinos would hurt me. It was hard to fight them because I would always take damage at each one because there was no way I could tell to avoid getting hurt. Maybe I'm just missing something...
The backstory, however, is WAAAAAY too long and confusing. The game is simplistic (with no way to heal health), and there's a game-breaking bug where I get stuck in the floor after a jump.
Overall, decent work.
I had some collision bugs that led me inside the platform, and made me restart the game.
Congratulations! Your entry was good :) want to see more of it.
Any way to heal yourself. :'(
Played briefly on stream @ 2:30:10 : http://www.hitbox.tv/video/991443
Congratulations with the care fixing the little bugs man!
Update: Now I know, that the falling is a bug :) . Nice game :)
Music and graphics were very nice though - the background in particular added a lot to the game's aesthetic, and the character animations also worked well - the mid-air animation was fun to watch.
Definitely a fun game though - would stream again!
nice game... .funny too xD the controls could use a better layout... other than that, great game, nice job!
I thought I would be ok punching dinos in the butt, but sometimes I would still get hurt so I would either make it more clear the dino can still hit you, or have it so you only get hurt when near the head/claws.
Climbing walls felt a bit awkward to me, usually I expect the player to already jump in the opposite direction when wall jumping.
Restricting player movement if they didn't kill a dino is ok, but doesn't make much sense world-wise, wouldn't the player be able to still move past that area? Maybe if there was a barrier or something that appeared to let you know you couldn't proceed.
Overall good job!
The music got annoying very quickly and didn't fit the scene/action.
Sound effects were minimal, tired out very quickly as well and didn't telegraph any extra information. So fortunately I could mute the game after hearing everything once.
Controls were extremely clunky. Both holding attack and jump only worked if I didn't hit anything else in between and seemed more of an accident than deliberate design feature (?). The wall jump chimney was particularly frustrating as naturally you'd try to jump over the lowest spike wall and start to wall jump from there. Since you barely cannot jump high enough you have to jump onto the left wall first and then carefully slide the not spiked sections up and down between wall jumps. At some point I just started to jump tap up the left wall. Invincibility frames make the penalty for going past spikes quickly so low that there is little reason to put up with this. Also wall jumps generally feel a lot better if you take away x control from the player for a bit and auto push away from the wall (better for a dedicated button instead of up direction though). Naturally that wouldn't allow for yo-yo wall slide sections, but those are awkward anyway.
As you can see at the end of my recorded run (https://youtu.be/NRTTJFzBJfk) spikes also don't do anything to prevent me from jumping into walls ...
The worst offender on the whole game however were the dinosaur attacks. I still don't know how or when they are active. Sometimes I even seem to get them stuck inside an attack action and thus take as many hits as I dish out. You've put some effort into giving them walking and getting hit frames, but absolutely nothing telegraphs when they are attacking (apart from the fact that they sometimes animate faster and rush towards you - but that never correlated with actually getting attacked). And this is way more important than the other animations. Walking animation could've been scrapped for the purposes of this game and getting hit could've been indicated by blinking much like the player.
A colour (brightness/hue/...) change to indicate when dinosaurs damage you would've already done the job. Better would've been at least a single distinct frame that has a different shape to all the other frames (walking/getting hit and so on are just variations of the same shape). Anything that can be recognized very quickly.
Is the shapeshift theme hidden in there?
Pretty sweet music! The controls felt a little untight and the fighting mechanic lacked feedback.
I didn't really see how it connected to the theme either.
The platforming mechanics felt pretty good, but could probably use some polish.
Cool sunglasses! :]
The controls are a weak point though. Wall jumping feels a little sluggish and the punches lack a bit of oomph. Maybe with better/more sound effects this could be remedied.
Anyway, I played a dino punching game, that was worth the time spent.
I didn't feel like I could consistently plan how to not take damage from the dinos. Because it lunges forward sometimes the punch would land me in the spikes accidentally, whoops.
The audio worked fine for me and the loop was even a little catchy. The jump sfx may be the weakest part but didn't hurt the ears so it was ok.
It's been mentioned in a couple of other comments but I also thought the spike placement was a bit "off" sometimes. With the floaty and controls I couldn't really time my jumps right so I didn't have much incentive to avoid the spikes so much as to just roll with getting damage. I think overall the controls could stand to be tightened up, and if the floaty movement is important then maybe the level design and dinosaur behavior could be tweaked to focus less on jumping puzzles and more on close combat.
Well I suck at platformers, but its a nice game and i had fun punching dinos in their face...
Good work!