LD43: Super Space Sacrifice by LMB

[raw]
made by LMB for LD 43 (COMPO)

Cross the galaxy, kill a lamb.

title_screen.jpg

The Bork robot race is so powerful they can destroy the entire galaxy in a second. But they are not evil -- they just ask for a sacrifice once every century.

The last one was 99 years ago.

Your quest is to reach the Borks and to make the sacrifice and give humans one more century of existence. Legends say you may need to make other sacrifices on your way...

dogfight.jpg

Instructions

  • This is basically a plain and simple shmup: avoid collisions with other things, shot everything that moves.
  • You can equip your ship with different weapons and subsystems:
    • Armor protects against all kinds of damage. As armor is lost, you cannot fix it (but you can replace it with a new armor if you find one).
    • Shields protect against energy weapons (laser and plasma), but not against more physical damage (rockets and collisions). Shields regenerate over time.
    • Engines make your ship move faster.
    • You can find much better weapons than your initial Cheap Laser. You have a total of four weapon slots, but one of them (the bomb bay) is basically useless: bombs were forbidden by the Jupiter Convention and thus you'll not find any in the game. (Or do you think this is just an excuse for "sorry, I didn't have time to implement bombs"?!)
  • If you have available crew members, you can use them to man weapons and subsystems. Manned things work better (faster fire rate, lower armor damage, faster movement, etc)
  • To equip weapons and subsystems and to assign your crew to them, just enter in the pause/inventory menu.

inventory.jpg

  • To find weapons, subsystems and crew members, just kill some enemies. Sometimes they drop the good stuff.
  • Notice that to take things dropped by enemies you need at least one available cargo slot. You can destroy things in the pause/inventory screen.

powerup.jpg

  • Once you get some of this gear, the game should be really easy. In fact, the first few minutes are much harder than the boss fights (which are ridiculously easy). I guess this is a symptom of bad balancing :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

boss.jpg

  • Speaking of bosses, you cannot fight with the last level boss. He might look like an ordinary giant saucer, but in fact he is a Bork. If you a lamb on your cargo bays, you'll automatically sacrifice it and win the game. Otherwise, you'll automatically lose.
  • No biological lambs were harmed to make this game. The one you carry on your ship is a robotic one!

toll.jpg

Controls, in game

  • Move ship: Arrows, WASD, controller D-pad, controller left stick
  • Fire: Space bar, alt, control, shift or the main controller buttons; each one fires a different weapon
  • Pause/inventory screen: F1, pause on keyboard, pause or start button on the controller

Controls, inventory screen

  • Select item: Arrows, controller D-pad, controller left stick
  • For other actions there are on-screen instructions. Just be aware that, in order to swap one equipped item with an item in the cargo slots, you must have the equipped item selected.

Tools * Engine: Godot 3.0.6. * Font: Orbitron, by Matt McInerney, SIL Open Font License 1.1. * Graphics made with Krita. * Sound effects made with sfxr. * Music made with Otomata. * Used a bit of Audacity for sound editing.

Ratings

Overall 452th 2.761⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Fun 481th 2.348⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 496th 2.068⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Theme 467th 2.548⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 439th 2.522⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Audio 289th 2.848⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 327th 2.375⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Mood 427th 2.525⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 29🗳️ 9🗨️

Feedback

organicpencil
04. Dec 2018 · 04:01 UTC
Oh hey, a fellow Godot entry! Couldn't quite figure out the objective, but it's already 5x better than our game. Might try again after the description is updated.
🎤 LMB
05. Dec 2018 · 22:52 UTC
@organicpencil I hopped no one would find my game before I updated the description :slight_smile: Anyway, now it's updated! Will take a look at your entry: I liked the graphics of the title screen! (Serious!)
JLV
06. Dec 2018 · 01:54 UTC
Fun shoot'em up ! Loved how you crammed all the evolving mechanics inside of the basic skeleton of your game.

Pros :
- It's a shmup, with all it's barbarian glory
- Great audio
- The gameplay expands a lot on its initial premise

Cons :
- Bullets are too small, and the game lacks readability in general
- Really hard at the beginning

All in all, great job !
🎤 LMB
06. Dec 2018 · 20:43 UTC
@jlv Thanks for the comments! Some very true advice there!
dry-squid
08. Dec 2018 · 01:04 UTC
TOUGH game! I liked the ship, but it was was so difficult predicting where lasers were coming from. Adding some warp boost would be amazing. Also nice job using godot!
super louwaque
08. Dec 2018 · 14:40 UTC
Damn it's hard ! The game is really complete. Good job !
Noah Barsky
09. Dec 2018 · 05:19 UTC
When the game starts the ship moves automatically downward unless you double press down. The music is just one bar on loop.
Cr0wnS
09. Dec 2018 · 11:11 UTC
Gotta agree that the start was real tough, but it was a nice game that I enjoyed playing for a bit. Sound was a bit loud but maybe that was just my computer. Awesome to see that more Godot entries are popping up!
dob
17. Dec 2018 · 06:04 UTC
I like this kind of game. I agree that the high difficulty at the start (one hit to die, unpredictable alien shooting that is unavoidable, really infrequent player shots and multiple hits to kill enemies) makes it less fun. I died a bunch without getting very far. I also had the key status bug, where down was pressed until I mashed keys to get it unpressed - I think you need to clear your keypressed variables before starting a new game. Good effort - good luck in the compo.
pcmaster
17. Dec 2018 · 10:58 UTC
Hi! I have problems with the difficulty, I cant't kill more than 1 enemy before dying :( I also wasn't quite sure if I can equip the ship differently initially? Can I? I like the sounds/music and also the GFX is alright!
🎤 LMB
18. Dec 2018 · 21:04 UTC
@dob @pcmaster Thanks for playing. The wasn't meant to be that hard, it just came our like this I didn't had much time left for balancing. The only thing I managed to do was to increase the chance of killed enemies to drop power-ups, but since killing an enemy is hard on the first place, I recognize this doesn't help much.
Vinay Rao
18. Dec 2018 · 23:32 UTC
As others have mentioned, it does open with quite a lot of enemy fire. It feels a bit harsh for the first few enemies to soak multiple hits, though perhaps that's just years of conditioning in side scrolling shmups messing with my perception. Once you get through that though it starts to feel better. I found the projectiles a bit hard to see. Nothing a couple of slight changes couldn't fix though.

I like the sacrifice mechanic you've got going with the toll booth thing. Though on my first time encountering them I managed to convince myself that the big purple cubes near the toll gates were the way to pass through rather than the clearly visible passages next to them. Not sure how I managed that one.

The audio is good. A bit on the loud end, but not a whole lot've games have time to make a volume slider when we're scrambling to cram in gameplay mechanics.

Just a few tweaks to the game balance and I think this game would curve out a lot better.

In 48 hours we're often lucky just to get something out at all! A few changes to the enemy health and projectile visuals would go a long way.

It's a solid side-scrolling schmup foundation, so good job!
🎤 LMB
19. Dec 2018 · 20:54 UTC
@vinay-rao Thanks a lot for all the comments, suggestions and detailed description of your experience! Also, nice to see that someone managed to reach the toll (regardless of what happened there)! :smile:
Flying Dog Fish
20. Dec 2018 · 20:20 UTC
This game is too hard, especially because the enemy bullets are practically invisible.
blubberquark
31. Dec 2018 · 18:49 UTC
These bullets are soo small and fast! Make your bullets bigger!