Throwing Science Out The Window! by SimplePotential
The lab monkey's have broken lose and are throwing science out the window! You must save the science in order to win the game. But be careful, there is only so much space in your truck to haul it back to the safety of the garage.
The more you are carrying the slower you accelerate and if you are too full your max speed will be reduced as well. So it is best to to empty before you get too full. If you miss science, it will reduce your science score. If you hit -100%, you lose. Save 100% science and you win!
You can tell how full you are to an extent by the color of your truck. Green is not full, Red is really full, Grey is completely full.
I managed to get in one bonus item, it is the atom looking science that comes flying out. You can store up to 3 of these bonus items. Use the Shift key or Fire3 button on your controller to use the bonus. This will dart you back to the garage super fast. Very useful when you have a massive load. If you don't use your bonuses and capture more of them, you will get a large score bonus (not science bonus).
Use the Left Ctrl key or Fire1 button on your controller to brake. Keep in mind though that you'll have to re-accelerate.
Things I didn't get too: - High Scores - More bonus items - Actual monkey's throwing science. - Animated truck... He's a little static and boring, sorry.
There are probably a few bugs. I completed everything in the game myself and that is why you get terrible art assets :)
I feel decently good about the sound this time around. The game itself is meeting most of what I expected to get to so I'm pretty happy about that too.
I'm trying out DropBox for the Source and Executable this time around. Play the HTML5 version on itch.io.
FULL SCREEN RECOMMENDED.
Tools: - Unity - Paint.NET - Bosca Ceoil - BRFX - Audacity
Known Issues: - HTML5 version the bonus pickup sound has a weird click after it. - Non-Full screen runs will cause title image to be cropped.
Notes about Non-Windows/Non-HTML5 Builds: - I do not have a Linux or MAC and thus cannot support or test these builds. - Hopefully it all just works. If not, the HTML5 version should work in most/all modern browsers.
Ratings
| Overall | 634th | 2.829⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 545th | 2.871⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 586th | 2.714⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 663th | 2.662⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 653th | 2.343⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 481th | 2.514⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
This truck is hard to manage...
Nice little game. I feel, that it would be nicer for the truck to catch things only at it's rear part, to make it a bit harder.
The pitch is great though. It would be funny to add some monkey sounds in there :)
Good job.
Nice mechanics, challenging, and easy to understand. My only criticism would be that the car controls are bit sporadic and slidey.
@conorod I agree that the sound gets repetitive. Definitely not my strong point. The truck controls were on purpose, note that you can break using the left ctrl key. It was incredibly easy to play when the truck didn't have the deceleration portion but I may have overdid it.
On one hand, they're weird and infuriating. On the other, the more i play it the better I get.
As others have stated, the music loop is a bit short and gets on your nerves after a while; but that's standard fare for compo.
The info dump of controls/rules at the beginning is a bit hard to mentally parse. I know it's LD and time is the enemy, but in the future consider teaching the player the rules as they play; so for example once they collect a few science, flash a little sign on the garage telling them to drop it off. The controls themselves were also all over the place from what one usually expects, so it just added to the list of things I had to read/remember before going in.
Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)
the music loop is also way too short and got on my nerves pretty fast.
As for the controls, I'm still not getting that part. I'm good with people not liking it but I'm not getting the "why" so that I can improve it. I'm using some pretty standard accel and decel code but did fudge it a bit because the game was incredibly easy when there was almost no acceleration or deceleration. Both accel and decel are also effected by your total load, where it gets slower to accelerate and deceleration is harder. There is a break control as well. The controls are also meant to be something you get better at so you can win faster.
Good feedback, just would like a bit more on the controls especially for future projects.
1. The car physics felt very weird - like you would keep momentum when you changed directions from forwards to backwards but not vice versa (or you'd lose some momentum that way). This made it hard to slow down without using the brake for the precision adjustments to catch stuff.
2. I think having the monkeys there (even if their animation is two or three frames) to telegraph when stuff is thrown would be incredibly helpful. As it is, it's impossible to tell when there's going to be enough of a break to drop off the science. Instead, I had to rely on the boost to reliably get back without missing too much science.
3. The throws felt pretty random - without any indicators of where they might go, you just had to accept that you were going to miss some. It would be nice if they kinda followed patterns such that you could catch them all if you were experienced, but it feels kinda unfair as it is.
But like I said, this is a start to a fun game. Well done within the time limit!
On #2 & #3, this was actually something that was planned and I just ran out of time. I was going to have a monkey show up and the bigger the monkey, the more likely he would throw it further to give you an idea of where it might get thrown. They were also going to occasionally jump out and attack or something. Throws are more or less random right now. The mass of the different science items are different and they have a range of power that is thrown behind them (plus the window they come out of changes things a bit).
Excellent feedback, thank you!
But the gameplay could be improved. The car was too difficult to get to the destination I wanted. Maybe the acc was not high enough. This made the whole game difficult and frustrating.