Murder Mitosis by _for_science
Murder Mitosis was made in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare Jam 38 (our very first one). It is a chaotic arena ~~death~~ dish match game for 1-4 players. You play as nano bots, competing to control deadly (but also weirdly cute) microscopic creatures, in a small world that gets more and more crowded as you fight.
The twist is that you slowly lose energy (attacking or getting hit drains your energy even faster). The only way you regain energy is by eating the small gray energy pellets that are strewn about the dish, making this an action game about strategic positioning and board control in a crowded small world. So go play and starve your friends (or our AI if they're not around :upside_down:)
Play the game on itch.io (Windows, Linux, WebGL)
Follow us on Twitter on YouTube and on Facebook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKzk9eatf8
Screenshots
Bugfixes
- Changed the in-game tutorial text.
- Fixed the bug that all music layers (except for percussion) were accidentally set to mute in our automatic music mixer. New music layers are now properly added whenever a player dies.
- Fixed the color highlight when a player eats an energy pellet.
Music Credits
"Ouroboros" and "Danger Storm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Feedback
If you want to learn more, we have written up a brief Postmortem on the development of Murder Mitosis.
Ratings
| Overall | 40th | 4.116⭐ | 148🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 34th | 4.021⭐ | 147🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 31th | 4.048⭐ | 148🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 67th | 4.075⭐ | 149🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 160th | 4.128⭐ | 150🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 221th | 3.08⭐ | 139🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 241th | 3.521⭐ | 142🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 343🗳️ | 184🗨️ |
EDIT: I have just uploaded a slightly modified version that (hopefully) explains stuff in game :D
It's tricky to figure out what is the goal at the beginning (especially the health bar), but after 2~3 games it's super cool!
And the look of the game is simply awesome, I love the blackboard design :smile:
My only questionmark was that I was constantly asking myself why my (health?) bar gets filled up. How does this starving system actually work and why does it refill even if I do almost nothing (like right when you start) ?
Thank you for playing and your great feedback!
*(We'll be back again on Sunday when the judging starts)*
// Rasmus & Isak ([LiquidBrain](https://ldjam.com/users/liquidbrain/))
It would be amusing to see the kind of strategies a vivid multiplayer scene would come up with for something like this. Especially in a 2 vs. 2 match.
At least against the AI it always ends up in the smartest player (me!) using the secondary action at the right time to smother everyone else amidst their own minions. Those merry blobs are adorable and deadly at the same time!
Outright splendid work!
This is a really nicely put together game--original, colorful, interesting, and fun. It's smart how the pressure builds naturally as a mechanic of the gameplay.
I played the WebGL version - it didn't work in Safari (menu was OK, but after starting the game, the screen remained black, only the music+SFX played). Strange... However, it did work in Firefox. Thanks for making such a nice game!
```
TextureFormat 17 is not supported on this platform
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Other than that, this is a great game! Very simple, solid idea, executed well. Graphics are perfect for this, and lucky you to find music that fits! I second the comments above about making your abilities cost a little more to make the game a tiny bit more strategic than it currently is.
I liked a lot the art and the music is on point. Actually I can't belive that there's a multiplayer mode included.
One of the best entries that I've played!
I'll play it with my little brothers!
I found myself wishing that my little army would convert other blobs over time if they outnumbered them, because that yellow jerk just buried himself in his army and I couldn't get to him - lol
Really cool concept though, and I wish I had someone to play it with (looks like it's multiplayer?). Impressive for 3 days of work!
Good audio choice too, even if it's not your original work.
The game has flawless and very cute graphics! \*u* The AI was impressively good and beat us for many of our first rounds. We also really like the hand-drawn instructions and menus!
Very innovative interpretation of the theme, and adorable use of Voronoi diagrams (?).
The controls had a rather high delay on older machines.
This game is cute as hell and very nice to play. Gathering resources, collecting allies and sending them to eat your opponents!
I understand the control scheme as it allows for multiple players to play locally. The music is really fitting the game.
(You can see me playing this game for the first time on the vod https://youtu.be/lXUmif8KKxM?t=1h40m16s )
Great job on the game, keep working on it!
Very creative and very fun! Everything with the music, gameplay, and graphics all go together really well! The movement feels a little difficult and slidey and you tend to get buried under a lot of cells and become unable to move anywhere. Otherwise, really great!
If anything- the controls did feel a bit difficult to go around with especially since there was this weird "float" feel. I'm not sure if it were entirely intended.
As for the art- I liked it. :D It would definitely be a fun game if it had a lot more power ups and features- but right now, it's strong enough as it stands as game.
Wish I had more people to play the game with- as playing Solo felt a bit too easy and I won my 4 rounds. :P
@brainy-beard Glad to hear that 72 hours without sleep paid off. :sleeping:
@blinry It's not Voronoi directly (well it is in a way), but we used some shader magic to approximate it and add some random noise for the wobble.
Could you also please describe the implementation part? That squishy faces physics especially.
Here is my playtest: https://youtu.be/K3bMrIsmMWk
Thank you! It was fun to play.
The game was really well made and really polished. Although, I would somewhat tweak the UI or the color of the food, because it was not obvious that you have to eat it. It looked like a dirt at first.
But aside from that, really well made :)
Great job overall:thumbsup:
I also like the art choices quite a lot(The notepad style with simplistic shapes made it feel really elegant). It took me a few rounds to finally understand the mechanic, but I really enjoyed how the game pushes towards ending with the petri dish being filled up.
Overall, great work! One of the best multiplayer games in this jam.
I think the food pellets could stand out a little more; the grey on grey isn't the best. Perhaps a different color or maybe a gold/shiny aura around them.
The game plays nicely, the music, sound effects and visuals are all awesome, and most importantly it's a lot of fun! Good job on making all of this in time - even multiplayer and a controller support! The AI is very well made too, although I was able to win without shift and later without using spacebar.
It feels like a complete game, the mechanics all work fine, and the graphics look great! The controls were easy to grasp and felt very fluid and properly tweaked. I can't really think of many things to critique with this game, because it does exactly what it tries to do and it does it well.
Not sure how many different strategies there are but the game has a surprising amount of replay value.
The rules were explained well but it took me some time to understand how to win but it quickly became obvious.
It would be really cool if you had online multiplayer but that is something that can be added in a post-jam version.
Also it would be helpful to have a restart option in the menu so that you can retry without having to wait for the match to end or go back to main menu.
Overall it was a really cool game that impressed me on how well polished it was. Magnificent work
But after that, it became a fun and innovative game!
In my opinion, the fact I can be killed by other creatures isn't necessary. I prefer the idea that we have to block and starve others by having the most creatures...
Fantastic work
Highly rated by us
I've said a lot about my complaints but this game is legitimately good, nice job on pumping that out during the jam :D
One small improvement would be to have '<Color> wins' instead of 'You win'. I lost the first match and it looked like a bug that it said I won. After a few more rounds, I realized it always said 'you win' and it was just colored to match the color of the winner. I am red-green colorblind so, color ques like that are sometimes missed.
- control initially was a bit confusing , but then when i understood then i enjoyed a lot
- that tutorial page was very good
The learning curve is kinda hard but not really steep, in a couple of round you get the whole gist of it and from then on it's only fun and competitiveness.
Implementation, controls, effects, visuals, music, UI and pretty much everything is on point. One of my favorites from this Jam, definitely!
Congratulations, great effort!
I have so fun playing it ^^
A great job with this one would love to see an online option for this game in the future.
Special thanks for gamepad support!
I think this game could be even better if you add some bonus stuff. Like item that increases speed or distance of that... I don't know, attack?
All in all it's a great stuff!
This is well executed.
The only thing I didn't get is what the point is of having many cells of your color. It seemed to me that the only important thing is eating. So it was the winning strategy for me.
Well done.
All in all I really can't find any criticisms here... I think you have the potential to make #1 this Ludum Dare ;) **Keep up the good work!**
I had a bit of trouble understanding what to do with the game, the grey dots weren't immediately apparent (I got it into my head that I was supposed to eat the other cells). I may revisit this tomorrow if you want to drop by the stream and resubmit it.
Don't eat them, creatures that are not your own color are your enemies and will drain your energy badly if you touch them! :rofl:
Yeah, we have noticed that the gray pellets are easy to miss and we will definitely change that in a post-jam version (didn't feel right to doctor with it after the jam deadline). The keyboard controls are designed with 2 people in mind, so that anyone can play with a friend, even if you don't have gamepads. Playing with a gamepad is a little more comfortable though. :wink:
Also don't worry about the non-readable text on the energy bars too much, it is mostly decoration.
I'll get myself some caffeine this time, so I can stay up till the end! (Germany here)
We both missed the energy dots at first whoops, thought they were part of the background with all the mayhem. Just a smidge too subtle. Caught the text on the second go though, perhaps a bit of a delay and/or a countdown before the match starts might give the player some time to take in the details/descriptions? Though we didn't read the instructions that thoroughly so that's on us really!
This is so polished it looks fantastic, everything fits together nicely. I can really see it as a full on release. Really nice way to tackle the theme too.
Great job!!
I replayed this today and actually figured it out. Great job! I really enjoyed this a lot and spent another 30 minutes post-stream playing it.
You can check out our playthough of the game over here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTCEiFkkoI
its could be really fun to play it with 4 players there, keep up the work in this one! Really found it enjoyable!
Good Job!
This is a really solid entry, with a simple but engaging crowd control core mechanic and polished graphics and sound. I've only played single, unfortunately, but it's easy to see how this could be more fun with friends.
Great job!
interesting!
Some points of improvement (there's not many, it's very solid!) Perhaps combine the 'converting' with the 'aggresive behaviour' into one function. When I convert cells they could be automatically aggresive. It may lose some of the strategy but this game doesn't feel like a strategic fight to begin with, it's more like a lightening landgrab. Secondly, and this is a really small thing, when I'm playing single player and I die, the match should end immediately. The AI are pretty compitent and fighting eachother, which means I am waiting for a good while for the match to end.
All in all a really solid, unique entry. Well done!
I like the color war aspect!
I'm wondering what intelligence you gave the AI, it looks pretty good, or I'm bad :p
If you wouldn't mind having a quick go of my entry and letting me know what you think I would be grateful. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-pow-collins
Other aspects in the game are all great and the game is fun. good job!
also if you could rate my game i'd really appreciate it
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/whats-left
@rahtainka there was unfortunately no time to balance power-ups, but we have a few in mind that we would like to add in a post-jam version. Anything in particular you would like to see added?
Game is polished and fun to play, what more could you ask for? Well done!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKbr96NdjUs