Cute invaders by sgadrat
Cute invaders
Grow your cute little chickens to have the cutest farm in the world! Featuring the awesome and critically acclaimed game system of loot boxes!
Game design
You are the owner of a little farm, growing cute chicken. Each chicken is a little tamagochi: the more you have, the more you will have to take care. On top of that, loot boxes appearing so often that you will have to open it, if only to see the screen. The more you have unopened loot boxes, the harder it is to take care of your chickens. As loot boxes drop new chickens, you are rapidly overwhelmed.
An interesting fact about the game design of this game is that it sets no goal. You cannot lose, you cannot win, there is not even any scoring. Yet, the overwhelming number of actions to do suffice to put the player in a rush for self stated goals (mainly keeping the chickens alive).
Technical performances
To move, chickens implement steering behaviors. It is a simple system to implement (great for game jams) featuring nice organic movements. For the chickens to not cross the fence, it is as simple as implementing a steering behavior pushing them away from it when they are near. To know how far a chicken is from a fence, the game solve the fence as a line equation of the form "ax + bx + c = 0", then compute the distance of the chicken using this formula.
When we started the project, we did not though we would use maths to reduce a fence to an equation! It is quite challenging, and we are now better at mathematics :)
Used tools
We gone for a 100% Free and open source stack for this jam. Thanks to our artist's Windows that crashed two days before the jam. So we used:
- Ubuntu and Archlinux as operating systems
- Krita, The Gimp and Image Magick for graphics
- Sfxr and Audacity for sound authoring
- Vim for code edition
- RTGE (home-made game engine) as the game engine
More, elsewhere
Follow @MargaritaGadrat, the artist, on twitter
Follow @RogerBidon, the nerd, on twitter
| Source code | https://github.com/sgadrat/gukifarm |
| HTML5 (web) | https://sgadrat.itch.io/cute-invaders |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/cute-invaders |
Ratings
| Overall | 617th | 3.411⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 831th | 2.986⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 609th | 3.13⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 210th | 3.911⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 399th | 3.77⭐ | 76🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 465th | 3.139⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 399th | 3.279⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 611th | 3.229⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 125🗳️ | 146🗨️ |
1. I would prefer it if you had to just click the chest once to not interrupt gameflow
2. It's sometimes hard to identify which chicken is most in need of something - maybe you could make some kind of exclamation mark pop up
More seriously, nice game, but the chest interrupting gameplay is annoying :(
The game gets very hard quick!
Cool game ! Keep coding :)
but I am so sad to see all this chickens died...
it is almost impossible to keep more than four chicken alive...
I really enjoyed the game though! Congrats! My only complaint is to have to click chests 2 times, other than that maybe you are sitting on a cool mobile game idea ;)
The graphics are really cute, the animations are funny I really like it. The little sound loop is cool but a little annoying after 10 minutes playing :)
Maybe you could have add shortcuts for the different action to combine keyboard and mouse ?
I did not manage to get a unicorn so I am a bit disappointed :(
Beau travail en tout cas :) a bientôt !
The implementation is smooth, everything work wells, good graphics.
The unicorn is a lie :(
It is so fast so hard, I can't really manage many chicken at once - totally hit the theme!
Nonetheless, I got the hang of it, and with appropriate chicken-triage, I could keep a decent crop of chicks alive!
Alas no magical uni-chickens...
All in all, very polished smooth game, nice learning arc. To improve, maybe a few area-of-effect one 'feed/love/poop' every checken powerups?
Lastly, thanks for the technical notes - i had no idea what steering behaviours were, and now i'm interested :).
They game was just cute, with a really nice music sound. The actions were also cool but after unlocking them not much more than repeating them.
I was hoping for a unicorn, but then I read that the chance was really 0% lol
It was a nice little game, very spot on on the theme, but I think it needs some more evolution, as the endless mode gets a little bit tiring and stressful to be repeating. But it is a great concept, and I hope you can develop on it! Congratulations!
It's very hard to take care of this little invaders! I would have seen the possibility of setting up feeders, for example, to feed several chickens at once.
This is a pretty hard game. It matches the theme well. Nice music too.
I also like how the game mecanics make it all humorous. It gets quite difficult quickly so you have what to do all the time.
What I'd like to add is to have the age of the chickens shown, so that maybe see if some of them survived long enough :)
The fact that there are no objectives does not bother me, but it's true that after a while it would be cool to have some variety to spicy things up. Maybe something like random events (like maybe a chicken that lived long enough could have an egg or invite the unicirn or whatever).
Anyway it's a really good game, and the graphics are lovely!
P.S.: This game reminds me of another entry: Tuftles by @zirrrus.
This is a very cool entry too! Those chickens are very cute, the style overall is very fun, well done!
The difficulty seems very high, those chickens are maybe a bit too needy but it makes for an interesting challenge. And those little animations are just perfect :D