PEW PEW PRINCESS by Karai17
Update 2
- Fixed bug where the player's hitbox was a frame behind and larger than intended
- Adjusted the balance of the game to make the bosses a bit easier
- Fixed a bug where the player wasn't flashing when the shield took damage to indicate that you had iframes enabled
- Fixed an issue where dialog text wasn't displaying properly or long enough to read
- Reverted the background image from a picture of holo's driveway to our initial gridpaper texture
- Updated the credits screen to actually show... credits
This will be the final patch to our LD entry unless another serious bug is found. Thank you for trying our game!
Update 1
- Fixed a game-breaking bug that caused a soft lock if you died when fighting Blossom or Rose
- Fixed a bug where the boss health bar wouldn't disappear when the stage restarts
Synopsis
Your sister stole all of your cute clothes and you need to get them back! Shoot your way through her army of stuffed animals (and friends!*) to reclaim your most precious treasure.
*Just the one, actually!
CONTROLS
- MOVE - Arrows
- SHOOT - Z
- SHIELD - X
- DODGE - LShift
Screenshots
INFO
We started with the idea of doing a bullet hell where you are supposed to dodge instead of shoot. You had finite bullets and shooting would reduce your damage output each time. If you wasted them on trash mobs, the boss would be (nearly) impossible. After we added some graphical effects, shooting became way too fun so we scrapped the original idea and tried a few other things. We ultimately decided to shy away from the theme in favour of making the game as fun as possible.
As is tradition, we went into Ludum Dare with a lot of ambition and ended up having to cut a lot of content. We originally had four stages planned but due to time restraints we cut it down to a single stage that has a mini boss, instead of full stages with full bosses.
All-in-all, we're fairly proud of this game despite the severe lack of polish and plan to clean up the code, polish the engine, and try to make a more full game. So if you're still reading this far, consider this entry a prototype of things to come!
Credits
- Landon Manning (@landonmanning) - programming
- Colby Klein (@shakesoda) - programming, art
- Stephen Gygi (@binarycocoa) - music
Ratings
| Overall | 506th | 3.238⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 160th | 3.619⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 736th | 2.476⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 846th | 1.857⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 683th | 2.762⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 386th | 3.048⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 242th | 2.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 489th | 3.1⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
The music is pretty good, and the motion of all the bullets was such that I never felt that it was unfair. I DID feel that I moved too slowly to hit some of the enemies without knowing their pattern beforehand (but maybe that's the point?). I really don't understand what the shield button does and I never became comfortable with the dodge button.
Overall I had fun with the game, it is a pretty good shmup. The effects and such that were done here were really nice looking and gave satisfaction on defeating enemies (but would have been even better with sound effects :smile:). I am slightly confused about the shield mechanic, I think I would have preferred lives or something rather than that, as holding down x while running through fire was a little awkward, and not holding x resulted in having to restart. I didn't actually beat the first boss, so take that for what it is. I think the difficulty may be a bit high.
@bobsleigh: hitbox is top of torso
Other than that, I did not find it was the connection between the game and the theme, but okay.
Or maybe I am very bad at this kind of game? :p
I enjoyed the music a lot, but I generally agree with everyone else that sound would have enhanced it a lot. I think the character models were 3d, but it was a little hard to appreciate them based on how tiny they were rendered?
I have one gameplay critique: I found the movement speed too slow, please add Marisa to the game! It was fine for dodging fine projectiles, but it definitely felt sluggish when just trying to move across the screen. On my first attempt the first thing I did was mash shift to try to dash around the screen faster, but I quickly realized that you can only do that so much, oops!
Overall I had a lot of fun soaring through the sky in my Civilian T-pose as Erin! I'd love to see this extended into something longer! I'll shamelessly suggest that you check out my own LD39 game, you're not the only ones who made a bullet hell game in Love2d!
Yes, I agree, sfx would have really helped a lot. We totally ran out of time before we could implement some of the finer polish for the game that we've had in past games. We are currently toying with different mechanics and improving the code in various ways to give us a lot more flexibility with the engine in the future.
The whole scene is actually 3D despite how it looks. the bullets are all just billboards and the player models are full 3D objects. They were modeled with fairly realistic proportions (if you check out any of @holo's work on Twitter, you'll note he's pretty good at modeling that sort of thing) so it ended up being difficult to see any of the detail in the models. In the future, we will probably have moe stylized models that better show off their features, and more interesting shaders and lighting too.
In the current build of the game, we have dodging remove one of your shields. This totally sucks! But I feel like if we remove it, that might change the game abit too much to qualify in LD, so we left that in. In a futurre release, movement speed may be increased and dodging will have no penalty unless you take a hit while dodging (same as how shielding only decreases when it takes a bullet).
I have been trying to get to everyone's games who have rated ours, so if you leave a comment, I'll play your game!
I love the colour circles on squared paper graphics, you're not trying to hide it's a jam game and it still looks great. Also the music's nice. Sadly didn't beat it. Still nice one. Way to go!
There could be some extra graphics improvements on the background but I find this easy on the eyes.