Rhythm-Based Twin Stick Zombie Survival Shooter by Niker107
Greetings everyone!
This is my first ever submission for the Ludum Dare game challenge. I have experience with game development using Unreal Engine 4, which I use for 3D games and Construct 2 for 2D games. However, up to this point I have only released levels for Half-Life 2 level design competitions, so I'm glad to say that this challenge has allowed me to release something complete!'ish; I proudly present:
LD41's Combine 2 Incompatible Genres is actually the theme that I really wanted to be picked initially, with the thought that there would be thousands of interesting concepts one could come up with and create!... But I also found myself having no clue what I wanted my game to be, as you do. Thankfully, I dug up a ridiculous concept from the back of my subconscious - a rhythm-based twin stick game! And what better twin stick game to create than one about fighting zombies?
In the end, the game didn't turn out quite as polished or... complete as I wanted, but I'm still very proud of it and very happy that I got to work on a Ludum Dare submission. Let's hope that next time, I can do even better. Hope you enjoy!
Ratings
| Overall | 229th | 3.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 161th | 3.619⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 405th | 3.262⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 201th | 3.881⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 267th | 3.452⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 167th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 403th | 2.467⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 329th | 3.059⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
I was surprised to see that you could damage and break the bookcases to walk through them. It felt good seeing that I could do that.
There are two major things I think you could have done to greatly improve this, without needing to spend _too_ much time:
- Better music. Sorry, it was just too repetitive. It got tiring to listen to after less than a minute. It was easy to tell the beat at least, so I'll give you that.
- Increasing difficulty over time, or difficulty in general. Once I found the shotgun, I was effectively invincible. I wasn't going to die unless I simply stopped playing. I lost interest at that point, because the high score becomes meaningless as a measure of skill. I feel an easy way to solve this is to ramp up the difficulty as the game goes on, such as by increasing the amount of enemies being spawned, increasing their speed or health, etc. Easy to implement, and fixes that problem.
I got to around 7500 points with 3/4 of my health, at which point I decided that I was invincible.
The game feels pretty solid, but it could use a little more flavor. Better music and difficulty, more variety, and this could be really cool.
Also, I found that I could just kind of walk out of the house into nothingness. Is that intentional?
I think the one difficult part of this was, there was no beat indicator to let me know when I could move..
And the one easy part was, the game doesn't have (or much of) a delay penalty for hitting out of beat... so I could just mash the button
If you had added a couple levels/objectives or a scaling difficulty I think you'd have a very solid complete experience :) As it is I wound up getting god-mode after the shotgun.
Overall great work! :D