LudumData

Venus Ascending by MisterKeefe

[raw]
made by MisterKeefe for Ludum Dare 45 (JAM)

Venus Ascending

Screenshot from 2019-10-07 19-40-24.png Screenshot from 2019-10-07 19-40-44.png

Screenshot from 2019-10-07 19-41-02.png

Help a young plant grow from nothing and achieve its full potential. Your keyboard (alphabet keys) control the mouths of a hungry young venus flytrap. Tower Defence / Typing Game mashup done in HTML5/JS

I interpreted the theme "start with nothing" as kind of like a "rags to riches" story, so I went with something with the potential for growth (a plant).

Controls

  • a-z keys on your keyboard to type words

Tips

  • Try to catch multiple enemies in one of your mouths at once.

  • You don't have to type all of a word at once! Typing all of it and then waiting for the right moment to press the final letter is a good strategy.

  • There are multiple levels.

Known Issues

  • Because I'm an idiot, the soundtrack is >5MiB big even though it's a tiny drum loop... if it doesn't play or the page takes ages to load, I'm sorry!

Misc Thoughts

This was fun! It was my first Ludum Dare.

Tools used: PIXI.js for rendering, howler.js for sound. Gimp for sprites, JFXR / chirp composer for such sound effects as there are.

v1: commit hash d82c559 on gh-pages branch

Youtube https://github.com/misterkeefe/ludum-dare-45/
Youtube https://misterkeefe.itch.io/venus-ascendant
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/venus-ascending

Ratings

Overall 745th 3.25⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Fun 330th 3.558⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 133th 3.86⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Theme 912th 2.788⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 924th 2.78⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Audio 642th 2.6⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Humor 201th 3.5⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Mood 679th 3.208⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Given 27🗳️ 17🗨️

Feedback

07. Oct 2019 · 21:35 UTC
Yes! EAT ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO FLY CLOSE!
Rusty Jim
07. Oct 2019 · 21:36 UTC
Enjoyed Mavis Beacon back in the day and I really enjoyed this even though I found it a bit hard! I found in most levels that I was left with one mouth at the end which actually seemed to help. The drum loop is annoying to say the least and I feel is maybe even a bit too hifi for the Atari style visuals?

Overall though great job! :)
Lars-Erik
07. Oct 2019 · 21:38 UTC
I love typing games. 😁 This was a nice new twist to them all.
Would love to see a more polished version, especially if it would teach some touch typing as well.
Well done! 👍
Jummit
07. Oct 2019 · 21:39 UTC
Pretty awesome concept! I really enjoyed it. The difficulty is perfect, with the two letter words at the beginning followed by harder ones.
SheepDog123
07. Oct 2019 · 21:39 UTC
Awesome game, man! (or woman) My only complaint is with the sound. The "beep" sound can get a bit annoying, I reccomend making it a type-writer?
Swordishmage
07. Oct 2019 · 21:40 UTC
Great game! This was a lot of fun to play and definitely stressful when the waves seemed to never end. Great work!
CiaranW
07. Oct 2019 · 21:46 UTC
This was tense! Weird style and I like it, the plant looks cool and alien like, and it really stressed my typing :P

I almost always got down to one trap left and just typed the same word over and over, otherwise I guess my typing just isn't good enough. I think it was a bit frustrating that you couldn't swap from one word to another, as when watching the screen, it was difficult to look back up at the 'current' word. Would have been easier to keep track of if the game could recognise you swapped to a new word and start tracking that instead.

Nice job!
SP3sheep
08. Oct 2019 · 09:49 UTC
I love the game! It's a very innovative take on the typing type games, I am very impressed. It was a bit too difficult for me but maybe I'm just bad at typing. Well done :thumbsup:
🎤 MisterKeefe
08. Oct 2019 · 20:30 UTC
@ciaranw thanks, I also end up with one mouth left desperately fending off the end of the wave... About swapping words, that's a great idea, I'll have a look once the jam is over! I think there's a lot going on onscreen sometimes and it's quite hard to keep track of which word you're halfway through, definitely.
🎤 MisterKeefe
08. Oct 2019 · 20:32 UTC
@sheepdog123 thanks for the feedback! "put more effort into sound" is definitely something I'm taking away from this jam, a typewriter noise is a great idea but more generally I think there's some great sound work out there from playing people's games, and a lot of cool tools out there for working with it that I've not used before
NachtWitch
08. Oct 2019 · 21:09 UTC
Fun little game, would be super fun if it had better graphics but hey, we are programmers not artists
GhostGoatsGames
08. Oct 2019 · 21:13 UTC
Ha, this was really cool. I like games that are different like this, nice job.
Gustav Andersson
08. Oct 2019 · 21:19 UTC
To bad I can't type without looking at my fingers :sweat_smile: super hard but fun!
Lewis C. Parr
09. Oct 2019 · 19:01 UTC
Really cool idea!
Weine
09. Oct 2019 · 20:07 UTC
Fun idea and nice gameplay! I found it super hard after the first level, but that is probably just because of my crappy typing skills =). Slightly weak on the theme, though. I would have fit perfectly in the "combine two incompatible gengres" jam (LD41).
ancient-pixel
09. Oct 2019 · 20:15 UTC
It s a fun idea, but i found only keeping one mouth and using only that and its word was an imba solution. Maybe that could get mixed up or otherwise balanced to keep the game entertaining.
GraphicEdit
09. Oct 2019 · 20:21 UTC
Nice game
Palemek
09. Oct 2019 · 21:35 UTC
Really nice concept, although i think that game would benefit from some mechanic that would force the player to use more than one mouth all level. I found myself with my fingers over specific keys for one word only on harder levels. Had good time with this, good job!
Lone_Wolf
10. Oct 2019 · 16:49 UTC
Great game. But like @ palmek said. You end up just using one mouth to catch them all.

Other than that great work :thumbsup: