Surge by loginaut

[raw]
made by loginaut for Ludum Dare 46 (JAM)

SURGE! Stay alive as power surges through the factory. Energy decays with time, be sure to use the charging stations to repower. Be careful, the other robots will surely fight you for the scarce power; collect wrenches to heal. Every 60 seconds is a power SURGE which will knock out a charging station. Survive!

Background.png

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Notes: The game is based on the Mirror multiplayer package for Unity. If you are prompted to allow firewall access for single player it is because the game runs a server in the background, feel free to disregard.

The game works with LAN and online multiplayer, but you'll need to forward port 7777 on your router to play online. Both game modes have some AI characters to fight.

The bars in the upper right are health and energy, energy is refilled at charging stations, health is recharged from wrenches.

QOL fixes on Monday 4/20 ~ noon: removed AI spawning next to the player, reduced AI health, stopped camera from clipping through geometry, adjusted aiming sensitivity.

ss1.png ss2.png

Ratings

Overall 1878th 3.207⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1563th 3.155⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1513th 3.138⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1962th 3.259⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1070th 2.981⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1561th 3.19⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Given 32🗳️ 31🗨️

Feedback

beanslasher
21. Apr 2020 · 03:34 UTC
The gameplay was really cool, very very cool to see multiplayer games being developed in a game jam! Great execution! :D
ldd
21. Apr 2020 · 03:47 UTC
Great gameplay, I think I was only able to play against bots. I also commend you for your efforts to try to fit so much in so little time!
maxter10001
21. Apr 2020 · 03:50 UTC
Pretty cool, I really like that it's multiplayer! I couldn't start a second game after the first though, it just hung at waiting to connect. What I did play was very fun though!
smallgaier
21. Apr 2020 · 03:52 UTC
This was really cool! I think the music was a great selection for this game, it had a nice mechanical vibe and kinda creeped me out (in a good way) and kept me on the edge of my seat!
JunaGames
21. Apr 2020 · 06:54 UTC
this was super fun love the art style
mehrdadsh
21. Apr 2020 · 06:54 UTC
i like the idea and overall it was good too
misterG420
21. Apr 2020 · 08:13 UTC
Refreshing interpretaion! And who doesn't love robots? I certainy do!
Scharma
21. Apr 2020 · 15:19 UTC
Cool idea, surprised to see multiplayer on a jam. On that note, the movement and targeting felt kinda clunky, and the framerate seemed low. Congrats on the idea :)
MorandiGame
23. Apr 2020 · 05:12 UTC
Superb Art style. Amazing how you managed to have multiplayer available. Love to know what you think of my entry~
mmadara1
24. Apr 2020 · 05:30 UTC
i really like it, thank you so much for the game!
I would be grateful if you told what think of my game
Cole Wasserman
25. Apr 2020 · 03:50 UTC
The game came out really nicely, Great Job! The artwork was really well done. However, it was a little bit glitchy. After I died, I wasn't able to start another game because I was stuck on the "waiting to begin" screen.
Beelzeboss
25. Apr 2020 · 06:31 UTC
Art style is great and the music was nice. Its great that you wera able to have multiplayer, what did you use to make it work? There are some bug but Great Job!
WhatNameGames
25. Apr 2020 · 19:54 UTC
The robots are really cute, awesome job, especially with MP
Simon Rahnasto
25. Apr 2020 · 19:58 UTC
Wow this was a real challenge, they all ganged up on me and I managed to kill 2-3 each try. It was interesting to try to find different ways to approach it. My initial plan was to camp around healing wrenches and let the enemies come to me. That way I could heal after a fight.

Cool idea!
🎤 loginaut
25. Apr 2020 · 22:50 UTC
@beelzeboss we used the free asset Mirror in the Unity asset store (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/network/mirror-129321).

The documentation was pretty sparse, but we managed to get it working good enough for the jam after the first day and a half + watching some video tutorials. I think I made a mistake by having the players driven by rigidbodies which lead to lots of small synchronization errors between the clients and server (I think this is what @scharma experienced). I also literally interpreted the "player prefab to spawn" field as the actual robot, which leads to the strange connection bug that @cole-wasserman and @maxter10001 ran into after that prefab is removed.

Lots of lessons learned :)
Geckoo1337
26. Apr 2020 · 10:59 UTC
Interesting FPS with fun mood. The best part is without any doubt the multiplayer code which I did not know. I will take a look at this asset. The controls are a little bit weird for me - maybe because I do not play games in third view. It is not always easy to plan a strategy... but it is good enought for a game which has been created in less than 3 days. You should wotk on it so as to create a full game. I had fun playing. Well done ++
PeterBuo
26. Apr 2020 · 22:20 UTC
Very cool I had fun
Shaolin Dave
27. Apr 2020 · 05:44 UTC
Can't play it (Mac user here) but wanted to say the character designs look cool, and while unnecessary I do think it's interesting/pretty awesome that you made a networkable multiplayer game.
NicoNeko
30. Apr 2020 · 02:13 UTC
Really cool design and great music! It goes well with the sound effects in the game!
Defiant Genesis
06. May 2020 · 00:30 UTC
Really liked the graphics and the sound, they fit together really well for a game done in a jam! The multiplayer was a nice touch and made it that little bit better.
scsc
11. May 2020 · 13:51 UTC
Nice visually good looking game, but your multiplayer instructions are very lacking, as you are letting users figure everything out by themselves. I'll assume that you intend this to be purely P2P without any server of your own, so users unable to forward port 7777 and share their IP with someone they already know have no way of experiencing the multiplayer. I didn't understand why the game starts after first pressing Play, yet when the match ends and I click Play again from the menu, suddenly I'm waiting. Running a second game instance didn't let me connect from the first one either no matter what I did, it only says "waiting to begin...", so the instructions could be more explicit even about how to join a local server.

You have chosen a very unusual aiming system, as most people are used to having crosshair stay at the middle of the camera :) When spectating after dying (at least it seems that's what happened, even though it doesn't say "life terminated" immediately), controllers seem to be stuck based on previous rotation, e.g. left/right is swapped, and it doesn't say when (if) will I re-spawn. One other issue is that the mouse gets stuck inside the window even in menu after the game ends. Mouse scroll is also too slow in-game. If you plan to continue developing this game post-jam, fixing these small issues will have a huge impact :) One small tip for your Git repository, try not to add the files listed inside before creating the .gitignore file, as you have plenty of temporary files inside /Library that can cause you conflicts on top of wasting space (Mirror even has one useless 30MB benchmark scene inside its Examples directory). We've also begun to learn Mirror as a part of our LD Jam 46 game, so feel free to check out our server-sided approach that doesn't rely on P2P if you're interested in some specifics :) There are currently plenty of non-intuitive issues regarding Mirror documentation, while some of them could could be addressed very easily if any experienced users contributed to improve it.
🎤 loginaut
12. May 2020 · 17:35 UTC
Thanks for the feedback @scsc, we definitely bungled our git repo after we ran into an issue early on. I always think of gamejams as a good exercise in trying new weird things under strong deadlines :)

Unfortunately we're all engineers so UX tends to sit at the bottom of our priority list. We'd been playing it over LAN during development, and I didn't really see the value in hosting an online server. The player movement is all done through rigidbody physics, so the additional latency would likely make the player control a jerky unfun mess.

It's definitely good practice to reflect on the good and the bad after a game jam, and I would definitely change the implementation of the player to fit better with my current understanding of Mirror (rather than the tank example they have provided, which imo don't give a great idea of how to architect a multiplayer game). I'll definitely check out your repo to see if it gives me any better ideas! I think if I create a post-jam version I would probably want to start from scratch knowing what I know now about multiplayer, which I suppose makes this a very good use of 72 hours.