Marx's Graffiti Squad by Rongefilet
Remember everyone your thirst for communism using street-art propaganda!
An old member of the communist party takes the fight in her own hand, sprays her ideals on various walls not to let them slowly fade away into oblivion.
You must fill the gauge at the top by covering the map with graffiti (you can check the areas you've missed by displaying the map with space) then go back the way you came. And obviously avoid police, you can avoid outrun them by sprinting but be careful not to empty your stamina.
Controls:
Arrow keys: Move
W: Sprint
X: Spray (Hold with a wall above you)
Space: Display influence map
Notes: - No sound and only 5 levels, bugs have sadly destroyed most of my available time - The windows version has no improvements over the Linux one, just a port to allow more people to play it - The "Balanced" version are updated to take into account the Ludum Dare feedbacks, those are only minor tweaks to difficulty making the game less of a hassle to get through
| Youtube | https://rongefilet.itch.io/marxs-graffiti-squad |
| Youtube | https://rongefilet.itch.io/marxs-graffiti-squad |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/marxs-graffiti-squad |
Ratings
| Overall | 849th | 3.644⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 653th | 3.606⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 823th | 3.48⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1925th | 3.279⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1005th | 3.775⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 501th | 3.51⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 947th | 3.531⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 69🗨️ |
On a more serious note, that is a neat little game. It was pretty challenging though, having a checkpoint between each level would have been great. Not sure what the connection to theme is, but other than that it was really enjoyable.
Yeah the game balance has also suffered from the time spent on bugs (or poor time management and scope, no one knows). Thank for pointing out that the link to the theme was not obvious, I added an explanation in the description.
And man, those policemen have *stamina*.
definitively 5 stars out of 5
I really like how the game looks and avoiding the guards feels stressful in a good way
I played the jam version, since we're still voting, so you might already have attended to it in your balancing version. But I found that the game was rather unfair when you start a level the first time as the police come up on you rather abruptly. I should say I didn't see that there was a sprint key so that meant I needed to be 100% undetected. Anyways, this doesn't matter too much on the first level, but it feels rather unfair once progressed to the second level and beyond, as it drops you right back to the first level. I would consider either letting the player restart on the current level or at least give the player three lives before dropping them back at the first level.
Otherwise a really neat experience.
I love the pixel art, congratulations !
Also your vision coins are amazing. How did you do them? I have a stealth game side project (and I did one for this LD) and I never could do them properly.
Nicely done!
So for the vision cones, I'm sure there are better way to do it (lots of resources on that online) but here is what I did:
- For the graphic display I generate points at the enemy position, translate them along it's velocity/direction vector and rotate them gradually using the enemy as pivot point. Then check collisions between the created segments and the level geometry, moving the end point accordingly, and finally draw a polygon clockwise including one more point at the enemy's feet.
- Regarding player detection it's only a matter of checking if the distance to the enemy is lower than the cone radius, that the angle is in it's arc bounds and that the line enemy->player does not intersect with level geometry.
I had never done neither cone vision nor A* pathfinding before, those were quite the time-sinks but quite a joy to see it working in the end, glad it payed off ^^.
(Oh and while I would have loved to work with friends none of them was available, I actually made the game on my own ^^")
The first level was pretty easy, but from the second one on, the difficulty really takes off. It was very easy to lose, beacause the police was very fast and hard to shake off. If the sprint timing was off by a little, you basically are game over. This could be re balanced a little to allow more ways to get away from the police. Maybe even have an item per level that allows to stop them in their tracks for a short amount of time. It was a bit frustrating, because it could be over so quickly after working hard to spray a lot of walls.
Aside from that, the mechnanics worked pretty well. But I didn't like the button placements. W and X as action button were awkward to press together with the cursor keys.
All in all, good entry. Keep it up!
It is a nice and well done game. I've sent this page to some comrades from the french party :p I think they're gonna laugh.
Mechanics are simple to understand but tuned to be pretty smooth and nice.
The game seems quite fair to me at least in the balanced version.
You need a chiptune version of the Internationale. x)