Gravity Blade by chainedlupine
"Take Flight - Gravity Blade!"
"Eliminate enemy forces who have forcibly mined away your planet's energy crystals to use against you! Using Gravity Blade's powerful Graviton Generator, fire particle beams, capture enemies and siphon their power using a Graviton Snare, and charge up energy to release captured enemies in a wide barrage of junk with the Graviton Launcher!
Wipe them out, collect crystals, and save your world!
- - - KNOWN ISSUES - - -
- Win64 build crashes if you lose all lives. Use Win32 for now.
- - - CONTROLS - - -
Keyboard controls only for now due to time constraints: * X (tap): Fire Particle Beam * C (tap): Fire Graviton Snare at weakened (flashing) enemies to capture them and power up / fill your Graviton Loop gauge * X (hold & release): Charge up a powerful junk shot with the Graviton Launcher. Kills with these projectiles drop better crystals, but power down your Particle Beam!
- - - ABOUT - - -
Gravity Blade is a scrolling shoot-em-up inspired by many classics of the genre, such as Gradius, Axelay, R-Type, and so on. We decided to interpret the theme "Caught in a Loop" a little differently by having the player use the ship's Graviton Generator to capture weakened enemies within a Graviton Loop. This uses enemy energy to power up the player's own weapons.
The player can either decide to keep their upgraded weapons, or to hold fire to charge up the Graviton Launcher. Upon release, the player will fire a wave of captured enemies as junk, which deals high damage and grants better loot on kills, but also powers the player's Particle Beam weapon back down again. This allows for a gameplay loop of fighting, capturing, powering up, releasing, collecting higher points, and repeating!
This is a project we both got really into, and will likely continue pursuing after the fact - both being big fans of the genre, this prompt was a great kick into gear to get started on something that could shape up to be extra cool!
| Youtube | http://chainedlupine.com/temp/gravity_blade_win64.zip |
| Youtube | https://chainedlupine.itch.io/gravity-blade |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/gravity-blade |
Ratings
| Overall | 1091th | 3.31⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 787th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1514th | 2.5⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1532th | 2.643⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 983th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 644th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1176th | 3.024⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
Linux builds will -- come later. Maybe tonight?
UPDATE: Win64 version uploaded! Compiling the others, now.
Well done for this entry.
Cheers
A nice horizontal shmup with a clean and crip style.
This game does well:
- :medal: great minimalist r-type revival
- :medal: cool, driving music
- :medal: crisp sprites and very crisp collision checking
- :medal: butter smooth scrolling
- :medal: the snare mechanic is pretty interesting
Could make this even better:
- :heavy_plus_sign: X / C may be ok to shoot, but on a gamepad, the buttons are mapped to the right hand
- :heavy_plus_sign: I was crabing gamepad support
- :heavy_plus_sign: add some explanations and teasers, screenshots etc. to your game page on LDJam
- :heavy_plus_sign: more juice could make this a real winner
All in all a very nice throwback to my horizontal shmup days. Thank you :)
The graphics were also very nice, especially the projectiles; the sound was alright, but I would've liked it if it changed according to the level of your weapons.
Here are my feedback:
_Positive points
- Good art style
- The ship is really responsive
- Cool SFX and music
_Negative points
- A bit simple in term of mechanics
Overall: gg for your work!
@thygrrr A lack of gamepad support really killed me! I wanted to have it playable with my Xbone controller but we ran out of time to implement button binding. Or implement any kind of options at all, really. XD But I am glad you enjoyed!
@ovrbi @edalbung The lack of enemy variety was disappointing to me. There were ideas for different kinds -- particular, a simple enemy that would attack while you were fighting the boss, so you would have a chance to power up your attacks mid-fight -- but all of that had to be left on the cutting room floor.
New Unity Input System.
And the PlayerInput class. Really makes it easy to bind buttons and actions and even Interactions. (You can also easily implement it in pure code instantiating a InputAction set and wiring its .performed delegates.
Hasa few pitfalls, sure, but... Especially the hold to charge and tap rapidly actions would be trivial to get and bind to the player.
Edit: and I think I even took note that this was a godot game when I played it...
+ I really like the mechanics of absorption, it works well and makes you want to take risks.
- The respawn deserves to have a time of invincibility or clean the screen to be safe. The projectiles can be hidden by the enemies that we absorb which gives unfair situations.
The project is simple but it is fun and the problems mentioned are simple things so the game does not depend on it.
bravo.
good job