B.U.B.B.A. Express by Pizzasgood

Keep your giant robot alive and armed as he ferries your family to the hospital.
Tips
You're a flimsy human, so make sure to use your giant robot as cover from the incoming lasers.
Turrets have a chance to explode every time the craft they're mounted on takes damage, and that chance gets higher the lower the craft's health is. Employ redundancy!
You automatically pick up whatever item you run into, but you can only hold one at a time. Clicking will toss whatever you're holding in the direction you're aiming, so throw it behind you if you don't want to just run into it again!
Post-Deadline Bugfix
- [2020.04.20 01:21 EDT] Fixed a bug that snuck in at the last minute and prevented you from mounting turrets if your collision shape recently overlapped two mountpoint zones at once. This was only a tiny change (swapped an
else:withelif current_drop_zone == zone:).
| Youtube | https://pizzasgood.itch.io/bubba-express |
| Youtube | https://github.com/pizzasgood/BubbaExpress_LD46 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/b-u-b-b-a-express |
Ratings
| Overall | 744th | 3.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 656th | 3.125⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 590th | 3.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 594th | 3.6⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 883th | 2.81⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 675th | 2.7⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 532th | 2.722⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 865th | 2.711⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
Initially I thought I found the 'win-it-all' strategy, by simply staying on the lower levels and pick up scrap metal to repair the ship, but these pesky bots also finds their way down there.
The first time I jumped off the ship I really had this sense of 'dread' watching the ship fly away from me (although I quickly realized it was easy to catch up)
I'm not sure if you can win this game, but I didn't manage to, after several tries.
I definitely enjoyed this, and I think I'll add it to my collection of the Ludum Dare games. (I keep some games around that I find quite good, and this was one of them)
The graphics were really nice, and the audio was quite okay.
Keep up the good work, and thanks for sharing!
The idea is really original. I like the simbiosis between the player
and his jaggernaut. The difficulty ramp could be a LOT flatter.
Nice work!
Some feedback points:
• The UI was ultra tiny on my MacBook Pro retina display Firefox.
• I didn't think repairing BUBBA added a lot to the game, it was pretty tedious to jump down to get junk and bring it back up to the center. I would have rather been able to grab a lot at once, or something like that.
• Agree with others that once you install turrets it goes from too hard to too easy.
• There was way too much to understand at first without context, especially in that tiny UI.
Good entry!
One problem I had with it is that is too easy. When first enemies arrived, I hid behind B.U.B.B.A.'s head, shot them down, taken their turrets and mounted them on three forward slots. From that point on, the game almost played itself. Even if I mounted more turrets, the enemies were destroyed before they got in their range. To fix that, I'd propose three changes to the game:
1. Make the turrets do less damage. I think they should serve as support for the player instead of dealing the entire damage themselves.
2. Make the player gun more powerful, but restrict it's usage. Right now, the player can hide behind B.U.B.B.A's body and shoot from cover. Making it so player bullets collide with B.U.B.B.A. (even if they don't do damage to him) would give the player the need to come out of cover in order to shoot their enemies.
3. Spawn enemies from all directions. Right now, enemies all appear in the front of B.U.B.B.A, making the back turret slots useless. If some enemies arrived from behind or from above it would add the need to think about turret location a bit more.
Other than that, it's a pretty solid entry. The sound effects are nice, and the music is great. Well done! ;)
I don't quite agree about not letting B.U.B.B.A. do the majority of fighting himself, though I understand where you're coming from. The thing is, this isn't actually intended as a bullet-hell game. It's supposed to be a salvage and maintenance game, with the player supporting and upgrading B.U.B.B.A. as he plods implacably toward his destination. That'll work better as I add more enemy and weapon variety along with other sorts of equipment to mount so that you'll have more choices and strategy. I'm also going to break him up into separate destructible modules so that you can experience minor failures and mounting tension instead of the current all-or-nothing approach.
That said, the expanded game is definitely going to have a slower beginning where you have to do most of the work of defending B.U.B.B.A. until you can get him geared up before it transitions into more of a scramble to put out fires and keep him running.
Fun fact about the sound effects: B.U.B.B.A.'s engine rumble and the initial sound of him rising out of the ground are both just my voice. The engine rumble has some post-processing, but IIRC the rising-up sound is raw audio from me making a growling sound into cupped hands. Maybe "growl" is the wrong word; that makes me think of a throat sound, but this was upper-back-mouth sound. It worked way better than I thought it would.
>I don’t quite agree about not letting B.U.B.B.A. do the majority of fighting himself, though I understand where you’re coming from. The thing is, this isn’t actually intended as a bullet-hell game. It’s supposed to be a salvage and maintenance game, with the player supporting and upgrading B.U.B.B.A. as he plods implacably toward his destination. That’ll work better as I add more enemy and weapon variety along with other sorts of equipment to mount so that you’ll have more choices and strategy. I’m also going to break him up into separate destructible modules so that you can experience minor failures and mounting tension instead of the current all-or-nothing approach.
Ah, I see! That sounds interesting. Can't wait to see how it pans out! :)
>Fun fact about the sound effects: B.U.B.B.A.’s engine rumble and the initial sound of him rising out of the ground are both just my voice. The engine rumble has some post-processing, but IIRC the rising-up sound is raw audio from me making a growling sound into cupped hands. Maybe “growl” is the wrong word; that makes me think of a throat sound, but this was upper-back-mouth sound. It worked way better than I thought it would.
Yeah, those worked really well! I guess that's the standard for making sounds for game jams - I've used edited sounds of me hitting a water bottle and a tea mug. It's amazing what little post-processing can do. ;)