Feed The Beast by leorid
Beast is hungry

About: By now I am 4h late with the upload but thats what I've got for this jam. I am happy with the result and I don't care for any ratings but please leave a review, it would mean the world to me if I get to know what you think about our game. :)
The Game: Escort a beast throught various landscapes. Feed the beast with defeated enemies and shoot at the beast to regain health. There are 5 (or 6?) different weapons in the game (my friend, who made the leveldesign did a good job at hiding them). Barricade-Doors can be opened from the other side - find a way over or around them.
And most importantly: have fun!
known Bugs: Pathfinding sometimes goes wild Restart Button does not work, you have to close and re-open the game.
Controls: Walk with WASD Drag Enemies with Right Mouse Button Shoot with Left Mouse Button Jump with Space Change Weapons with MouseWheel or Number Keys
| Youtube | https://gamejolt.com/games/feedTheBeast/488525 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/feed-the-beast-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 2158th | 3.024⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1849th | 3⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1895th | 2.929⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1411th | 3.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1099th | 2.944⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 2304th | 2.421⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 12🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
Now it's working.
- Performance is quite poor. I was getting about 20-30fps. Barley playable
- Darging enemies is quite hard. It always takes multiple attemps
- There are too many enemies and health boxes are to scarse
I'll try to improve the performance, for us it went completely smooth at >50fps but we have quite good computers and no chance to test it on lower spec PCs.
health boxes spawn when you shoot the beast, but it makes it more hungry - you control how many health boxes are on the map, maybe I should've phrased this better in the info box, maybe somehting more precise than "shoot the beast to gain health".
Thanks for playing. :)
The main mechanic is kind of cool but I don't think it was used that well in the end.
Like mentioned above, performance is quite poor, and I have a 1060 GTX and 16GB of RAM.
You also don't really die when you "die."
We didn't had the time to implement all the sounds we'd like to .. maybe we patch this version during the next few days.
Also yes, there are way to many enemies ... not enough time to balance too, it maybe was overall too ambitious.
But what I am most interested in is "The main mechanic is kind of cool but I don’t think it was used that well in the end" - could you elaborate more on this?
Because fixing all the bugs is kinda easy, as we have the time now (the tree bug above was 1 day of profiling for example) but the game-design itself is harder to get right.
Do you have more details about what made the main mechanic less cool than it could've been? Essentially why it's not used that well in the game? I'm really curious in your thoughts on this topic. ^^
I would be really surprised if there wasn't an existing terrain/vegetation generator or such for Unity that used this pattern.
As for the mechanic of the game, I didn't go that far so maybe I missed some things, but it feels like it's just a game where you shoot a bunch of guys, whose bodies you can coincidentally feed to the monster, and I don't feel any urge to do that besides from the fact that it's kinda funny (and the red thing that says you need to feed it, I guess). Basically, I don't feel a sense of purpose. Like there should be additional interactions instead of just the monster moving forwards and the enemies coming to attack you. The monster could be helping attack enemies while you defend a base which they are coming to destroy, and the enemies try to defeat the monster so they can get through, and then you feed it to recover its health so you can keep your base protected, something like that.
The mechanic where you have to feed the beast makes for a pretty good synergy too, although maybe some ennemies should attack the beast as well.
The levels are sometimes a bit empty too! But good job nonetheless!
The guns for the must part sounded great and powerful, but think they need some camera shake, especially the later once.
For the most part the shoot was good, had fun spam shooting the shotgun, until I accidentally killed my pet hehe. If you going to have projectiles, then use those to detect hits, felt weird shooting and the enemy die before the projectile reached. Nice use if impact effect.
Was interesting that the more powerful weapons destroy the bodies, forcing you to use other weapons.
Good job.
Performance was very bad, though. Started out completely fine. After about two waves of enemies is started dropping and after the third wave it was abysmal, a slide-show at times.
The timing of the waves could be tweaked. The waves come very fast one after another at the beginning, leaving you little time to feed your beast, not to mention explore. Afterwards, between the gates, there were zero enemies and no activity what so ever. And after the second gate they started coming again like crazy.