Protect Egg. by devook
Death comes for all of us eventually. Right now, it's coming for :egg:...
Plot
Egg used to live in peace on this floating square, but not any more! Egg must escape but there's nowhere to run.
Features
- egg-based physics gameplay
- meteors
- some music I made
- excessive screen shake
- not the default unity game jam UI
- a mildly tuned difficulty curve
Download
Links to itch.io below screenshots and at top of page.
Mechanics Spoilers
Meteors spawn at a semi-random rate that increases over time up to a plateau. Egg is drawn to your cursor, and the meteors are drawn to Egg. The longer the game goes, the more fixated on egg's position they become. If you get knocked into the air, you have some limited control, BUT if you get knocked too high, or too fast laterally, you lose the ability to draw Egg to the cursor until you've landed again. SUPER SECRET TIP (my sister is a cheater and was exploiting my meteor AI and sending me screenshots of her scores): If you want to get the Big Times, hide in the corner until you know some meteors are coming, then switch corners and repeat. Keep going indefinitely until the game lags or you get bored. Enjoy it while you can, 'cause I am eventually going to patch it >:[ (addendum: I did not patch it.)
Also it's way harder on the Windows client than WebGL because the particles are substantially denser.
Very Short Post-Mortem (for Unity game devs)
- If you're using RigidBody, use FixedUpdate instead of Update
- Clamp your velocity when adding forces indiscriminately
- Scale your lateral movement control with respect to vertical speed for non-game-breaking air control!
- Particle systems and game feel tweaks are black holes; save them for the end
Credits
Solo dev using exclusively stretched/squashed primitives and free Asset Store particles/sound fx/skybox. Music and "switch" noise by me (and some very good arp/fx presets in Native Instruments). Feedback system (and ground texture) by MoreMountains * Impact noises and particle sprites are from asset store and shouldn't be rated
Tools Used
Unity 2019.3 and URP for game. Ableton/Native Instruments for music. Blue Yeti for one sound effect.
| Youtube | https://devook.itch.io/protect-egg |
| Youtube | https://devook.itch.io/protect-egg |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/protect-egg |
Ratings
| Overall | 1171th | 3.521⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 449th | 3.727⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 755th | 3.521⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 743th | 3.875⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 621th | 3.565⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 461th | 3.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1530th | 3.214⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
I accidentally tabbed out of the window at the beginning on my first run, and failed to catch that the egg was mouse controlled. Quickly figured it out for my second though.
I like that the enemy appearance is telegraphed really well. You get a sense of the location and the distance before it comes up.
@jeremy-ryan Thanks! I spent way more time than I should have tweaking the meteor telegraphing, so I'm glad that it felt right to you.
@crispypear The origins and aspirations of Egg are mostly a mystery. I refer to the great philosopher Socrates wisdom on the subject, Plato's records indicate that he often said, "Hey, what's up with that egg?" (Editor's note: He definitely said that. Don't look it up.)
I will let you in on one bit of Protect Egg deep lore. The egg is that of the last remaining Dodo bird. This is Protect Egg canon.
@pomeroyb So glad that came through! I turned those knobs many times to get a level of egg control that felt right to me, glad I was mostly in the ballpark.
@shadoninja You made it halfway through my originally expected max playtime! (the difficulty currently plateaus at 2 minutes). Bummer that you got blasted into the no-control zone so early :( You actually *do* get to control the egg in the air *sometimes*, but if you get lobbed too high, I steal it from you (I thought it was funny to watch the egg slowly drift off the platform). It definitely still needs some tweaking.
@snip-man Thanks! The corner-hiding strategy can pay off when executed carefully, but the meteors are also programmed to expect it. There's a bit of timing to get it right, but when you do it becomes somewhat exploitable (and a thing I need to patch, I think...)