[WebGL/HTML5] Murder Loop by leorid

The Game: Run and Gun your way through a circular spaceship. From checkpoint to checkpoint. Dismember your Enemies and collect their heads to open doors. Explore 7 Rooms + 1 Bonus Room.
Play Duration ~15 min
If you get stuck (more than intended), here is the full walkthrough:
https://youtu.be/_ey5qHuptSg
About the process: I started with no idea, 2h of thinking, 8h of sleeping, nothing helped, so I started working on the player character.
But after modelling him in blender, Unity refused importing any animation. Instead of fixing the bug (which could've taken some precious hours) I decided to try something I wanted to try for a long time: procedural animation.
To make them, I need inverse kinematics .. unity didn't release their Generic IK solution yet (afaik) and I can't use third party assets if I want to participate at the Compo. Writing my own IK-Solution using trigonometry could also take up lots of hours, I don't know if 48h are enough for the IK solution and then I still have to make the game..
But wait, theres another Solution: PhysX. If physics does all the math for me, I can focus on the animations and the gameplay. So I used Physic Joints as "pseudo IK" solution and it worked pretty good.
Everything else evolved from this step. Disabling Physic Joints lead to a cool dismemberment system. Kicking Enemy Heads around was fun, so I decided to make it a game mechanic ... and thats it. Thats the game for this jam.
I hope you enjoy playing it. Please leave some feedback, so I can see your name and play your game. ^^
| Youtube | https://github.com/leorid/MurderLoop |
| Youtube | https://gamejolt.com/games/murderLoop/542897 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/murder-loop |
Ratings
| Overall | 402th | 3.25⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 399th | 3.087⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 359th | 3.196⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 572th | 2.652⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 456th | 3.022⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 471th | 2.364⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 150th | 3.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 495th | 2.682⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
I like the orange style graphics this reminds me cs custom maps ^^
I tried complete stairs challenge 20 or more times and finally done it )))
I don't know is it last room or not. Any way thank you for fun )

I spent quite a while with this, because it has a cool air of mystery about it, and a mix of combat, exploration, and cube-soccer. The animations and models are wild, too, love the mohawk and the unusual walking.
Part of the issues, but in a strange way also part of the appeal, was that the procedural animation seemed to get corrupted over time. After I had been playing a while, my guy would stagger around, sometimes spike way up into the air, shatter into pieces and then reform with twisted limbs. This corruption was another form of challenge, and you did a great job of giving me tools to deal with it, including some really smart choices like: the frequent checkpoints, the killplane beneath the level for when I clipped down into space, and the K key for when I clipped into other invalid areas. In fact, the whole options menu was vital, as it let me set my mouse sensitivity.
I appreciated the short bursts of combat, but I was glad it wasn't the main focus of the experience.
I got to a part where I went up an elevator and got a 7-gate, but my corruption was so extreme by then that I couldn't move forward.. at first. I would get 3-4 pieces together and then clip away, respawning, and my work would be undone.
I actually started writing this review having quit there, but I went back and gave it another shot, and I made it through that darn 7. After that it was a breeze to complete the loop.
If I could tweak one thing about the game it would be the make the cube-kicking a little more generous... maybe have a special "cube kick" layer, and put like an invisible "plow" collider in front of the player so they can herd the cubes slightly easier?
A very interesting and memorable experience, nice!
@tort60091 You somehow managed to clip throught the wall, you are basically at the center of the Map where in theory should be nothing but the cold vacuum of space (but because you should never be able to see it, I mad the top and bottom floor just giant cubes - the small cube in the middle is exactly at (0,0,0) ) Melee Weapon is also an interresting idea ^^
@pkenney Thats awesome - thanks for every single word in your comment :D
The corrupted physics happen because FixedUpdate (the physics update loop in Unity) can't keep up with all the calculations - the more enemies you kill, the more physic objects exist in the game world and it seems like some of them didn't stop moving and their calculation never ended.
I thought of "bugfixing" the cube kicking after finishing the game .. but I had no idea where to start because of (literal) edge cases.
And I want to thank all four of you for your feedback :)
I guess most questions can be answered with one Walkthrough, so I made one:
https://youtu.be/_ey5qHuptSg
I love the ragdoll animations, they are great!
You were not kidding when you said aim for the limbs. As a seasoned FPS player i was giving them soo many headshots and nothing happend :D That's a nice touch.
I really liked the funny descriptions like "I don't know why it's called healing station" :D
overal great job, cool entry!
That being said, I have to agree with pkenney and say the bugginess of the game dampened the experience somewhat. I got sent to the center of the map so many times from using a healing station, or kicking the cubes around, or even just turning my character too fast. If all the lose physics objects are giving you trouble, have you tried making the blood particles disappear after a while? or at least remove their Colliders and RigidBodies once they've settled down?
Physics Bug on low-end PCs should be fixed now - when you respawn, all dead enemies and blood gets despawned ^^
* enemy heads turn into points which combine and then you kick that point block around and then
* the point blocks are what unlocks doors for different amounts of points.
* The graphics are great.
* The shooting is good,
* its pretty bloody for a voxel game the blocks drip blood.
* I think it should say like "hit escape or space to play" to remove the UI at the beginning and let you have mouse look automatically.
Thanks for making this game. I also loved hearing about how necessity helped you innovate several of the key gameplay mechanics. Awesome!