Zombie Horde by Tatuvasara

[raw]
made by Tatuvasara for Ludum Dare 46 (JAM)

Ludum Dare 46: Can you keep your player alive and survive the zombie horde?

You must build walls to keep you safe!

The game gets harder as the countdown runs down. Also it seems the countdown slows as you get closer to winning the game...

Keys:

  • arrows = move
  • x = Jump
  • z = Build a wall

Squatting

Press down and squat like a slav. No effect on the gameplay

Built with PICO-8

Everything built inside PICO-8. (All code & sprites available inside the PICO-8 Cartridge)

Built with my son on our first ever game together. All sounds, sprites and code done from scracth during LD46. Had fun :D

SPLORE code: podizopsa

Ratings

Overall 1439th 3.395⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Fun 904th 3.474⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 2108th 2.789⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1910th 3.289⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1853th 3.105⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Audio 1311th 2.921⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1953th 2⭐ 19🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1992th 2.889⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Given 5🗳️ 4🗨️

Feedback

🎤 Tatuvasara
20. Apr 2020 · 21:30 UTC
Try beating the game squatting!
alanxoc3
21. Apr 2020 · 16:38 UTC
The vibe/story was cool. It was a bit too easy though...
Abb1x
21. Apr 2020 · 20:05 UTC
Great Game ! I really liked the references to minecraft !
albertnez
21. Apr 2020 · 20:09 UTC
Starts a bit easy, but towards the end it gets more challenging and fun! If difficulty escalated faster, and then was held at that point for longer, would be pretty sweet.

The walls are really a 1-time trap, maybe it could be change into such, to make it clearer.
🎤 Tatuvasara
21. Apr 2020 · 20:09 UTC
@alanxoc3 you must be pretty good... We did quite a bit of playtesting, trying to achieve 2/3 wins/losses ratio (kind of thereabout).
Mammoet
21. Apr 2020 · 20:10 UTC
A bit unnatural to jump with x. But it's a simple nice little game :)
SaadSirius
21. Apr 2020 · 20:10 UTC
i really love pico8 art style,the game looks very simple at the starting but gets difficult with time,overall a good game
Fireshake
21. Apr 2020 · 20:23 UTC
Cool Game, love the artstyle and the idea of crushing zombies with walls. And yo definitely get an extra star for adding a squat^^
Glaceo
21. Apr 2020 · 20:24 UTC
had fun with the progressive difficulty, really enjoy it when games get harder the longer you overcome it, great stuff
Khud0
21. Apr 2020 · 20:27 UTC
Simplicity is king! I like the idea, SFX and art style, but I found the game a bit too easy for the genre. I also think that the time wasn't quite correct on the last few seconds (or it's just not measured in seconds?) because last 10 seconds lasted for half a minute or so. :)
🎤 Tatuvasara
21. Apr 2020 · 20:38 UTC
Thank you all for the great feedback! Really appreciated.

@albertnez agree, walls are essentially a 1-time trap, but it was a bit accidental. We had quite a few cool ideas for mechanism (the source still has a bullet system in it). Implemented the walls first, and as time progressed we realized we could not implement all the cool ideas. We then changed the walls to be traps, and it kind of worked.

@mammoet true, X is not a typical jump-button, but that was more of a limitation on PICO-8 (you only get arrow-keys, Z and X)

@khud0: The last few seconds are intentionally made longer... Part of trying to build a bit of pressure (speeding up the spawning, speeding the zombies and randomly skipping countdown)


And people commenting the game being easy... You make me feel like a lousy gamer; I had hard time beating the game when playtesting :laughing:
ruddgasm
21. Apr 2020 · 20:48 UTC
Nice little game. I liked the pixel graphics and the music. The difficulty increased in a way that made sense. I beat the game squatting which made it a little more difficult to move around. Good Job!
FPGames
21. Apr 2020 · 21:06 UTC
Is it just me or do the zombies look like creepers :D
The game is short and sweet.Good job!
RAFFE
22. Apr 2020 · 16:21 UTC
Lmao, what a fun, simple yet a pretty difficult game (at least for me, tho jumping from x just didn't really work for me ;D ) Still completed it around my 5th time trying and it was fun!

Grphics were cute and good looking, nothing too crazy about them, unfortunately I had to play without sound, I'll go and play it with audio next time I get back to my pc! And so lovely to hear that you made this game with your son <3

It was clean, well working, nothing to really complain about, thanks for submitting and I hope you and your son keep making more games. 8)
Koolruz
23. Apr 2020 · 03:20 UTC
This was fun, and it's really awesome that you made a game together with your son! :)

I liked the difficulty curve - It started out a bit too easy for me, but quickly got to the point where I had to think about what I was doing, and it took me a few attempts to beat. One thing that threw me off was the way the timer slowed down at the end of the game - On one of my first attempts, I let a large wall of zombies build up to one side of me that I was slowly running away from, and ended up dying because I had a lot longer to survive than I originally planned for.
🎤 Tatuvasara
24. Apr 2020 · 07:38 UTC
@raffe & @koolruz Thank you!
Motley
24. Apr 2020 · 12:01 UTC
Great graphics and gameplay!

The fact that you can place many walls on one tile lowers it's difficulty, but I still died in my first attempt.

It's great you added both visual and sound indication for when the enemies spawn
tobiasw
05. May 2020 · 02:02 UTC
Simple but fun gameplay. I died a few times, but after a bit I found a working strategy. I agree that adding both a visual and sfx for enemy spawn was a good idea!
domrein
09. May 2020 · 03:33 UTC
I read some comments that said it was easy. I wanted this to be the first LD46 game I actually beat. But I couldn't do it after 5 tries. I'm just an old guy that sucks at video games now ;p . This is a fun little game. Good work!
yy404
11. May 2020 · 11:43 UTC
Good to know that you made it with your son!

Perhaps it could provide a message or any feedback (e.g. showing millisecond), indicating that you intentionally made last few seconds longer. I thought the timer was broken :smile:
LunacyEcho
11. May 2020 · 12:39 UTC
This was super fun! I liked how you took a really simple concept and added some flavor, and came up with this gem. It was also pretty evil how you made the clock slow down! I was counting internally and felt so victorious at the end, but... alas... DIED! Fun stuff :)
randomhuman
11. May 2020 · 12:51 UTC
That's really fun! The difficulty ramps up well and I had to play it a couple of times before I figured out my strategy. Good job team!