Variable Volatility by Kimbsy
Do you like chemicals? Then have we got the game for you!
Experience the joys of being in a lab, with some chemicals, trying to keep them well behaved. It's as exciting as it sounds, trust us.
Variable Volatility was created for Ludum Dare 49 in 3 days, all assets (except for music) were created during the jam.
The music was kindly provided by PJ Kimber
Ratings
| Overall | 533th | 3.68⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 549th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 637th | 3.42⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 285th | 4.02⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 938th | 3.4⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 321th | 3.64⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 464th | 3.66⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
When I lost and restarted it bugged out and I couldn't play again sadly, might want to fix that!
I love how the buttons are placed just right so your fingers get in eachothers way, great game, so funny hahaha.
I'm super glad you enjoyed the awkward key layout, I'm always worried people will find it more annoying than funny, looks like I did ok this time :D
I was worried the simple aesthetic might have been a bit too minimal so it's really nice to hear you say you liked the look of it <3
Good work!
That's a really good note on the bar placement, I probably should've sketched out a wireframe or two before getting stuck in :P
Also "mmm green" SO TRUE that's what I've been saying for my entire life
The liquid shaking was _surpisingly_ tricky to get working so I'm very glad you enjoyed it! The game is written in Clojure and is essentially a colossal tree of pure functions composed together and applied to a global state each frame, which is fun, but makes seemingly simple stuff like 'mutating variables' (ew lol) relatively tricky.
Obviously I've no one to blame but myself :sweat_smile:
Maybe I could've had the keys to press displayed on screen as you play, I've seen other games this jam that did that. That way you don't have to remember all the controls all the time, which would probably be helpful as most people are rating 20+ games!
Thanks for playing :D
> Exception in :draw function: #error {
> :cause line with format PCM_SIGNED 44100.0 Hz, 16 bit, mono, 2 bytes/frame, little-endian not supported.
> :via
> [{:type javax.sound.sampled.LineUnavailableException
> :message line with format PCM_SIGNED 44100.0 Hz, 16 bit, mono, 2 bytes/frame, little-endian not supported.
> :at [com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDevice$DirectDL implOpen DirectAudioDevice.java 484]}]
> :trace
> [[com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDevice$DirectDL implOpen DirectAudioDevice.java 484]
> [com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDevice$DirectClip implOpen DirectAudioDevice.java 1241]
Nevertheless, I think I experienced the whole game.
The core game loop was very simple but enjoyable and challenging (what do you want more?). Keybindings were a little awkward and it would have made it easier if temperature were two keys on the left and the PH stuff two keys on the right. But actually the current ones worked as well and having fingers crossed on the keyboard was kind of fun.
The tutorial was very nice and felt really polished.
Also, the music choice was superb.
Great submission!
And thanks so much for providing the exception there, I've got a good idea of what's going wrong. It's a really hacky audio system I rigged up, and it sometimes falls over if it has to play too many sounds in too short a space of time . It's been on my backlog to improve for ages, I guess I should finally get round to doing it :P
Glad you enjoyed the game though, I'll pass your compliments on to the musician :)
It's a good point about the controls, they are a little awkward. I just used the letters of the actions while k was making it and then never thought to change it. I might try and do something a little more configurable next time.
Open source games deserve to be run on open source platforms :penguin: :heart:
And yeah the end of the game is just trying to see how long you can last. If I were to do it again I'd have a score counting up the longer you last to give the player some feedback.