Ninja | Thief by rolferm
The ninja thief steals everything!
Every 10 seconds you get tasked to steal something. If you can steal everything your officially a Ninja Thief.
The game is made in an awesome home-made game engine I call FoxEngine, with all game logic written in Lisp (FoxLisp!) and engine code in C.
| github | https://github.com/rolfrm/ld51_ninja_thief |
| web | http://bitsofinfinity.com/ld51/index.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/ninja-thief |
Ratings
| Given | 13🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
Other than that, looks nice and is also quite funny
The game really suffers from the clunky controls. Either better controls or more space to maneuver could help the game a lot. Also I'm glad that I've read in @nikola|s comment that the baby remains okay and healthy. I was a bit concerned about it.
I like that you use the assigned tasks to enlarge the playing field by making the player remove the door.
Sorry about the clunky controls! I tried to come up with something better, but that broke everything, so now it's tank controls >_<
I think my favorite aspect of the game is routing. For example, first I would always take the closest chairs first. But later, I realized it would probably make my life easier if I were to take the farther chair for the first chair requirement, and then take the three closer chairs for the triple-chair requirement. Similarly, I later decided to pick up the coffee cup off the table for the second coffee requirement, as that made the coffee-and-dog requirement easier.
This game also made really good use of the theme, in my opinion. There is a very direct "every 10 seconds" gameplay element, but it isn't annoying, and, crucially, it rewards you for getting better--there isn't just a 10 second deadline for every action, but you actually build up a budget of time by being faster earlier. This is what makes the routing so fun, I think.
I do think a nice quality-of-life change would be to, say, draw a highlight if you can successfully pick up an item (and if you can successfully throw it out the window). I lost a couple runs to the first "pick up the person" requirement, as apparently you are only able to really pick them up by the legs.
Of course, if there was such an indicator, it would make the game easier and, more importantly, it would lose some of the inherent riskiness in pushing the "pickup" button when you don't actually know whether you will succeed. So perhaps a better change would just be more forgiving hitboxes on the humans in particular.
Either way, I do think this game is actually quite fun to get good at. It is very satisfying to successfully execute a route that you have learned and make real progress. I think the intrinsic difficulty in the controls, combined with their determinism--and so repeatability--make this happen. It is difficult to just pick up and start playing, but it is possible to get better at the controls, and it is satisfying to execute them well.
P.S. I think it's pretty cool that this is all made in a custom engine. :smile: