Outland Escape by Spike Studio
In the Outland, you must kill zombies to survive. Get ready to scavenge for resources with your limited scavenging space to do so, and be careful with what equipment you bring, as this will limit it further!


Spend your collected junk to upgrade your buggy enough to escape the Outland. You have limited space to collect junk, as well as limited space to drift, good luck escaping!


-A / D to steer buggy.
-S to reverse.
-Left/Right Click for buttons.

All Programming, Art, and Audio done by Luke Speicher (solo)
Devlog will be out on YouTube @SpikeStudio soon
| Link | https://spikestudio.itch.io/outlandescape |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/outland-escape |
Ratings
| Overall | 137th | 4.049⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 36th | 4.255⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 608th | 3.304⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 767th | 3.333⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 497th | 3.725⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 321th | 3.608⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 595th | 2.824⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 382th | 3.745⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 57🗨️ |

Fun gameplay loop, though the frequent drives back to the left of the screen could get a little tedious as the game continued.
As soon as I understood the 'limited space' mechanic, it did add some interesting choices, deciding which items to pick up and which to steer around.
Nicely done, and very polished!
It made me want more. Congratulations!
The drifting feels great, and the screen shake when hitting enemies is satisfying. Seriously good work with the camera too, you don't tend to hear a lot of praise on camera-related work, but I thought I'd point out that you did a great job.
As a heads up, after maxing out the tires/bumpers, I was able to infinitely gain durability for free by clicking on the icons over and over. (Sorry i didn't catch that when I play-tested before the submission hour!)

I did it! I escaped the outlands! This is a really great entry. Graphics and audio are so clean and well polished that I forgot that I was playing a jam game for a second. You even managed to build a steady progression system and add a decent amount of content, good work! I don't have any serious gripes with this.
Personally, I think the gun feels too weak compared to just ramming. I tried making use of it, by slowing down/stopping to shoot at the zombies, but that felt too slow and quickly became a little too boring, so I just resorted to ramming for the rest of the game.
I think car-wall interaction is a little awkward as well. I occasionally got stuck facing a wall, and tried to turn out, but I couldn't, since the car doesn't slide along the walls. And because of that, there's this sense of "I'm stuck, what do", and then I remember that there's a reverse button.
On the technical side, I see that this has been mentioned before, but yeah, I can upgrade tyres/bumpers past the maximum, giving me infinite durability.

I also found out that holding both A and D allows me to go straight, but I'm still considered drifting. So, I was able to complete the drift zones by just going straight through. Only found out on my second playthrough though, where I was more purposefully breaking stuff. <.<
Anyway, this was a very nicely made game! Well done!
Here's the VOD with Timestamps so you can click to your game!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NVsG7UOyfw

https://youtu.be/OMFzVKOU-1I?si=iWeoNFNas8DRYucA&t=14663