Depth Orb by cogcomp
After multiple massive setbacks I can finally present
DEPTH ORB
A game made in the Haxe language using heaps for graphics and echo for physics.
The goal of the game is to steer the orb left and right and thereby descend deeper and deeper into the game.
Along the way you’ll run into a bunch of nasties to avoid or obliterate with your trusty orb gun.
The environment has a bunch of surprises in store for you aswell:
bouncy floor, moving platforms, volatile blocks, platforms that appear and disappear, spikes and more!
Controls
You control the orb with the A/D keys to move left/right.
Space or left mouse button to fire your gun
and left/right keys or mouse to control the crosshairs.
Reflections
It's been 7 years since I last used haxe and I've never used heaps+echo so this was quite the experiment for me. Obviously the game suffered from it and I've run out of steam. There's really only 1 proper level and only half of the features made it into the game.
Tools used
Bfxr https://www.bfxr.net/
Gimp https://www.gimp.org/
Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/
Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
Haxe https://haxe.org/
Heaps.io https://heaps.io/
echo https://lib.haxe.org/p/echo/
Tiled https://www.mapeditor.org/
Explosion generator https://explosiongenerator.com/
Ableton live 10 lite https://www.ableton.com/en/products/live-lite/
Chrome https://www.google.com/chrome/
(it seems to work just fine in Edge and Firefox as well)
| Source code | http://www.cogitarecomputing.com/depthorb/ld48code.7z |
| HTML5(web) | http://www.cogitarecomputing.com/depthorb/v2 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/depth-orb |
Ratings
| Overall | 558th | 3.31⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 315th | 3.534⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 667th | 2.828⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 654th | 3.224⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 636th | 3.103⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 181th | 3.643⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 430th | 2.521⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 550th | 3.086⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 74🗳️ | 38🗨️ |
https://t.co/JrDoYcmxa2?amp=1
Mechanics/Fun: You did a good job balancing difficulty and pacing of the game. Good intuitive controls and bouncing around is pretty fun.
There were some big frame drops during the boss fight but it was still playable and smoothed out after. Good job!
I appreciate your list of tools, I'm always interested to know how others go about doing the jam. I'm going to check some of this out...
The speed of the game was a bit too fast for me at times and having the camera glued to the ball made my eyes spin a bit, but I persevered and got past the big enemy and then promptly fell into spikes ^^
Not a bad entry at all ^^
Also, the first boss (as seen in the image in the description) made the game superlaggy.
Still very good and fun overall.
Controls were responsive even if shooting direction was a bit off. The ability to aim either with the arrow keys or the mouse were a pretty nice touch for people testing "on the go", thanks for that.
Gfx were a bit too old-school to my taste but overall it's quite coherent visually and it's not that disturbing.
There is a hard lock zone after the first boss (mentionned by other jammers) and it was (with the flying platform, spikes and "water inertia" block) that felt a bit unfair. Other than that the level design was really nice and diverse.
Overall I really enjoyed playing this one, congratulations on your entry !
- in some cases you introduce new tiles/blocks safely so that the player can figure out what they do before the get to them in a win/lose scenario; very "mega man" style of teaching
- music is great
- sfx fits the game style
- I like the gravity on player bullets
Ideas/suggestions:
- The tiles aren't visually descriptive as to what they do;
- checkpoints after bosses
- don't have scenarios where the player survives a move but is stuck in a situation they cannot get out of without suiciding. If the player needs to pass a test, kill them if they fail rather than have them sit in limbo
Bugs:
- I had performance issues with the first boss in both Chrome and Firefox.... it was still playable in chrome; Firefox dropped to less than 1 frame per second.
Веселая игра ^_^
The only criticism I have is that the text in the title screen doesn't contrast well with the background making it a tiny bit hard to read.
In any event, good job making this game!