Tribulation is a game about making it out of a nightmare world while fighting back against varying levels of insanity.

PLAY IT HERE

This is my fourth Ludum Dare entry! It was a difficult one, and first time I have pivoted from my original game idea (4 hours in).

I streamed the game's development on Twitch, you can see the VOD here!

Follow me on Twitter to see future projects :)

Controls

Movement - WASD or Arrow Keys

Shoot - Left Mouse

Aim - Mouse

Use Healthkit - R

Lower Sanity - X

Cycle Weapons - Q

Mute Music - M

Mute Sound EFfects - N

Theme

With the theme being "unstable", you play as an unstable person fighting through a nightmare world. Use the insanity mechanic to your advantage to maximize damage and score!

Gameplay

Tribulation is an isometric shooter. There are 5 levels including one final boss fight. There are two endings, a good and a bad. There are 3 enemies and 3 weapons. Player health is considered their "sanity" level. When sanity gets too low, the player is insane and may see things that do not exist in reality. Scores are calculated through a number of items such as enemies killed, times damaged, medkits collected, secrets found, and ending achieved. Weapons have different stats, some causing more "stun" damage than others. Stunning enemies causes them to be stopped temporarily and more vulnerable to damage.

Tips for playing

• If the game is too hard, try the easy mode. Your damage received is greatly reduced but you cannot submit to the leaderboard
• When in insanity mode, your damage output is greatly increased
• Certain weapons have better stun rates (i.e. the Pipe), use this to stun enemies then cycle to other weapons to deal maximum damage
• Stuck in a dead end or see something out of reach? Try lowering your sanity.

Tips for finding the GOOD ending

• Pay attention to what gives you score, and what takes it away
• There's 1 secret to be collected on each level
• Level 4 is important to fully clear

WALKTHROUGH FOR BAD ENDING FOUND HERE (SPOILERS)

Screenshots

Tools used

Art

• Aseprite

Code

• Godot 3.3

Music

• Strofe

Sound Effects

• ChipTone
• Audacity

Hosting

• Gitlab pages
• Itch.io

Continuous Deployment

• Gitlab CI/CD

Leaderboard

• NodeJS
• MongoDB
• Digital Ocean App Platform

Known bugs

• Monsters may at times not attack more than once until they are hit or moved away from
• Insanity at start of level may cause bugs with the world spawn
• Bullets go through walls
• Final boss may spawn monsters on top of eachother causing them to glitch
• Insanity transition may cause player to get stuck in a wall (can kill yourself with X in this case)
• Leaderboard submit button is offset wrong

Cut Content

• Boss third phase
  • Insanity world in this phase would be filled with new area of effect items.
  • Boss would eat minions for additional health
  • Boss would have a clone in the Insanity world that is unkillable forcing the player to avoid
• Spawner enemy to spawn new enemies on the map. Would teleport away from the player and have to be chased down
• Shadow effects for each sprite so it looked less flat :(
• Better death animation including screen closing in with Nightmare effect
• Full lighting system so that player was forced to use light sources and/or flashlight to see
• Sanity maze level (original level 4 design)
  • Level is two entirely different levels, one sane and one insane. Player would have to navigate between the two to bypass roadblocks and solve puzzles
• Elite versions of the Naked and Stumpy enemies
• Shotgun weapon
• Sniper weapon
• More interesting boss arena, including enclosed areas to hide from boss and kite enemies
• A lot of sound effects are still missing due to time constraints

Post Submission Changelog

• Fixed bug with secret collection between games