The Last Patrol by WilloXs
Only a sole squad patrols somewhere in the outskirts of the habitable universe. Guard in this quadrant is low as no one expects the mysterious hostile Combine to know of the outpost established on the Moon Delphi...
Soon it will be on the brave pilots of The Last Patrol to face impossible odds.
The above is all you need to know about the game. Now begins the dive into the dev part.
This is my second attempt on a narratively driven game for a Ludum Dare Jam. I didnt have time for menus and the code got very messy day two onwards. That means there is not even a retry/play again option. If you encounter crashes - please be so nice and post the Error-Message here.
The cinematic finale could also not be implemented in time - i needed an animation of the planet getting destroyed and had an hour left so skipped it.
On the other hand - things that went good:
This is my most ambitious project when it comes to AI (in a jam from scratch). Im really proud on how the AI fighters behave (i even had to nerf them as they would be too good - they now mainly guard the players "six" and only occasionally attack unprovoked).
Also Audio! I always struggled with music and soundeffects in particular. But this time i had it working pretty early on and invested much time into the composition. I may be a bit biased but i think just flying through open space with the white noise ambience and the sound of your booster setting in is amazing.
| Link | https://willoxs.itch.io/the-last-patrol |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-last-patrol |
Ratings
| Overall | 926th | 3.347⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1065th | 3.014⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1104th | 2.819⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1165th | 3.143⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 724th | 3.611⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 548th | 3.414⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 747th | 3.429⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 64🗨️ |
The controls feel great, though sometimes you feel faster than the enemies and you end up passing over them, and having to turn back to shoot them.
The game lacks a feedback when a shot hits an enemy, like a screen rumble or an sfx.
I would really like to buy and play a full version of this game.
Great work!
@tendencydriven Im a big fan of "you die but take over something else" and i appreciate the voice line love
@mindexpositions Yeah i guess a little notification aside from the narration would have helped
thanks for being my first commenters this LD! Ill make sure to check your games when i have time
I am constantly faster then my enemies so it's rather annoying circling around to even hit them just because I always catch up to them. There is to me a bit too much time in the traveling.
Time in traveling would be fine BUT! The space is just empty, the color background is very cool and the particles I love it. But sadly it felt very empty and I would like some bigger planets in the background that very slowly move away. Maybe like 3.
The voice over is very nice! If that is your voiceover sir, then very good. The graphics and sound felt polished
Feel like it needs some background music.
All in all it was a good game
It's hard to offer any critique as I read about your challenges in the "dev log". The game ran fine for me! Beyond the things you talked about, I think two things would have been nice:
1. I think the ability to switch at will would have been a lot of fun!
2. Maybe the controls would have felt a little smoother on a game controller
Thanks for the game!
@trev3lyan nah the code is such a mess - im not touching that again xD
@taaada the bigger ships are supposed to be the bombers send to destroy the moonbase and the smaller ones are their fighter escortes. Good point about the emptynes - i felt the same and tried randomly generated asteroids that you have to avoid. But that was too ambitious as it required altering the AI to avoid them as well...
@jesse-martin thanks! No music was an "artistic choice" actually.
@raiponz yeah the feedback was brought up before - thats a good point. I think next time i need a few playtesters.
@hawkin controller support and custom keybindings were the first things to be thrown out to save time. The ability to switch at will would have been really cool! Again - i should get playtesters to tell me such things xD
You did a great job with the friendly and enemy AI, too.
Great work!
The controls were fine, but I found it tricky to actually aim due to things moving too fast.
Also I has an interesting border at the top of the screen when the camera zoomed out when accelerating. (1920x1200 resolution)
I would have liked to see the planet go kaboom :grin: , but the way you handled it was pretty humorous :D
@wouter52 Also thanks for actually finishing the game! I have no idea how hard the difficulty actually is and yours is the first comment to reference the ending. Thats not to say everyone else didnt get it but the number is now definitely higher than zero.
@rhoka Yes switching at will would have been a great feature...
* I had the same issue as David York, albeit not quite as extreme.
* It would have been nice to have some feedback on ship damage, it could be hard to tell if I'd actually hit the enemy at times. Some kind of sprite effect, hit markers, damage counter etc... just something to show I'd connected.
* Mouse movement would be great also, the WASD controls felt a little clunky.
* Could the enemy damage the planet? I had assumed so, but it wasn't obvious and they didn't seem to do anything to it.
Cool game :) Great work!
Keep up the good work!
Once I got used to the controls, though, it was a cool little experience. I was a fan of how the game didn't end when I died, but switched me over to the next ship in the squadron. Really sold the "last desperate effort" and "losses are expected" kind of mood.
The sound design was really good too. The engines felt powerful and the ships weighty simply because of how they sounded.
Great job!
Its really just that the background is not scaled. That means if your screen is bigger than the (pretty big) background there is no surface left to cover those parts of the screen and thus it will still render the sprites but wont clear the stuff drawn before... i should probably put up a post jam version that is windowed so it works on larger screens as so many seem to have problems with it.
I just hoped nobody will notice that the big ships are essentially just target practice.
Good job :slight_smile:
I love shooty-shooty space fights, so this was right up my alley. Totally didn't expect the voice over, so that was a cool surprise and gave the whole experience a real feeling of being launched into the middle of a story in progress, which I loved for something that's meant to be a short experience (just got to the good stuff quick!).
As a person who mainly focuses on the audio aspects of projects, I completely understand how hard it can be. If I didn't have a team to work with while doing jams it probably wouldn't happen at all. So, despite the lack of discernable music, you still did great work on the stuff you did get implemented, so nice job on that!
The ships control well, and I love that it switches the player between them - very cool idea.
Overall, cool game that ticks all the necessary boxes in my book, and in some cases, does so excellently!
The only issue was that weird border effect which I assume was a glitch. Not sure how to describe it but I think you know what I'm talking about. It was just ugly and weird and kind of broke the immersion and feeling of being in space.
And yeah also thx for telling me that the version i put up for all the people that would otherwise have terrible glitches (see above (and below) comments) was completely broken xD
@gamescodedogs @martink @david-york @someone i now have a version that forces a windowed mode for big screens and should prevent the visual glitches. A bit late but i though i at least tell you.
I thought for a long time I did no damage and my squad did everything, but maybe I hit some of them it's hard to know without feedback (at first I thought it was one hit to kill). Btw the AI is well developped
The combat is not easy, it's a little bit hard to be precise on the direction I shoot