MegaSpiker by Copito

made by Copito for Ludum Dare 50 (JAM)

You've arrived on a weirdo magical island inhabited by terrifying megaspikers! See how long you can survive before they maul you or before the vengeful magic in the air murders you. Eat tulips to stay alive.

Written in C++ / Vulkan (Note I did start with a little engine / code base with basic rendering etc)

I wanted to try out using navmeshs heavily for both player and monster movement, via recast. Ultimately though I under estimated both how many issues I'd have with the nav-mesh generation and had trouble with the workflow for placing objects (I had been planning to place objects using geometry nodes in blender but struggled to export them correctly).

This game is far from what I'd been hoping to make and I spent most of the jam fighting with technical issues but hopefully it stands up as an experiment in nav mesh use and I was quite happy with the art style even if I had no time for animation.

WSAD to move around
Hold right mouse to look around (Sorry I had meant to change this to always have look around enabled before the final build but forgot)

Change list

11/04/2022 - Removed stupid requirement for 4x MSAA sparse virtual textures

Link	https://copito.itch.io/ld50
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/megaspiker

Ratings

Overall	1245^th	3⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Fun	1302^th	2.625⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	1294^th	2.521⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Theme	1138^th	3.188⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	583^th	3.792⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Mood	1140^th	3.022⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Given		19🗳️	29🗨️

Feedback

marrs

05. Apr 2022 · 10:23 UTC

Runs really smoothly, and I enjoyed chasing after those tulips while being chased and shot at by that megaspiker!

DerekBell

05. Apr 2022 · 19:32 UTC

Fun game, cool little world to explore. Was not expecting the enemy and it somehow sneaked up on me, scared me pretty good hahah

BinarySpark

05. Apr 2022 · 19:34 UTC

I commend you for the fact that this game runs on a handwritten Vulkan renderer. In a game jam? That's crazy. Nice work.

Boathd

05. Apr 2022 · 19:36 UTC

You say that you're not very happy with the game, but I think that this game turned out very well given the time constraints. The graphics are very impressive as well.

🎤 Copito

05. Apr 2022 · 19:37 UTC

@binaryspark Oh hell no the vulkan rendering was written before the jam, I'll add a note to clarify that. I don't think I could even get a triangle rendering with vulkan in 3 days xD

Boykala

05. Apr 2022 · 19:45 UTC

The assets in the game look great but there's not very many of them and the gameplay is extremely simple. I think having to outrun the enemies without a way to fight back is a cool concept however it needs to be supplemented with an interesting movement mechanic either a grappling hook or a dodge roll or some kind of jump. With something like that this could be a really fun arcade style game.

Timur_Bahadir

05. Apr 2022 · 19:47 UTC

Intense gameplay. Had a bit of a Slenderman vibe ^^ The monster aim felt a bit overpowered xD

Roberto Romao

05. Apr 2022 · 19:52 UTC

The graphic is charming and the game run soooo smooth :D I like it! Good job!

CobGoblin

05. Apr 2022 · 19:58 UTC

The mix of flower picking with being hunted really made for an almost peaceful/ambient experience I wasn't expecting, it's an interesting mix! I think you should be proud of what you made, it's very enjoyable.

JCMonkey

05. Apr 2022 · 20:59 UTC

i really liked the toon shading look. it was really hard to out run the enemies because they had your number once they found you.

🎤 Copito

06. Apr 2022 · 12:08 UTC

@boykala thanks for the feedback, I think that is pretty close to how I feel about the game too, The original intention was that each day you'd get a new power up until eventually you could fight the monster. Alas I got too bogged down in technical issues to make it happen.

AnimalX

08. Apr 2022 · 08:46 UTC

Always love games that use a custom solution for the engine. I like how I was peacefully walking around the forest picking flowers when all of a sudden I got shot by a massive monster :D Looks and feels great, impressive with a custom engine.

LDJam user 268934

08. Apr 2022 · 17:08 UTC

Clean art , love it !
I think you are to hard on yourself This is a good game! ( we can do always better if we have more time ).

S_Onoe

08. Apr 2022 · 17:12 UTC

I liked the overall solidness in the environment. The monsters felt intimidating alright. I would say next time make the projectiles more random in their trajectory, and make the camera naturally move with the mouse instead of having to drag.

jelch

09. Apr 2022 · 16:48 UTC

I got trapped between the river and the shore :( really cool looking though, and impressive for the time constraint!

🎤 Copito

09. Apr 2022 · 17:37 UTC

@jelch hey thanks for giving it a go; yes this kind of issue is basically what I spent the whole jam trying to fix, I really struggled to control the walkable areas of the nav mesh with monsters often teleporting onto the river bed and other annoying issues. These would have been solvable by better tooling etc but I really underestimated how much trouble I'd have thinking placing large invisible blocking objects would allow me to robustly fence off areas.. which really didn't work as well as I expected. Really frustrating. Sorry I will sort it out before next jam

Noiyy

10. Apr 2022 · 11:56 UTC

Doesn't work for me, stuck at white screen when launching, then it crashes.

PashaLoban

10. Apr 2022 · 11:58 UTC

Cool game

🎤 Copito

10. Apr 2022 · 13:59 UTC

@noiyy Hey, any chance you could check the log file and see if it gives any hints? It should just be in the folder with the exe, the game does require a reasonably modern GPU as it relies on sparse virtual textures even though it doesn't use them...

Noiyy

10. Apr 2022 · 14:09 UTC

@copito "Error VK_ERROR_FEATURE_NOT_PRESENT (Remember the NVidia extension doesn't work with render doc)" I'm not using Nvidia gpu :thinking: But I do have maybe 4-5yo GPU

🎤 Copito

10. Apr 2022 · 14:36 UTC

@noiyy I think you can ignore the NVidia part as that log is wrong, what gpu do you have? I don't think the requirements of this are super high but possibly the sparse virtual texture requirements are causing issues. Thanks for the reply btw

Noiyy

10. Apr 2022 · 14:49 UTC

@copito alright, Intel HD Graphics 520 & AMD Radeon R5 M330

🎤 Copito

10. Apr 2022 · 16:07 UTC

@noiyy looks like the issue is sparseResidency4Samples which is a weird feature I have no idea why you'd want and definitely not needed for this game sorry my bad it shouldn't be required, I'll try to do another build tonight but the current one won't work. Sorry nothing to do with your GPU just a stupid flag I forgot I had set from testing random things before the jam

zimny11

10. Apr 2022 · 20:53 UTC

I was not able to run in on Windows 10. The game closes itself immediately after game window shows up :(

akitl

10. Apr 2022 · 21:50 UTC

dont got to the water ! ![image_2022-04-10_234916904.png](///raw/b57/e2/z/4dccd.png)

monsters make me think langolier , in the tv movie of the stephen king novel

LDJam user 282870

10. Apr 2022 · 21:57 UTC

Sorry bro, wont run on my box. The idea is good, the graphics, but I couldn't play it

🎤 Copito

11. Apr 2022 · 01:42 UTC

@zimny @noiyy @beebster-games I've uploaded a patched version of the game that should be a bit less picky about GPU (although you'll still need something relatively high end to run it min spec is probably a bit under a 1060 or equivalent)

Noiyy

11. Apr 2022 · 20:45 UTC

@copito Well, I got to start button now, but it crashed again after clicking it :sweat_smile: log:
```
BVH build took 0.200523
Recast build took 0.0521328
Error: [VK_SUCCESS == vkAllocateDescriptorSets(dev(), &allocInf, &_set)] Failed!
```

🎤 Copito

12. Apr 2022 · 13:15 UTC

@noiyy hey thanks for giving it another go; I think the issue this time is the max texture array size looks like it's 2048 on your card while the game uses 4096 :D good grief the game only uses about 10 textures though so err yeah I'll do another build later tonight. Thanks for all the testing the game will be a huge disappointment if I'm ever able to get it to work for you xD

commanderstitch

16. Apr 2022 · 19:25 UTC

Was not able to run it on windows7.

🎤 Copito

18. Apr 2022 · 12:50 UTC

hey @commanderstitch thanks for trying it, there should be a log file in the folder with the executable, does it have any info in it about what might be wrong?

Sopata

21. Apr 2022 · 13:02 UTC

I really liked the intense feeling of being chased and I tried strafing as much as possible :sweat_smile:
I respect the fact that you've implemented this without too much engine code - it is quite impressive - also navmeshes are hard, man.

I think it fits the theme perfectly. I probably would want to have an indicator how far away are the monsters behind me and adding a little ambient sound (royalty-free) would really spice things up and make the game much more intense.

Good job!