Tick by ChewieCB
“Your heart's trial period has expired, and your Flux Payment Plan has been activated. Failure to keep up with your payments will result in a remote halt of your heart's functions, leading to cardiac arrest and your untimely death.”
Make questionable deliveries around the station, meet the residents, and bask in the glory of future bio-capitalism - but keep those payments coming.
Pick up organ deliveries from the blue pickup zone and drop them off in the green drop-off areas. Deliveries give you cash which you can use to buy more time for your ticker at the shop.
Controls
W to accelerate
S to brake
A and D to turn
Space to handbrake (for tighter turning)
E to interact, this includes: - Opening the Organ Shop (when in the shop/pickup zone) - Complete a delivery (once in the green zone) - Closing/Advancing dialogue
Numbered keys to buy items at the Organ shop
Changelog
v0.3.1 - Post Jam Bugfixes
- Fixed issue of friction being applied at incorrect scale to player movement, general handling tweaked and improved
- Fixed bug that let the player move around after game over if they were in the
crashedstate during the timer ending - Decreased web audio buffer to reduce latency of sound effects
- Fixed main music track being started before main scene loads
- Fixed typo in intro text
Credits
- Code: Jack McCaffrey
- Art: Tom Lindberg
- Sound: Lachlan James
- Writing: Bryn Smith
| Link | https://chewiecb.itch.io/ld50 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/tick |
Ratings
| Overall | 488th | 3.675⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 734th | 3.344⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 750th | 3.254⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 318th | 3.967⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 547th | 3.828⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 231th | 3.85⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 345th | 3.583⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 563th | 3.596⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 70🗳️ | 112🗨️ |
Thanks heaps for taking the time to give feedback around the controls.
Not sure if you were using it or not - but if not, the handbrake is definitely an essential part of navigating through the environment (light taps on and off to drastically improve cornering).
It's certainly tricky at first, but definitely very doable once you get a feel for it :)
Also I'd have liked to read the text but it's impossible to do while playing.
Hopefully will get a post jam version out somewhere along the line with some enemies/powerups etc!
But after that hickup it was smooth sailing. I think this is a great example of a game where the visual style and the setting makes even the simplest mechanic quite engaging. I found myself finishing a job after a job just to get that next dialogue line to learn more about the world.
There's so many neat things to call out I don't even know where to begin. The level design was great, there were plenty of loops to zip around in. The sound track using POS register/pinpad sounds was inspired. The dialogue and news ticker were great too: love the guy who had to get the same brand lungs because he already has that brand's heart.
I think the only gripe I have is that I never felt like I was going to run out of time. Maybe if each delivery awarded you more time, with diminishing returns or something like that. Basically the Crazy Taxi formula.
I also wish I had enough time to pull myself up by the bootstraps and buy my heart outright - then again, the next firmware update would probably make it too slow. Planned obsolescence is a helluva drug
Overall, it's a solid game.
Cool idea and fun concept. criticising lousy healthcare is always gold.
The controls felt both good and a bit frustrating, I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of Player oriented controls, with that I mean that when you press left it is the players left and not how most player's are used to, the world's left (so like on the screen) I feel like if you could adjust that I could play this for hours :)
(We once did this ourselfes with an entry on a past gamejam, so I could still make it work :) but there I also learned that most players prefer the directions to be world, or rather, screen oriented, because they're used to it and it feels more natural)
Visually it was very clear and easy to read, leveldesign was fun, the objectives we're easy to understand :)
Music was a BANGER! Awesome!
All in all, a great entry, congrats! :)
Those controls are so hard tho, maybe I just suck xD
Very nice graphics!
It's a shame the timer kept the pressure on me and prevented from reading the text since you seem to have put quite the effort into it. But it's true that pausing the gameplay during text display would have been worse.
Regarding the gameplay I don't know if I'm juste really bad at this kind of perspective but I spent way too much time colliding with walls at low velocity than wooshing around the city and that took a bit of fun out of it. Would have loved to have the thrill of "should I go faster and take more risks ??" but here, going faster actually seemed to help since the recoil from the wall allowed me to change direction faster than when I was stuck against a wall.
All in all it's still a very solid entry, great job :)
I really enjoyed playing your game. That said, I'm really not good with the control.
If you want to keep working on your game, I can suggest you a additional mechanic based on risk / reward:
When the player takes a job, you should give him a time target. If he delivers before the target, he receives more cash (you can give him a penalty otherwise)… This'll be a nice way to force the player to take huge risks and zip even faster through the city for extra cash.
Another suggestion that could help with the control: You should lock the camera to the player and rotate the world instead. You should also zoom the camera out depending on the player's speed (It'll help to anticipate obstacles).
Anyway, that's a great entry. Good job on your game.
The only gripe I have with it is that it starts being a bit on the easy side once you get the hang of it (and I'm terrible at racing games!)