Secret Mission: Datastorm by Sentmoraap
A shmup/racing game mashup.
You are the secret agent James N. Evans. You just escaped from Dr Nop's secret base with megabytes of data about it and his plan to take over the world. You are chased by n°144, Dr Nop's best pilot in the experimental supraconductive induction hover vehicle. He will eventually catch you, how much data you can send over a 1Kbps satellite link?
Use steering, gas and brake inputs to drive the car. Driving makes the screen scroll in a way tat your car stays at the same place relatively to the camera. In addition you can freely move within the screen but it does not affect scrolling.
Destroy enemies to get turbo. You are invulnerable while using it. Being hit temporarily stops you but it's not an immediate game over.
The game ends when 144 (the yellow circle) catches you up. There is no "game over" indication or whatsoever. To restart hit the pause input.
Default controls (it's remappable):
|Action|Keyboard|Gamepad| |-|-| |Try these first|---|---| |Steering|Left and right arrows|Right joystick or □ ○ face buttons| |Gas|Up arrow|R2| |Brake|Down arrow|L2| |---|---|---| |Moves|WASD|Left joystick or d-pad| |Fire|Space|L1| |Turbo|Numpad 0|R1| |Pause|Tab|Start|
Keyboard inputs are scancode-based. Gamepad inputs uses Lazẏnput.
Ratings
| Overall | 577th | 2.792⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 557th | 2.625⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 478th | 2.896⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 577th | 2.674⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 325th | 3.396⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 488th | 2.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
The graphics are amazing (and after looking at your code I appreciate it more as you did something from scratch in C++)
I know that Ludum Dare doesn't rate tech complexity or any other technical aspects but I personally appreciate that you took the time to write your own thing :)
Great job :)
The move left/right/up/down keys moves the car without scrolling the screen. Use gas/brake/steering inputs to move both the car and the screen. Try playing one game with only the latter inputs. You can use both types of moves together to take weirder but faster lines, but be careful about how you manage the scrolling.
Being hit temporarily stops you but is not a game over.
Being caught up is a game over but yes, there is nothing to tell it.
I found simultaneously having free 2D movement and steering/accelerate/brake disorienting - I was able to eventually internalize how to control it but I still don't have a mental model for what it represents.
Fantastic graphics and smooth gameplay, was interesting to play around with.
After giving up on the gamepad I tried the keyboard a couple times and at first it seemed like the same thing was happening where up arrow didn't accelerate, but eventually I realized that I was moving forward it just didn't seem like it because the beginning of the track is straight with nothing else on screen for a little bit. Maybe add a turret or some decoration next to the starting point to more clearly indicate when the player is moving at the beginning?
Eventually I got going and it was entertaining but it was really easy to get the camera kind of out of sync with the car. All things considered I really like the style and wanted to play more of it but the controls were too tricky. Maybe adding a simpler control scheme would be worth doing. Regardless, very impressive to make an SDL game from scratch for a jam, nice work!
I still quite like the concept though, and I'm sure this could become a really good game without the obvious deadline of the compo :D
./smd: error while loading shared libraries: libGLEW.so.2.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I tried
sudo apt install libglfw2.1
but it did not help.
But anyway, this was the error. I have SDL2 installed and working.
However I am aware that such complicated and weird controls is risky.
Some elements of decor could help the player to understand that the "car" is moving in the beginning of the game, since the track is a perfect vertical line and that there's no enemy, there seems to be no movement.
I really enjoyed the graphics, though, and I almost managed to make a full lap! Some kind of score/time board screen would give the player some incentive to try again!
I think the only thing really missing are some kind of skid or slide mechanic to add a little more 'oomph' to the driving.
Well done for using SDL in a comp entry (I'm not sure how much boilerplate is involved, but I'm assuming its not a out-of-the-box as Unity).
That engine sound is just too aggressive and loud for me x)
I liked the vector neon style of your entry. Really remind me of some Tron-like game.
The idea of the racing/shmup game is new but I don't know if it mix very well : as in a racing game you have to stay on track, but as in a shmup there is a lot of bullets to avoid, but because you have to stay on track you cannot move enough you car for it to be really useful. And also turrets shoot bullets too slow to catch you, so if you just go full throttle you are barely annoyed by them.
It was risky but you made a game with a good retro vibe :)
Nice try !
It's always interesting to see entries with games done without an engine. I like the neon vectorial graphics, it's simple but it works well.
The overall idea of mixing a racing game with shmup and bullet hell is good and has potential, though I feel like in the current state there are too many game mechanics mixed at once as you've got 2 different movement mechanics mixed together (classic car controls & move in the square controls) + the chasing that forces you to focus on movement and go fast. Add to that bullet hell mechanics where you need to dodge stuff in addition to staying on the track and shmup mechanics where you destroy the turrets (which also cancels the bullet hell stuff if there's nothing to shoot bullets anymore) with different weapons and a 'Turbo' gauge to fill to have a bit of bonus. This not only makes it that there's too many things to manage at the same time for the player, but also that some of the mechanics feel a bit lackluster.
There's still quite a lot of work put in that entry, just to implement all of these, etc... all this with no engine to help. So, gg for that.