Shell Smash! by MartensCedric

made by MartensCedric for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

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Help Henri the Hermit Crab

You play as Henri the Hermit crab (a Rust-acean), and must defend your shell from unfriendly sea creatures. While a Hermit Crab's shell is a house, it does not offer sufficient storage for all of your crustacean needs.

Control your shell space

Click on the arrow-shaped gizmos to move and rotate your collected items to help you fit them in your shell. This can also be controlled with the following keys: W/A/S/D (move item), Q/E/R/F (rotate item), Arrow Keys (rotate grid).

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A Hermit is reclusive

Henri lives alone and fights alone, you will meet ill-natured sea creatures that desire nothing more than break your shell.

You can cycle to the next weapon by clicking on it on the top left corner, or by pressing Tab. Make sure to hold down the left mouse button for weapons that can auto-attack.

Game made in Rust

Shell Smash! is written in Rust using Bevy

GitHub	https://github.com/CoolCrabsCollective/ShellSmash
Web	https://davidhuculak.itch.io/shell-smash
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/shell-smash

Ratings

Overall	927^th	3.136⭐	35🧑‍⚖️
Fun	889^th	3⭐	35🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	675^th	3.227⭐	35🧑‍⚖️
Theme	500^th	3.727⭐	35🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	630^th	3.515⭐	35🧑‍⚖️
Audio	645^th	2.766⭐	34🧑‍⚖️
Humor	672^th	2.679⭐	30🧑‍⚖️
Mood	920^th	2.984⭐	34🧑‍⚖️
Given		49🗳️	43🗨️

Feedback

Chaineddreamer

03. Oct 2023 · 01:59 UTC

Man wave 5 was crazy!
Great idea for keeping and losing items .I enjoyed it. The ouch sounds was really funny too.

LDJam user 372525

03. Oct 2023 · 02:00 UTC

I like the unusual mechanics of the game. It looks cool!

StvUP

03. Oct 2023 · 02:15 UTC

Took me a bit to understand the item fitting mechanic, after that it works well!

foreyes

03. Oct 2023 · 04:19 UTC

I like the backpack management gameplay,it expresses the theme well!

TFL

04. Oct 2023 · 03:30 UTC

The backpack mechanic is cool, but it was somewhat hard to tell which item I was messing with at each moment and how to best move things around. Once I got the hang of it it worked better.

Phillips Albright

04. Oct 2023 · 03:33 UTC

Inventory management was definetely a neat way to incorporate the theme. My team did something similar. Nice work!

floppynub

04. Oct 2023 · 03:45 UTC

We've got a rust/bevy enthusiast on our team, so I know enough about bevy to be incredibly impressed by this lol. Great work all around! Ran great in browser. Didn't have a single bug. The 3d tetris was a really cool touch, though it would have been nice to have full orbit camera control for that.

Overall a super impressive entry, wave 5 was my favorite.

floppynub

04. Oct 2023 · 03:45 UTC

aevek

04. Oct 2023 · 04:23 UTC

As an apparent rust/bevy enthusiast, I am into this one. Ran great and the core combat was fun. It did feel like a pretty intense difficulty spike once I got the third weapon, but in a fun way. The inventory management was a fun interpretation of the theme and was a nice relaxing break while I tried to optimize, but arranging things wasn't really a challenge for quite a while because of all the extra space, so maybe starting it out smaller and increasing it with each item could help make it more involved earlier? Game looked great, sounds were good and communicated state well (did you use built-in Bevy audio? If so I'm even more impressed), and the core loops were fun. Great work!

Raaph

05. Oct 2023 · 08:17 UTC

I found myself switching weapons mostly so I didn't have to listen to the repetitive sound effects as opposed to suit the situation as there was very little variety between waves. The RE4 type inventory management is always fun but I didn't reach the point where stuff didn't fit because I wasn't being challenged. I also feel like the bigger gun and sword just make the others obsolete, although even the starting sword was more than enough to survive until boredom finally beat me. Great atmosphere and graphics, love the underwater vibe.

zanagi

05. Oct 2023 · 15:51 UTC

Interesting action game, having both melee and ranged weapons was nice and the ouch sound was kinda funny; would've been nice if there were sound effects when hitting enemies as well. The inventory management for removing items could've been clearer as I was having hard time seeing which piece I had selected. I also think I encountered some sort of max HP bug where I could tank ~10 hits from enemies without health going down.

Still this was a nice game, congrats on submission!

Winter2277

05. Oct 2023 · 16:37 UTC

Thank you for the feedback @raaph and @zanagi.

Jinbu

07. Oct 2023 · 07:21 UTC

Interesting concept, had some hard times timing the attack

Marcel_1

08. Oct 2023 · 18:08 UTC

Interesting game!

DeadByDeath

09. Oct 2023 · 10:07 UTC

Chill and calm game. Nice idea and very good implementation of the theme! The controls was a little bit clunky thoough and I was not very sure even when I was attacking the enemies that I will do damage to them, because it seemed like that sometimes it worked as expected but some others times it was doing its things! Anyway, very nice game! Good job! Keep up!

Meo-benderson

10. Oct 2023 · 13:43 UTC

Not sure how to change the weapon, but I liked the concept :-)

Winter2277

10. Oct 2023 · 19:33 UTC

@meo-benderson when you picked up more than 1 weapon, click on the other weapon in the UI (top left) to shift to it

knexator

12. Oct 2023 · 15:28 UTC

Good mix of mechanics, and nice work on using Bevy engine

Haste06

13. Oct 2023 · 07:47 UTC

Very nice concept! Attacking is a little bit hard but it's a game I'd like to play more if it were expanded on.

fatEmperor

14. Oct 2023 · 15:56 UTC

Very interesting. Clear and convenient combat system. I did not understand why the stage with the collection of weapons is needed.

Vodzik

19. Oct 2023 · 10:40 UTC

Cool game. Nice art.
I think that sotrage space could be smaller, since it is easy to stack everything.