Mecha Walker by Le Don
Mecha Walker was made for Ludum Date 54 with the theme
Limited Space
Buy new parts for your mecha and manage your limited inventory, while you try to survive the travel back to your home!
In the world map you can travel to towns, each one with their own jobs to earn money and shops to buy mecha parts and ressources - food, fuel and ammo. Traveling on the world map consumes food and fuel. When you run out of either of them, the game is over.
During your travels you engage with random quests you can participate for a reward or decline if you aren't brave enough. Succeeding or failing a quest depends on your combat stats and the amount of ammo you have - no ammo makes the quests harder. If you fail quests you take damage and if your mecha's condition is zero, the game is over.
Mecha Walker was made in Godot 4.0 solely by me with soundeffects from pixabay.com. Mecha Walker was inspired by games like FTL, Oregon Trail and Front Mission.
Known problems and todo list for post jam versions:
Drawing the sprites of the mecha parts might result in some strange behaviour. I wanna be honest, that part of the code is hold together by bubble gum, tears and dreams.
The armor stats currently doesn't do anything. If you accept a quest and fail, the received damage should depend on the current armor, but I didn't have enough time.
There is no lower limit for non-game over ressources. That means you can have negative money or ammo. Let's assume this waste land is a bit more generous and allows credit loans.
The balance might not hit the right note, as this is meant to involve some tight inventory management, as the theme suggest.
The Quit Game button doesn't work properly with the web build. I hoped to get a "Game Restart" function working, but this doesn't seem to be a build in method in Godot.
| Link | https://le-don.itch.io/mecha-walker |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/mecha-walker |
Ratings
| Overall | 865th | 3.212⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 852th | 3.058⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 920th | 2.885⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 952th | 3⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 902th | 2.808⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 693th | 2.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 670th | 2.68⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 976th | 2.846⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 33🗨️ |
I know it's a jam game, so this feedback could be solved with just having more time, but: I felt like I didn't have many important decisions to make as the player. Without feedback or insight into how the events/jobs work (is it just a damage check and nothing else?), I just blindly bought the highest stats I could and accepted every event/job. Maybe if there were events that cared about different stats, (e.g. a shortcut that checks how big/heavy your mech is, saving on fuel/food if you're under the threshold, maybe even with the option to throw stuff away), or regions of the map were different (e.g. short trip, bandit-heavy vs. long trip, difficult terrain) that could improve strategic depth and tradeoffs etc.
An old friend of mine had a game like this with pirates in his programmable calculator, something like 30 years ago. You had your pirate ship, your crew, and like yours you just choosed what to do and odds did their thing. Then you had to maintain your ship and hire new crew and keep an eye on resources.
Fun entry!
The game looks great, especially the mech sprite with interchangeable parts. It might be "held together by bubblegum", but it's cool as heck. The map is pretty functional, so it doesn't really need any changes. What could use some change perhaps is the shop area. There are a lot of different mech parts available from the get-go and it's pretty difficult to wrap your head around it all. Perhaps a slower introduction of various parts would be better, but then it'd require a much longer playthrough, which means a larger map, which means a lot more time than was available in a jam, so it's understandable that you did it the way you did.
As for the map, I liked the random events between towns, but I felt like there were too many of them happening during the travel time. Several times I've had three events during what looked like a not-too-distant journey.
I've had one small bug during my first playthrough - after one of the jobs my condition dropped to -11, but I was still able to play until my fuel dropped to 0 and I got stuck and starved. I wasn't able to replicate it in any subsequent playthroughs, so I'm not really sure what caused it. I definitely went on one of the hard difficulty missions while already low.
There were 2 pretty game-breaking bugs that I encountered that almost gave me give up on the game, but thankfully I found a solution for both:
1. The fuel/food depletion rate seems to correlate with frame rate, because on my high refresh rate monitor I could never make it to the first town even with 7 food/8 fuel. Switching to 60fps seemed to fix this.
2. Every time I successfully complete a job, if I go straight into the shop tab I lose all the money I've earned. I haven't seen anyone else mention this so maybe it's a Vivaldi bug? Anyway, the fix was just to leave town first.
I really wanted to backtrack and keep upgrading my mech with all the TX parts once I reached the end, so this game has clearly done something right. The lack of polish makes it quite difficult to get into but once you do it's pretty fun. Also is it just me or are protection missions super hard?
But also, I am mostly surprised about the Humor category. I thought I had some solid jokes, but I guess not :>...