First of all bonus stars for using Unreal :) I really like these kind of wave hord games and the swarm is very cool.
But I could not managr to get past wave 1 could you explain a bit more how to play the game? (how to win)

@kevin-meissner, Yes the feedback is a bit confusing we intended to make either a gaz diffusing VFX and sound or something more like energy based but we didn't have the time.
So basically if you keep shooting at the swarm it will die over time.

I put a separate like for the fact that it's on anril, and so the idea is cool

Seems like the mob of the wave 2 never spawn, or i miss something

The Swarm was very cool, however there seems to be issues with how collisions are functioning for the games shooting. Loading distance is also a bit of a pain point as the only information a Swarm is present is the health of the Obj going down, so looking around and not knowing which Rod is what to have to get closer with no movement tech creates a bit of an issue as the Swarm only loads in when close.

The completion level is not very high; the group of small spheres could be designed to be more diverse and rich.

@overlix Yes, sorry for the confusion. We didn’t adjust the culling distance, so you'll need to get closer to the rod that is being attacked

@wolfox121 As I mentioned before the feedback of the gun is confusing. And we used GPU particles, you can't actually collide with them. We could have used a tech artist ;).

Ok so the swam of mobs looks really cool! it reminds me a lot of the machines from the matrix. A couple of problems arose when playing, first when the swarm is very far, it doesn't render in which makes it really hard to tell if anything is actually happening, next the gun feels very awkward the bullets sometimes just don't appear, it also feels to me like the concept of killing a whole swarm really calls for a full automatic firing mode instead of semi-auto. Movement feels a bit slow for the size of the arena and the speed at which you have to get to the rods to destroy the swarms. It seems like a shame to me that the swarms seem to share a health pool where when they get hit by the bullet they all go away at the same time. It detracts from the feeling of swarm that otherwise is very well executed. all in all it's a little undercooked but i think it has potential good job :D

Cool game, and made with Unreal: GG!

Very cool to see a swarm like that. We were thinking about something like that but deemed it too risky in the time allotted, so well done there!. The draw distance was a bit confusing though since I didn't know which rod was being attacked. Also sometimes it was unclear if the bullets hit or not (though possibly due to the low travel speed). I do think you can do a lot of cool things with an enemy like that!

Overall I think the game works well!

@abductedplatypus It was definitely too risky!
the initial plan was to do it in Unreal Mass, but there was an online tutorial for flocking in a Unreal Niagara particle system. However GPU particles can't collide with the rest of the world.. Hence the hacky shooting feedback.
As for which rod, the session structure was put together last minute in a hasty way, I agree with you there should be some way to point out which rod was attacked.
Thanks for playing.

You've mentioned most of the things I have feedback for, so I won't repeat. What you could've used is a minimap, that way when a rod is being attacked you could flash it to alert the player where they need to head. That would've lifted a bit of the burden of the draw distance.

Great job on using Unreal. I don't see many of those.

@mrtroy @dianavi @hugaoxu @crozzy and all the one I already answered to, thanks for playing :D

Really nice visual effect on the swarm!

@keithswanger thx for playing :)

When I saw BOIDs, I thought we are going to get treated with something spectacular. Maybe this created big expectations and then, sadly, a disappointment. This is a nice tech demo for boid collisions. But unless you make the boids react to other stuff in the environment, for what I care, it might be just a baked animation played in loop. Make it react to player projectiles. Give player a way to heard it with one type of projectile and then kill it with another. Attack player if he comes too close. I am sorry for this comment ...

Interesting and cool graphics

WOW, Niagara effects looks kinda fire 10/10

@bacalear @pimping thanx for playing :)

I think you were not that far to something pleasant to play, some easy things I see:
- add the ability to run
- fix the gun bullet so it goes straight and not in the sky
- if you didn't have the time to understand niagara culling distance, maybe just change the color of the rod being currently attacked
- a spatialized sound for the swarm to make it more impressive and help find it

This being said, thank you for your entry, I hope you had fun making it :)

@pikario Than you for the suggestions and for playing.

The swarms were super cool to look at, but it was not very clear whether or not shooting at it was doing anything, it could use some feedback when hurt.

@master-yeet Shooting at it definitely works, though not as precisely as we wanted due to a bug. Aside from that, better feedback was also our conclusion. And thank you for playing.

An interesting game, I had to run a lot)

@bassilij Thx for playing :)

Very interesting game!
It is true that it lacks information for the player when he shoots the swarm.
But good concept, especially in Ludum Dare!

I probably have a bit of an old GPU, but for me the game was quite laggy and rendering distance was a problem, so I always had to go check all rods to understand where the swarm was. Maybe some sort of indicator (e.g., the name of the rod above it) could have helped. Also, I agree with @tritax711 that feedback on the shooting was very much needed, I ended up just spamming the mouse click and going as close as possible to the swarm to be sure to take it down as fast as possible. Apart from that, the idea is interesting and the technical work you did with the particles is really good.

@tritax711 @tommy Thank you for playing.
Our particles are GPU, so old GPU would struggle. It took a lot of time to setups the Niagara systems, so unfortunately the gameplay and notably player feedback is lacking. Thx for the suggestions.