Gossamer Glade by Deepfreeze
City Builder (In theory; In practice, extremely debatable!) + Shmup!
WARNING: HTML5 VERSION IS PRETTY MUCH UNTESTED! DOES NOT SEEM TO WORK PROPERLY! "Will try and fix it when I wake up". - 10/6/2024
Due to a lack of time, there is no tutorial, and upgrade requirements are not in the UI. Also extremely poor testing as I had to cram a bunch of stuff in the last minute. Boss is very much unfinished. Boss drops nectar, which is needed to upgrade the tree to win.
Options are likely broken, sound options definitely are.
Default controls: Z to shoot/select. Arrow Keys to move or select. Supports controllers. I have no clue what the default controls are offhand. In theory rebindable, in practice, not tested enough.
UPGRADE REQUIREMENTS:
Tree: 1 Nectar (Acquirable from the boss) Weapon: 10 Chitin per upgrade, and an additional 10 chitin for each upgrade beyond that. Armor: 50 chitin per upgrade, and an additional 50 chitin for each upgrade beyond that. Recruit: 20 wood, 5 chitin, and additionally 20 wood and chitin for each upgrade beyond that. Heal: 1 Mushroom, and an additional mushroom per heal used.
If population runs out, game over. This is however completely unimplemented. Thus this is on the honor system.
PATCH NOTES: v0.1.0 Fixed Mushroom crash and various mushroom related bugs. Population actually eats the meat now. Population Grows each day. Boss escape fixed. (Fly to the top of the screen to escape the boss; works after the boss is dead too.) Buying upgrades actually subtracts the materials. Dying actually subtracts a hunter as intended. Ending Background Fixed. Pausing Allowed in City and Ending (And thus able to get to the main menu from the ending; This will not work in HTML5 due to a GMS2 bug. Known Issues: Armor will purchase a weapon instead. HTML5 version will crash if attempting to buy armor. Various crashes and bugs in HTML5. Boss remains boring, unfortunately. (Unable to fix for the jam as that would require new assets and a fair amount of code)
v0.1.0c Upgrade requirements now in UI Armor costs 25 Chitin now HTML5 Armor upgrade crash fixed Various Bug fixes Stag beetle HP reduced slightly
TOOLS: Gamemaker Studio 2 (Engine) Aseprite (Graphics) Deflemask Legacy (Audio)
Ratings
| Given | 4🗳️ | 2🗨️ |
+ The city building seemed to crash the game, and I don't know if anything was happening there.
+ The boss was a nice thing but it was very predictable
+ I found myself several times wondering if I just keep flying until I die and then how much hp the boss has.
+ The "spider" that shot 3 times was a bit difficult to kill as the screen was small and had to move to it dodge it's attacks and then he was almost on top of me so had to run away.
+ In the options it seemed like several buttons had functionality, but in city building either nothing happened or it crashed, and during flight I only moved and shot.
- Yeah you already know this, the entire starting experience is impossible to understand. Some of the menu selections straight up crash the game. You could have disabled them?
- The window is tiny and I didn't see any way of making it full screen or enlarging it or anything, that's no good.
- The shooter part of the game works alright, nothing very interesting. No bombs, no movement mechanics. No powerups during a level. I understand that the metagame was meant to be the main hook, but like, the main game just feels flat.
- The resources being outlined in white is a nice design detail.
- There's nothing to tell you about the length of a level, and there's so much repetition that it feels like... Something's wrong, am I supposed to trigger the end of a level somehow? Players should have some way to easily tell how long till the end of a level.
- Logic wise - you're flying, but you'll hit ground beetles walking. Other shooters have resolved this kind of thing in various ways (can't remember shooter names, but there are several well known ones that "throw bombs" to hit ground targets and you can fly over ground targets. If you wanted to have slow moving enemies that collide with the player you can quite easily just retheme the enemy sprite and change nothing else)
- The boss was also completely flat and uninteresting, one single attack, repeated forever.
- Everything is technically very competently executed. Music, graphics, animation, etc. But the game itself just isn't very interesting. Again I say - scope down, focus on getting the player to the interesting hook of your game AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!
@tuism Yeah, time got the better of me; I tried to chase two hares and caught neither, and it shows. Xevious-style ground attacks might be a good idea for a future, post-jam build, as well as some much-needed variation.