The Germinator by Slippers
What happens when you mix LD56, an immunosuppressed developer with Covid and a heap of prescription amphetamines?
The Germinator is a lighthearted platformer. You must work through 5 levels, with the sole goal of reaching the end to kill your host. Optionally you can shoot for faster runs and gold medals on each level. Can you beat my fastest times?
Thank you for playing! https://slipperhat.itch.io/the-germinator
Controls:
- Movement: WASD, Arrow keys or Numpad
- Look around: Mouse
- Menu: Escape
- Quick Reload Level: R (only when speedrunning mode is enabled)
Tips:
- The game should be fully playable in the browser, cookies are required for times to be saved, however for the best experience consider the downloadable executable.
- There will be some lags initially while the shaders compile as I didn't have time to fix this, it will only happen once and then should be smooth.
- There are a number of skip / shortcuts which may be requird for gold medals.
- Speedrunning mode enables quick-reload (R), and prevents the ending screen from showing on the final level.
Asset Disclosure:
- All meshes & textures were made during the jam. The Adobe suite did a fair amount of heavy lifting.
- Sounds are CC0 from Pixabay that I had from another project (opted out of Audio rating).
- The only boilerplate code used was for scene switching and managing audio. All other code was written from scratch.
- No AI assets are used in this game.
- The sunglasses and HTML5 logo in the cover image are CC0, everything else is me ;).
Mini Post-Mortem:
What went well: - Considering I have been quite unwell and it's my 2nd jam, I'm very pleased to be able to submit a game that can be played from start to finish. - I feel like I've managed to crank out quite a bit of content for a 3D game and a solo dev. - I can see a significant improvement in the amount of work I am able to do, and how quickly I can solve problems compared to my first game jam.
What went wrong: - My respiratory system. - Choosing a platformer was a huge mistake - having to hand craft every level, make them fairly unique and tune the challenge adds an enormous amount of extra work with pays very little dividends for the player. It would have been far smarter to pick a very simple, repeatable gameplay loop and polish it really well. - I didn't allocate time very wisely - I spent several hours modelling, texturing and positioning the mouth scene, for it to be completed in about 10 seconds by the player. Not a good return on investment.
| HTML5(web) | https://slipperhat.itch.io/the-germinator |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/the-germinator |
Ratings
| Overall | 960th | 3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 844th | 3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1003th | 2.5⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 729th | 3.433⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 717th | 3.383⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 733th | 2.68⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 623th | 3.431⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 33🗨️ |
Thank you for playing and the feedback.
I enjoyed my playthrough and the graphics were very nice. The mouth was totally worth the time! I admired the details on the teeth before jumping in, lol
I think the movement is a little too slippery. The near-instant acceleration combined with slow decelleration makes it especially hard during those precision sections in the 4th and 5th level.
Getting caught by the blood cells is a bit jarring right now, as there's not a lot of feedback that it's happening, and then you're kicked back to the start with no warning.
Fun game, good job :D
I didn't scope particularly well, as nothing is tuned that well as a result. Too much to be left on the cutting room floor with a platformer.
I was kinda of going for the feeling of the old Counter-Strike: Source bunnyhopping servers that I played tonnes when I was a kid, but it is an aquired taste for sure.
Thanks again.
Yeah the general feedback to the player is absent in many cases, and I was trying to throw as much in towards the end as I could, it was a completely avoidable issue with overscope.
I'm really pleased to hear you gave speedrunning a go, and hope you had fun.
Many thanks again.
I got to the level with the very small ramps and that was honestly too hard for me. The controls were very sensitive with a single tap moving me quite far in comparison to how small those bars/ramps were. Perhaps their hitboxes could have been a bit wider while still keeping the visuals the same. I'm guessing, but I feel like the game didn't fully teach me, that I needed to collect all the power up thingies before the exit opened? At least there seemed to be a cheeky exit close to the start on the following (?) level that closed right as I approached it.
I also got a bit lost on the jump around corners level at first, with the darkness and coming from above finding out that I needed to go back to where the white blood cell was patrolling and go the other direction.
Cool atmosphere though and interesting concepts for the level design.
All of the issues you have itentified are really symptomatic of a lack of polish and time to refine. 3D platformers are just way too intensive from a design perspective if you're working solo I guess; but that's all on me of course! Every day is a school day.
So on the cheeky exit that closed just as you approached it - it's on a timer that's just a little to fast for running normally, but you can actually move a little faster if you jump and run, so you can actually skip the entire level if you time it right - it's a kind of quirk you had in some old FPS that I wanted to implement, but I don't think anyone has noticed the skips yet.
I agree in general I needed to do more to guide players in the right directions in the levels too.
Thanks for taking the time to play and leave feedback :)
I ended up playing this for ages - great job!
I'm really happy it game across that I was trying to introduce the mechanics in a controlled way rather than throwing it all in at once.
And i'm chuffed you got lots of playtime out of it, thank you for your time.
I think adding some sensitivity controls or at least tuning them down a bit would have gone a long way to improving the experience as this has been an issue for many.
I was wondering if I had missed any collision boxes! I rejigged the level so many times and felt I must have forgotten to resize something, really glad that it didn't leave you stuck anywhere.
I'm glad that you had fun and enjoyed the unsettling texturing. Thanks again.
@iaroslavik @mothchoir Thank you for your time and for playing :)
Yeah the white blood cells had to be made super forgiving because I didn't have time to block their detection with walls, and it felt **really** bad to have them snipe you through a hard surface :grin: . My original plan was to have them chase you, but they would not behave themselves so that got canned too,
Thank you for taking the time to leave feedback, and glad you have fun.
But other than that, I really loved it, after I get hold of how things work.
Yeah the controller is pretty hacked together and very simple, and lots of people have felt a little out of control so it's certainly a bit wild so sorry about that :laughing:.
I would certainly look at improving the general feel of the movement and the collisions if I did something like this again in the future, it's certainly not like a dungeon crawler controller.
I'm pleased you liked looking at my meat, you can come back and play with it any time. Thanks again for the feedback
On the next level (also green, with a big red and blue glowing thing), the movement sensitivity felt way too high. I spent quite a long time and only once managed to get up to the first platform without falling off of the little wires, and then was never able to make it past that :(. Platformers aren't really my strong point, but maybe a "walk" button or something would have made that doable. A cross-hair or something so I know where the center of the screen is might have also helped, as it was really hard to line up the little bars to walk on such that I didn't fall off them.
The bacon texture is great. I like the atmosphere. Web build ran pretty well!
You're totally right in that if I was to even do something like this again (not likely :laughing:) I would need to implement some controls to tune the user input at the very least.
Platformers, and 3D ones at that are just absolute suicide for short game jams. But we learn these things the hard way I guess :smile:. I'm glad you like the textures.
Thank you for taking the time to play and leave feedback.