Massacre at Misfit Toy Island

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=258

I know my entry is way too hard. Changes I made at the last minute turned the game from way too easy to way too hard. And I didn’t have time to balance it. That’s the breaks with a 48 hour contest I guess.

Also, stupidly, I set the key to continue from the Win screen to “space bar” and during the game you fire by pressing the “space bar”. So what that means is that if you do win the game, you are sure to bypass the win screen!! Haha, well, just reward yourself by viewing the win screen in your favorite graphic software I guess if you actually get so far.

But I have actually completed the game. It is possible, though definitely CHALLENGING.

My idea of the game came from the great PS2 game Shadows of the Colossus. In that game, you roam around a landscape looking to fight a few gigantic and incredibly difficult to kill bosses. So I wanted the misfits to all be difficult boss battles and my influence on boss battles is pretty much from the 90’s SNES games where killing bosses takes figuring out the bosses weaknesses and then applying a huge number of hits using a repetitive process. I guess I just have the belief that a boss battle should be like playing a match of tennis, that is to say, exhausting! Call me Old School, hehe.

Well, that’s exactly what it takes to beat the Misfits. For example, the Tootsie Roll takes 50 hits. If you are able to kill it, you will get 25 health from it. Some bosses require as many as 600 hits to kill. Generally, the bigger the misfit, the more hits it requires to kill. The key to beating the game is understanding that you get half the hit points of every misfit you kill, so what you have to do is find the biggest, easiest to kill misfits out there and kill them first. I would recommend starting with the Jägermeister or the Electronic Battleship game. What you want to look for is big misfits that have a slow rate of fire. The slower the rate of fire, the easier the kill. If you kill the Battleship game, you’ll get 300 health.

Now that extra health will really come in handy. You see, if you touch a misfit, immediately death to either you or the misfit will occur, depending on who has the most health. This can be very dangerous at the beginning of the game. Once you have built up a lot of health though, you can quickly kill some super tough small misfits such as the bottle of Bengay or Snoopy by just touching them. You will know they are super tough when they unleash an endless stream of bullets that make them virtually untouchable.

Some big misfits you will need to battle rather than touch because they have so many hit points. The teddy bear is a good example of one of these. During these tough battles, you need to figure out the weakness. What you will usually find is that you can position yourself so you are at such an angle that it is difficult for them to hit you, but you can hit them repeatedly. Usually you need to play around with the angles, and aim for a corner of the misfit that maybe sticks out a bit. Eventually you will find a location where you are relatively safe, yet able to hit the misfit with regularity.

Also, after each misfit you kill, you move faster. So by the time you get to the last misfit, you are really able to fly around the screen and can pretty easily dodge the bullets. So in this sense, the game does get easier as the game progresses. I had also intended to increase your rate of fire as well, but I guess I forgot and this never made it into the game.

Hope this helps you conquer those misfits!