Jumping on the Vlambeer ripoff bandwagon
So for this Ludum Dare, we decided to rip off one of our favorite bite-sized games – Super Crate Box by Vlambeer. I named it Hero of Alexandria.
It looks like this:
And here’s Super Crate Box:
The motivation was simple – my graphics buddy googer got sick of my top-down fetish and wanted to finally make a game viewed from the side. At first I wanted to make a sidescroller, but googer wanted an endless game, and since we’ve both played Super Crate Box, it seemed like a perfect choice (although I must admit it took me a while to realize). Then things went a bit south when we started discussing how to approach the theme. I got this really strong idea for a parody of Hero of Alexandria where he’s a literal action hero, an ancient Greek McGyver meets Duke Nukem of sorts, but googer absolutely detested that. Then the rest of the team realized the gravity of the situation and quickly banished him to prevent damages to the project that would no doubt ensue as a result of his utter lack of interest.
One day I will tell the legendary tale of his lone travels through the wastes in search of a new, deeper meaning of life, but not now.
Fast forward to Monday, Hero of Alexandria is out, and it’s probably the best game to ever come out despite the utter lack of any audio. Or it would be. If Super Crate Box wasn’t better. And had audio.
So now I’m gonna explain why that is. First of all – there was no time for audio. Second of all – I’ve studied Vlambeer’s design for centuries, which is the same amount of time it took me to read all of the negative comments on my previous games, which all seem to boil down to “dude it’s so hard and not understandable.” The second part was fixed by taking an already simple game and ripping it off, the former was a bit harder. Making easy games isn’t that easy, especially when your favorite part of games is the challenge.
So how do we make Super Crate Box easy without completely butchering it?
I’ve done several changes to the core design to make the game more casual, but kept the juice. Super Crate Box lacks a moment-to-moment difficulty curve, it rather puts you on more challenging maps as the game progresses. Hero, however, has a very obvious one as you play – the Caesar’s rage meter, which dictates how often and what types of enemies spawn. The pit mechanic of SCB where the enemies respawn when falling into it, except faster and tougher to dodge this time, is removed, and is rather tied to the Caesar’s rage. This way you are still punished for letting enemies fall into it, but not as harshly. More rage means both more romans, but also more lead.
Lead pipes are the Hero equivalent of boxes, the main gimmick of SCB and the thing that earned it so much praise. It’s not a bad mechanic per se, but it needs all weapons to be on the same level of usefulness to work properly, which SCB doesn’t offer in my opinion. Generally my SCB play sessions end with switching from the disc gun to the double pistols and wondering why I had to skip my visit to the RNG church last Sunday. For Hero, I opted for an upgrade system, where the weapons are mechanically different, but the next one deals more damage per second than the previous. The lead pipes, which are used as a type of XP points for the upgrades, are also not spawned randomly but rather fall out of dead enemies. This removes the need to run around the map to collect crates, which is another perfectly good layer of complexity sacrificed for accessibility.
As for the weapons, your starting weapon, the ancient Greek xiphos sword, is also the only one which knocks enemies back, giving you a bit more literal room for mistakes since you don’t have to keep retreating as you fire, but its damage output is abysmal and it’s not effective against midgame enemies who are immune to knockback.
The second weapon type is the shotgun, which is hitscan, in stark contrast to Super Crate Box which had only one comparable weapon, the laser rifle. For a good reason – hitscan is quite potent. No prediction required, just click and the enemy instantly takes damage. Being reliant on hitscan, Hero is a much more accessible game, albeit with a bit less depth to it.
The third weapon is the machine gun. At this point it becomes quite evident that another staple of Vlambeer design is being trampled – there should always be a reason to stop shooting. Hero never really has to stop shooting once he gets the machine gun. Everyone playing the game just picked it up a minute ago, why would they want to not shoot? Let’s just let them mow romans down with tons of screenshake and shields flying everywhere!
The pillar bazooka is the ultimate example of not giving a hoot. It has an insane fire rate, and it causes large scale destruction. Fire it into a battalion of Caesar’s troops and watch spears fly. Everything that gets as much as clipped by the explosion takes massive damage, overkilling any enemies not in the turtle formation. At this stage of the game, the last seconds of the timer are ticking down, and the fireworks on display are mostly just for the show, however there are also so many enemies now it still takes some serious moves to survive.
The timer is there to give the game an appropriate ending. I’m not a huge fan of games without an ending. “Beat your score” sounds to me like “see how far up this infinite hill you can push this boulder, Sisyphus.” Unfortunately, I rushed Hero’s ending mere hours before deadline and it glitched out to boot, so it’s even less impressive than intended. Still, I’m glad the game has a goal to work towards and isn’t just an infinite gauntlet, googer.
Some things stayed – the blocky artstyle, screenshake, enemies flashing, being knocked away on death, and the whole map is the same design as the first SCB map, again to make the game easier. Since killing enemies is more straightforward, more spawn per wave, just for more carnage. The flying enemies aren’t present – both to buy more time for other things and because they’re a major case of my deaths in SCB. The jumping is a bit more floaty so jumping over enemies is easier and there’s a bit more hangtime for easier timing of shotgun shots and sword swings, and air control is also more prominent.
I intended there to be a bit more backstory and characters, which is also in contrast with Vlambeers philosophy of “show it, don’t say it.” Just for the heck of it, I’m gonna write potential dialogue here.
[Scene: Heron working at his workshop, a bunch of his inventions around, an old Greek dude rushes in]
[Old Greek dude] “Heron, the greatest inventor of Alexandria… Caesar’s troops are crossing our borders”
[Hero of Alexandria] “So that good for nothin’ Herakles has finally given up the ghost? Here, hold this”
*Hero puts a small aeolipile in the old greek dude’s hands*
[Old Greek dude] “What would this… amazing construct… Be?”
[Hero] “Just a harmless toy”
*Hero brings out a machine gun*
[Old Greek dude] “And that?”
[Hero] “A not-so-harmless toy. Stand aside. Caesar must have gotten a wind of my plans. Can’t let the guy just take over my latest device like that.”
And for the ending:
[Scene: Rome]
*derpyfaced Romans chomping on lead pipes get nuked*
[Scene: Nuclear explosion reflected in Hero’s sunglasses]
[Hero] “And that’s the end of the Roman empire… Maybe they shouldn’t have eaten so much lead”
*pan to background*
[One old Greek dude to another] “Told you he was our time’s Albert Einstein”
Dibs on a visual novel for the next LD.
