So, LD33 is over, and once again I made something: The Monster Within.

Theme

The theme was You are the Monster, and I wanted to really incorporate the theme into the gameplay mechanics for once (well yeah, Curved Curse did that, but the topic was very broad and there was no way but incorporate it into the gameplay itself).

Although you play a monster in The Monster Within, I took the theme a bit further. The theme reminded me of an exclamated “Look at yourself! You’ve become a Monster!”, something a movie wife might say to her increasingly out-of-control husband who just killed the neighbor that found out about the family’s dark secret.

The idea I came up with was the following: your main objective is to eliminate enemies from within a crowd of mostly civilians (in a generic top-down action game). However you turn into a Monster whenever you kill someone, which grants you a lot more power, but also impairs your senses; you can no longer differentiate between civilians and enemies. As a result, I figured, people would have to decide between two playstyles, going on a rampage and killing as many people as possible, regardless of their type, or trying to play strategically by memorizing the enemies in the crowd.

The Monster Within, normal and beast mode

[read the full post-mortem on my blog]

I wasn't going to participate, but since I was going to play with my oscilloscope anyway why not up the ante and make it interactive?

I was thinking about learning and using a sound synthesis API like libstk, but I think the learning curve is going to be too steep to handle in (less than) two days and PureData is working pretty well so far.

Here's what I have so far:
https://twitter.com/S0lll0s/status/855829643773050881

What you see is the audio output of my PC getting pulled into the Oscilloscope before entering my amplifier (which was muted in the video). The Oscilloscope is in XY/Vectorscope mode, so the left audio channel is the horizontal deflection and the right audio channel deflects vertically. By outputting a sine and cosine on both audio channels respectively, I can draw a circle for example.

I'm not sure what I even want to make right now, currently it reminds me of 'Vortex' (that Breakout clone for wheel-iPods), but I'm letting my graphics advances guide the mechanics at the moment.

After a couple more hours, it is basically playable!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=n_kaBXRwFx4

IMO the coolest thing about this right now is the fact that the visual and audio feedback when the ball bounces of something is literally the exact same thing/data/oscillation. (The whole thing doesn't flash like in the video to the human eye btw.)

The patch has gotten quite big by now, but I am really happy with how well PureData has been working for me, especially considering the very little experience I have had with it before yesterday.

I think I got everything I did together in this screenshot (click for fullscreen):

The itch Page for Plonat Atek is up!

Here's what the final game looks like on a web oscilloscope emulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKx6oNVSL4E

Check it out: https://s0lll0s.itch.io/plonat-atek

I finally got around to film a proper video of Plonat Atek on a real Oscilloscope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQAk9_nc-s

The Audio in this video completely and exactly represents / is all of the stuff you can see on the screen: the Oscilloscope reads the voltages on the left and right audio channel and moves the dot on the CRT screen according to them, while the speaker moves the membrane on the left and right speaker an amount proportional to the voltage.

Of course there's some more information and a few vote buttons on the game page: Plonat Atek :stuckouttongue:

...and Plonat Atek doesn't even have the 20 ratings yet! :scream:

I'm doing my best rating games but I missed a lot of time in the last couple of weeks and would really appreciate every bit of feedback :slight_smile:

If you leave a comment I'll check your entry out too of course!

Check them out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/$109005

Sacculos: Textulus and Sacculus V [DIRECTOR'S CUT] released!