Functor by Enneract
A game about using functions to terraform the surface of a planet. Built using my own engine Omicron: https://github.com/DavidSaxon/Omicron-Base
CONTROLS:
Move mouse to rotate the camera and scroll wheel to zoom. Fire your weapons with the left and right mouse buttons. Escape to pause. Backspace to return to level select.
OBJECTIVE:
You must stop the inhabitants of each planet from building towers. To complete a level you must survive until the timer runs out. You lose if a tower reaches 15 blocks high. To destroy towers raise or lower the ground beneath it. If the bottom block is red then then you must raise the ground and if the block is blue then you need to lower the ground.
KNOWN BUGS:
- Sound distorts on Linux, seems to a problem with the sound library I'm using.
- The game can stretch across multiple monitors (I think this is only on Linux). You can run the game in windowed mode from the in-game settings menu. Or you can change the value of "fullscreen:" from "on" to "off" in the "config.omi_pref" file in the top level of the project.
CONTROLS:
Move mouse to rotate the camera and scroll wheel to zoom. Fire your weapons with the left and right mouse buttons. Escape to pause. Backspace to return to level select.
OBJECTIVE:
You must stop the inhabitants of each planet from building towers. To complete a level you must survive until the timer runs out. You lose if a tower reaches 15 blocks high. To destroy towers raise or lower the ground beneath it. If the bottom block is red then then you must raise the ground and if the block is blue then you need to lower the ground.
KNOWN BUGS:
- Sound distorts on Linux, seems to a problem with the sound library I'm using.
- The game can stretch across multiple monitors (I think this is only on Linux). You can run the game in windowed mode from the in-game settings menu. Or you can change the value of "fullscreen:" from "on" to "off" in the "config.omi_pref" file in the top level of the project.
Ratings
| Coolness | 74% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.70 | 146 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.72 | 112 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.20 | 413 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 4.04 | 167 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.24 | 809 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 4.52 | 2 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.45 | 243 |
| Theme(Jam) | 4.14 | 47 |
In addition to that one needs to think about the math and what color is matches and which button to click.
For me the speed stuff was built, was just too fast while having to rotate around, trying to spot the right block etc.
Graphics wise it's really awesome looking especially the transformations and the fact that you "shoot" the math formulas that get applied is really interesting. :)
When I first started the game, I didn't even notice the text on the side as the challenge was already on and I was blasting away at the towers randomly.
There seems to be no way to see what the maximum tower height is or what specifically to do to reduce tower height. Since big text at the bottom was "tower height" I presumed you just had to dig all the towers as low as possible.
Also the placement of the functions is really awkward as the player constantly has to look back and forth between the corner of the screen and the center. Wouldn't it be better if the two options were on the left/right side of the crosshairs?
I haven't found good use of the sin and rand() functions
they don't seem to do enough to affect the towers.
I find some of the x*x function name misleading: x*x acts more like 2*x rather than x^2. at low values of x (between -1 and 1), x*x should decrease (tend towards zero)
Overall I still enjoyed the experience given it's very appealing presentation.
@DomNomNom you're correct the x*x and -x*x aren't exactly what they say they are, they're more like ( x + power ) * ( 1.0 - ( focalPoint - distance ) ). I just couldn't think of a nice way to show this on the UI.
To people saying it's too fast or hard understand... sorry about that. I spent most of time getting the surface deformation working and didn't spend enough time on the game-play and balancing it. The first two levels are definitely possible, the third one I'm not sure about yet.
Tutorial says I need to lower the surface so I used only function that do to destroy the towers but sometimes raising it would kill them, and bunch of times lowering surface would destroy any block. Maybe I misunderstood?
I could definitely see the mechanic being applied to all sorts of puzzle / building games.
Visuals are simple and yet look great, and along with the audio give a nice atmosphere to the game.
Like how your transformations persist after finishing a level. Would be even better if they stuck for repeat playthroughs.
A bit of a repeat of previous comments, but yeah, camera controls can get a bit disorienting, and it can be hard to see whether you're supposed to push or pull. Quaternion-based rotations and some visual feedback as to the status of the current base (like a colored glow, a billboarded dot, or something) would solve those issues.
Great game overall. Good job!
But hard to understand the gameplay.
Unfortunately, I really have no idea what's going on in terms of gameplay. I couldn't figure out how to destroy the towers and I mostly just wound up clicking randomly in their general direction.
Still, the gameplay feels weird. Even after playing 15 minutes, I still can't understand which mouse button kills what color, nor if my shots have any effect. It seems like sometimes they do, some they don't. Also, sometimes it's awkard understanding what color I should try to destroy becuase they overlap.
Couldn't beat the easy level, nor get close to it. Still, using functions as a weapons for me is 5/5 on theme. Wish I could have enjoyed this more =(