Snowflake by Meral

[raw]
made by Meral for LD31 (JAM)
Hi game developers. Do you know you guys rock?


If you're ready for some keyboard smashing action as in BosonX or SuperHexagon, this might one day be a thing for you. You can still give it a try in its current state if you like. :)
Evade the heatwaves so the snowflake doesn't melt. Save snowflakes from extinction!

[Mild language warning]
The longer you survive the more heatwaves there will be and the faster they will come.
If you experience random waves that are too fast and cutting into other ones - please restart the game. I have yet to figure out why they appear. Something goes wrong when the last snowflake dies. :/ If you push the reset button before that happens is fine though. Also in Winter #5 you get to take a break.
If you want to make it more interesting you can enable gravity by pressing 'g' and adjust it with + and -.

Controls:
w: Move up
a: Move left
s: Move down
d: Move right

arrow up: Move up
arrow left: Move left
arrow down: Move down
arrow right: Move right

esc: Quit
enter: Next text field
r: Reset the game
p: Toggle displaying debug info: FPS, x&y coordinates of the player, the players rotation (The framerate is locked to 60)
g: Toggle gravity
+: Increase gravity
-: Decrease gravity
i: A little easteregg? (intro sequence)

There are windows 64 and 32bit builds as well as the .love file itself. Recommendation for linux is to get love via your preferred package manager and run the .love file with it as first parameter. I don't own a mac, so I cannot provide a mac build. Sorry. :/ But mac users can still to the same thing as our awesome linux guys.

First LudumDare for me. I worked about 1 2/3 days on this. The music was made in BodcaCeoil, soundeffect(s) in SFXR, the snwoflake(s) in Inkscape and the Code in notepad++. Under the hood this thing runs on l枚ve. =D
I had played around with l枚ve2d before, but never made a game.
I missed having a fully featured code editor. With auto formatting, auto complete, function and parameter suggestions and a debugger. Think of all the typos and nasty debugging that could have been spared...
The coding style in this is pretty terrible, but I finally got to learn OOP in lua using metatables, so YAY!
How to define overloaded functions without total codechaos is still am mystery to me though. Same for concatenating strings with a boolean. o.O


Dear thanks is issued to the makers of these frameworks/applications:
- notepad++
- l枚ve
- SFXR
- BoscaCeoil
- Inkscape

Additional thanks goes to "OmarShehata" from the love Community for the auto-update lua-script snippet. (https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3733&p=167865#p167865)

Ratings

Coolness 61% 3
Overall(Jam) 2.76 856
Audio(Jam) 2.83 460
Fun(Jam) 2.97 562
Graphics(Jam) 2.50 839
Humor(Jam) 2.53 536
Innovation(Jam) 2.36 875
Mood(Jam) 2.74 711
Theme(Jam) 2.41 978

Feedback

Frozen Fractal
09. Dec 2014 路 19:50 UTC
Simple, but effective. Also, hard! But I think it's supposed to be :)

It would help discoverability if you renamed the download link to "Windows/Linux" or something like that, or just add an identical link titled "Love". Case sensitivity problem on Linux: you need to run "mv class/Formationgenerator.lua class/FormationGenerator.lua" before you start the game.
馃帳 Meral
09. Dec 2014 路 20:52 UTC
Thanks for the feedback and heads-up! I didn't realize you could rename the download links. I'll get onto that right now. I'll also rename the class and reupload the source as well as the .love file.
馃帳 Meral
09. Dec 2014 路 21:03 UTC
Updated the .love and Source download to avoid letter casing issues. Thanks again Frozen Fractal!
efux
09. Dec 2014 路 21:40 UTC
I like the story of the lonely snowflake =D

Glad you eventually decided to participate! Nice job and looking forward to your entry on the next game jam!
Wezley
09. Dec 2014 路 22:21 UTC
I really like how simple yet fun this game is!:) Great job!
Magicolo
09. Dec 2014 路 22:23 UTC
-Could use more diversity in the heat wave patterns :(
-Funny reference to global warming :)
-Pretty hard game :|
-Not a one screen game :(
-Music and SFX :)
馃帳 Meral
09. Dec 2014 路 23:03 UTC
Thank you all for the feedback!

@Magicolo: Diversity was planned from the beginning, but I didn't work on the game on Sunday and in the end ran out of time. The FormationGenerator class should have done that job at some point.

I noticed failing the "Entire Game on one Screen" theme at some point during development. While technically it's just that the obstacles fade into the screen and then out of it again - while the player is restricted to the screen - you are of course right with that critique. I could have brought this up by having some clearly static background image. Again: Ran out of time/energy.
Hope I'll catch it better next time.
danielilett
09. Dec 2014 路 23:17 UTC
This is pretty difficult, but it's not too bad. However, a few times while playing it, a whole load of waves spawned on top of each other and killed me pretty much instantly. I did like the difficulty level though, it took me by surprise at first, and the music and gameplay do sync up well. Good job.
DefectiveMelon
09. Dec 2014 路 23:52 UTC
Hard and fun :P It get's a little difficult to see the snowflake after you've taken a couple of hits, also it seems if you restart, blocks start flying at you and you can't dodge them, it seems like a bug of some kind.
chibiFlux
09. Dec 2014 路 23:57 UTC
Really fun to play! Nice theme! :D
hbocao
10. Dec 2014 路 00:01 UTC
I don't think you failed at the theme. It could be interpreted as screen (monitor), so... yeah. Congratulations for your first LD Game! I'm not a fan of "flappy bird" style of game, but you did good and learned a lot! :)
馃帳 Meral
10. Dec 2014 路 00:16 UTC
@DefectiveMelon: It is a bug in the dying procedure. I hadn't time to fix it until now.
sorlok
10. Dec 2014 路 01:05 UTC
Fun and controls well, but a bit more background stuff (rotating snowflakes, etc.) would be cool. Or maybe you avoid heat waves during the summer, but try to hit cold blasts (grow) during the winter? Overall, good job!
馃帳 Meral
10. Dec 2014 路 12:27 UTC
@sorlock: Love the idea with cold blasts! Definitely something I'd put in if I continue to work on this some day. Like Bonus Levels...
ViliX64
12. Dec 2014 路 13:46 UTC
Interesting gameplay. I really liked this game :)
ZNCatlaw
12. Dec 2014 路 16:36 UTC
I scored 51 seconds! I am a unique snowflake!
Kuality Games
12. Dec 2014 路 21:21 UTC
Really sets me in the mood of being a lonely snowflake, enjoyable to play but it got boring quite fast.
AinaSG
13. Dec 2014 路 09:36 UTC
Enjoyable. But veeeeery dificult for me >3<.

Also, it don't fit the theme very well, but fun overall
jthistle
13. Dec 2014 路 10:47 UTC
.love does not work on Mac.
pht59x
14. Dec 2014 路 09:36 UTC
A shame there is no web version.
BarrensZeppelin
16. Dec 2014 路 09:49 UTC
Couldn't get longer than 32 seconds :( (Winter #5)
Small and fun game :)
馃帳 Meral
16. Dec 2014 路 16:06 UTC
@jthistle: I'm sorry it didn't work. I don't have a mac to test on myself. What error are you getting?
ynots
16. Dec 2014 路 16:26 UTC
nice..
rjhunter
16. Dec 2014 路 22:39 UTC
On Mac OS X, double-clicking on the .love file throws the following error:
main.lua:7: module 'class.Obstacle' not found

If I add the class folder to the .love file (which is really just a zip with a special layout), everything works nicely. As a bonus, it's easier to distribute the all-in-one file :-)


As far as the game itself goes, I found it quite fun. The comparisons to Flappy Bird and Super Hexagon are fair, in aspects, but it's interesting to see how the concept of not-quite-instant-death changes the feel.

Simple but very suitable music.
Mekuri
25. Dec 2014 路 11:27 UTC
When I came to around winther 68 the entire screen became red- (I made it that far because I found out you could just move to the bottom of the screen, and nothing will hurt you :( - Anyways I liked the little story - The gameplay was simple and difficult :-)
maxmetallica
29. Dec 2014 路 22:17 UTC
nice game