Short Circuit by Nick Cash
Short Circuit is a floaty, spacey shoot'em up / bullet hell game. You control a spacecraft through a perilously random region of space. Thankfully, random canisters of useful items are here to help you, but your ship can only handle each one for ten seconds. You also lose fuel every ten seconds (or when you hit something), so make sure to grab more!
Good luck random space adventurer.
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Gameplay:
Control the ship with the arrow keys. Your ship is not capable of anything beyond movement on its own, so grab powerups to gain temporary abilities.
There are no additional keys for the powerups - they function automatically. Weapons will start firing immediately, but some powerups trigger/go off after 10 seconds.
While we integrated with Tiled to make levels, we ran out of time to do anything elaborate. What you are playing is a mix between a crazy user generated level and procedurally generated spawns.
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NOTE ABOUT SOURCE: If you want to play from source you will need Python 2.7 and PyGame. That should be it though :)
Good luck random space adventurer.
--
Gameplay:
Control the ship with the arrow keys. Your ship is not capable of anything beyond movement on its own, so grab powerups to gain temporary abilities.
There are no additional keys for the powerups - they function automatically. Weapons will start firing immediately, but some powerups trigger/go off after 10 seconds.
While we integrated with Tiled to make levels, we ran out of time to do anything elaborate. What you are playing is a mix between a crazy user generated level and procedurally generated spawns.
--
NOTE ABOUT SOURCE: If you want to play from source you will need Python 2.7 and PyGame. That should be it though :)
| Source | https://bitbucket.org/syncarn/ld27/src |
| Windows | http://www.nick-cash.com/download/ld/short-circuit-win32.zip |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=10844 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 33% | 1528 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.15 | 276 |
| Audio(Jam) | 2.70 | 330 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.20 | 185 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 2.76 | 434 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 2.44 | 482 |
| Mood(Jam) | 2.59 | 403 |
| Theme(Jam) | 2.26 | 558 |
Really all it needs is some polish. The ships movement was too fast. Understandable as it needs to dodge quickly but the speed just doesn't look natural. In shooters it's best if the enemy explodes instead of disappears. I know it's just for looks sake but it feels cheap to just see any enemy disappear after shooting them.
If you were planning on expanding on this, an upgrade system and boss battles would be beneficial. Boss battles in particular could be very interesting as you would need to collect your weapons to defeat them.
Fun game.
@AidanAK47 - The ship was supposed to be able to alternate between the speed it has now and half of that for more precise dodging, but it got botched in the repository and did not get added back in before submission.
As for the enemies disappearing, this was simply because we didn't have enough time to implement an explosion. The sound effect triggers, but we didn't have an explosion animation to use and we ran out of time to make a decent one.
Our initial concept included much more elaborate levels and boss battles, but again, we ran out of time. We actually made a system to allow level creation using Tiled to define enemy spawn points, but due to real life things some of our team got called away and most of us work on the Monday after LD, thus making the Jam effectively 48 hours anyway.
I definitely agree with your points though. The ship should move slower like it was initially capable of, there should be legitimate explosions not just for enemies that explode, but for the little missiles that get fired, and there should be actual levels with bosses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxeNHZIASGI