Nom's Evolvathlon by bvanschooten
Nom's Evolvathlon, an LD24 entry by Boris van Schooten. Time taken: about 20 hours. Based on Java and JGame.
Nom the Onmiphage wants to eat everything. To succeed, he needs to evolve the right abilities: walking, jumping, swimming, flying, breathing, and shooting. The more he eats, the more abilities he can evolve, and the more easily he gets around.
This game includes procedurally generated caves, 8 types of organism, and 15 difficulty levels.
If you get stuck, press "Q" to commit suicide. You can also start at any level you like by selecting the level in the title screen.
To play the Android version, you probably need a big screen (tablet) to be able to point accurately enough.
The Jar runs as 640x480 by default. You can pass x and y size as command line parameters. Pass 0,0 to get full screen. Example:
java -jar NomsEvolvathlon.jar 1024 768
Known bugs: the player sometimes floats around uncontrollably in thin air (but eventually lands on his feet again).
I have also recorded screengrabs for a timelapse, but I will upload it later.
Nom the Onmiphage wants to eat everything. To succeed, he needs to evolve the right abilities: walking, jumping, swimming, flying, breathing, and shooting. The more he eats, the more abilities he can evolve, and the more easily he gets around.
This game includes procedurally generated caves, 8 types of organism, and 15 difficulty levels.
If you get stuck, press "Q" to commit suicide. You can also start at any level you like by selecting the level in the title screen.
To play the Android version, you probably need a big screen (tablet) to be able to point accurately enough.
The Jar runs as 640x480 by default. You can pass x and y size as command line parameters. Pass 0,0 to get full screen. Example:
java -jar NomsEvolvathlon.jar 1024 768
Known bugs: the player sometimes floats around uncontrollably in thin air (but eventually lands on his feet again).
I have also recorded screengrabs for a timelapse, but I will upload it later.
Ratings
| Coolness | 92% | 2 |
| Overall | 3.51 | 109 |
| Audio | 2.30 | 407 |
| Fun | 3.31 | 137 |
| Graphics | 3.10 | 307 |
| Humor | 2.38 | 267 |
| Innovation | 3.82 | 42 |
| Mood | 3.05 | 170 |
| Theme | 3.90 | 48 |
I'd love to see a more polished version sometime.
There's some kind of strategy when choosing which power-up to choose, so it's not just a basic platformer. I'm pretty sure that with some effort (refined controls, bigger and nicer sprites, more precise indications on what powerups can actually combine - since some seem to replace others), this could really make a sellable product.
At first I thought you'd proceed by going beyond the level boundaries, but it turned out you just have to collect everything, meaning you have to kill the enemies too. While there's attention to detail like trajectories turning into parabolas above the surface, the mouse-only controls seem a bit awkward when trying to move small distances.
Nonetheless, this is clearly a 4- or 5-star entry.
The generated levels worked, but they didn't get harder at all with the increasing difficulty setting. The only challenge was shooting enemies that sit in cave like positions. It was quite frustrating that you could walk right next to them and were unable to shoot. Maybe a melee trait would have been nice?