My Pet Monster by rxi

[raw]
made by rxi for LD24 (JAM)
A game about a pet monster. It happens to lack an ending, so when your monster is bright green you can assume the game is over!


I was unfortunately unable to get the game finished for the compo, but managed to get something close to a finished game in time for the jam. I kept within the compo rules though, working solo and making everything from scratch-- I just needed the extra day.


If you're on linux and having issues running the game you can try your luck with the post-jam updated version which doesn't require libsoil. Gameplay wise this version is identical to the jam-version, with the exception of containing music (turn off the music on the escape menu if you want to give me a rating based on this version):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36451301/my_pet_monster_linux_1b.tar.gz


Controls are as followed:

Jump: 'c' or Space
Attack: 'x' or 'v'
Action: Up


Written in ANSI C, using SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/) and SOIL (http://www.lonesock.net/soil.html).

Ratings

Coolness 57% 3
Overall(Jam) 3.32 84
Audio(Jam) 2.50 153
Fun(Jam) 3.07 98
Graphics(Jam) 3.75 70
Humor(Jam) 2.86 73
Innovation(Jam) 2.30 209
Mood(Jam) 2.95 100
Theme(Jam) 2.56 160

Feedback

Pixelbear
29. Aug 2012 路 09:53 UTC
I found that rather fun! The graphics were cute and well done. Gameplay wise it was fairly good - I did have a problem with dying so quickly, then going all the way back to the last checkpoint. And damn - I sure have a lot of blood! :P
Huchickut
29. Aug 2012 路 10:18 UTC
The game looks really good and has great graphics, but few checkpoints, instant kill by anything, monsters respawning with full health after death and especially loosing apples when dying (even after activating a checkpoint which I thought would save them) make this game just way too frustrating for me.
Volute
29. Aug 2012 路 12:52 UTC
Very cute game !
It was a bit laggy on my computer and the controls screen took forever to disappear, but it looks great and I would have loved to be able to play it :)
馃帳 rxi
29. Aug 2012 路 17:30 UTC
@Volute

Could you tell me any information of what you were running it on? The game should be incredibly light on resources (I get <1% CPU usage on my Pentium D, and it runs smoothly on my netbook), so it's most probably a bug somewhere if it's not running well. :(

In regard to the controls screen. I wanted to make sure everyone saw it, since sometimes they're very easy to accidentally skip past. Though if it was running slow for you it may have been displayed even longer than usual.
berareu
30. Aug 2012 路 10:08 UTC
Liked it! Looks very polished graphically and the gameplay itself is fun too but the backtracking and istant deaths can be a bit frustrating after a while!
Loved when my first slime exploded :)
evilseanbot
30. Aug 2012 路 10:21 UTC
Got to the section with the desert shrews before I gave up. Would have liked to have seen more, but it's just too darn tough!
fruitfly
30. Aug 2012 路 20:36 UTC
like the controls, graphics and general feel to the game. just plays very nicely. add a nice soundtrack and you have a jnr that can take it up with mario or giana sisters.
Evil Cult
30. Aug 2012 路 20:48 UTC
Love the graphical style. Some more check points would be nice though. :)
NgonGames
30. Aug 2012 路 22:02 UTC
Over all this was a fun game. It would have been nice to see more check points and have a few hit points instead of one hit death.
cacciatc
30. Aug 2012 路 22:56 UTC
Great visual style. I was startled the first time I died! Didn't expect all that pixel blood.
dector
31. Aug 2012 路 15:24 UTC
Looks f**ing great, but can't start.
Debian stable. I executed `apt-get install libsoil1`, but still has:
./mpm: error while loading shared libraries: libSOIL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Kayelgee
31. Aug 2012 路 15:42 UTC
ok this game is fun, but so damn hard and I ran into a bug. I got he apple at the high tower and on my way back I died and the apple was lost forever, the chest stayed empty :(
Jeremias
31. Aug 2012 路 15:49 UTC
I didn't get all the apples because the game was too difficult to me ^^. You should change one of the following things, because playing gets annoying (if you are so bad like me):
- not an instant dying, perhaps 3 lifes
- saving the collected apple while respawning on a checkpoint


Additional, the rat should be slower or waiting longer before starting to run, because at the first moment you have no chance to react...

Very funny dying animation xD
CapGrip
31. Aug 2012 路 15:53 UTC
I agree with the up comment: "very funny dying animation" but, this makes me crazy dying a lot of times... great art style.. I thought: "how cool would be that if you麓ve control of the monster"
congrats..
馃帳 rxi
31. Aug 2012 路 16:23 UTC
@dector

I don't really know much about linux so I don't know why you're getting the error. That being said I have been working on the game a little post-jam and have ditched the soil library and am just loading the bitmap data raw. If I get a chance to recompile on linux I'll stick that up here which should hopefully fix the problem assuming SDL is in check and nothing else goes wrong.


@Kayelgee

> I got he apple at the high tower and on my way back I died and the apple was lost forever, the chest stayed empty

The apples return to a "random" chest when you die. Another measure I took to make the game difficult (which in rare cases can make it easier, for example the high tower/high desert apple getting put in one of the first two chests). I don't think I realised how good I got at the game from all the time I played it to check for bugs, and in turn made it a bit too hard!
zkenshin
01. Sep 2012 路 01:12 UTC
Really enjoyable :)
dector
01. Sep 2012 路 21:35 UTC
I tried postjam version, but have error: ./mpm: /lib32/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by ./mpm).

That's because I have 64 bit system. Can you build it for amd64? Thanks.
dector
01. Sep 2012 路 21:46 UTC
Don't worry. I started Windows version under wine. Game is nice and relaxing, but I think, you may setup Jump on Up and Action on Space. It is more habitual. And one-touch-dying is a little bit annoying.
olav_st
02. Sep 2012 路 12:25 UTC
This is so polished! It was very difficult though. It was very frustrating to finally get an apple and be killed on the way back to the monster, gaah!
Great work though! It's only missing a kickass soundtrack :)
馃帳 rxi
02. Sep 2012 路 12:42 UTC
@dector

I'm glad you finally got it working (and it's reassuring to hear it runs in wine), also, sorry you had to go to so much effort to get it to work!

In regards to the controls, I would have added custom control mapping as an option in the menu, but unfortunately I didn't even have enough time to finish all of the game's content, and custom key mapping was a lower priority. I did *try* to make everyone happy though, by providing two mappings for most the controls.
kddekadenz
02. Sep 2012 路 17:32 UTC
Didn't work on Linux Mint 12.
I'm sure I do have installed SDL, whatever the package libsdl doesn't exist.
michax
02. Sep 2012 路 19:14 UTC
Wow, realy nice game. Lots of content, enjoyed very much whole experience. Nice dialogues, interesting enemy ai (jumping over). If i must complain about somethig, I would give a player more HP as opose on hit to kill.
AdventureIslands
02. Sep 2012 路 19:26 UTC
Really nice, super clean and simple graphics, I like. The setting is pretty interesting too. The game is pretty hard with just one hit point and considering how close you need to get the enemies, it's very easy to get yourself killed.

I think I collected 3 apples and returned to the monster but it said I had nothing to feed for it, huh. and I think the chests stayed open too.
Raptor85
04. Sep 2012 路 08:11 UTC
This issue with your linux release, why nobody can run it is simple, you're using super new unstable library versions. Glibc2.15 just came out in june, to even install it you'd have to manually unmask developer profiles on almost any distribution. I go into more detail to my reply to you on my post but the short is it's the equiviant of requiring users to have the visualc 2012 RC runtime installed to play, it's only intended for early testing and has not been fully "released/made stable" yet. Bump down the glibc you're compiling for to 2.11 and include the .so files for soil and sdl just like you included the dlls for the windows release, and even those of us on 64 bit will be able to play it.
Cipher
05. Sep 2012 路 01:27 UTC
Was nice, really liked the death animation lol
ae12687
08. Sep 2012 路 10:03 UTC
The game is great, i really love the graphics,but
fighting multiple monsters at a time is pretty hard.
Anyways good work.
Tritax
13. Sep 2012 路 23:15 UTC
Tried quite a bit, but I couldn't get this running on my linux machine. :( A shame too, cause I really wanted to try this one.
thewiseguy99
14. Sep 2012 路 21:38 UTC
Great game and graphics! Nothing to add by way of comments that hasn't already been said. Good job though!
rhaasken
17. Sep 2012 路 03:45 UTC
Way too difficult. Really nice job on the art and the controls though. It plays really well, but there is no room for error, and the later enemies are crazy. I would have liked to have seen the rest of it, but I couldn't get past the spikes in the desert.