Primordial Soup by bytegrove

[raw]
made by bytegrove for LD24 (COMPO)
*** Kill fish-monsters and attach their body parts onto yourself to gain their ancient and mystical powers! ***

Explore randomly generated dungeons and battle their randomly generated inhabitants. Shoot at the enemies and click and drag body parts as they fall off. The more parts you've collected; the faster you move, and each collected head can shoot!

Be careful, as the enemies shoot back.
If you lose all your body parts a timer will start to count down, and you need to quickly find some spare parts, or you'll die.

Controls:
# Steer: arrowkeys or w,a,s,d.
# Left-click to shoot, aim at mouse cursor.
# Right click on a body part to detach it(only on the player).
# Loose parts on the ground can be dragged and attached to the player. Grab with left mouse, drop the part near a connector(the white spots on the body parts) to attach it.
# Shoot at the enemies to detach their parts, and use them to upgrade yourself!

*Tools used:
Unity, Visual studio, Blender, Photoshop, inudge, bfxr,
paint, chronolapse

*Known bugs:
- Sometimes, when a room is created and connected to another; it fails to make an opening from both ends.
- On rare occasions, enemy heads attached to the player won't get updated properly to player status, thus they'll continue to shoot enemy bullets. :P
-After restart, if you died on a later stage, the game will restart on that stage but it will still read as stage 1, until you enter a portal. I just discovered this, I will fix it asap!
- Pretty wonky controls, sorry about that. :/

Ratings

Coolness 36% 791
Overall 3.02 353
Audio 2.25 423
Fun 2.57 492
Graphics 3.17 275
Humor 2.28 296
Innovation 3.62 79
Mood 2.27 560
Theme 3.24 239

Feedback

Doft
27. Aug 2012 路 05:31 UTC
The idea is good, but bad implemented. The parts don't connect right, and sometimes you enter a room and is already being shot at. Make the rooms bigger, or make them continuous.
aitorman
27. Aug 2012 路 13:23 UTC
I liked the concept a lot, but as Doft says, it's not well implemented. If you made the dangeons much bigger or make the game generate new parts procedurally and attach them to the world, something like the chunk system in minecraft (although this would be difficult to achieve in two days) It would me much better. But it's still fun in it's actual form
cadin
27. Aug 2012 路 13:28 UTC
I like the idea of attaching body parts from your enemies.
The game is way too hard for me though.
Split82
27. Aug 2012 路 13:32 UTC
I like the idea and I enjoyed the game play. It's just too easy and I'm not sure it here is any global task to accomplish.
馃帳 bytegrove
27. Aug 2012 路 14:37 UTC
Thanks for the feedback!

I'm quite aware of the many flaws, I got so many bugs the first day that I wasn't able to implement nearly as much as I'd hoped. I had to rewrite the building system several times, until I at least had something that worked somewhat well.

The idea to make the rooms continuous is a great one, that would probably improve the flow a lot!

When I began making the game, all building parts consisted of only different coloured blocks(kinda like lego), and I made a system where the closest connectors of two blocks attached to each other. When I later made organic building blocks instead, the game lost some of its building logic, hence why it might feel like the parts doesn't attach where they should. With the more rounded parts, a simple raycast and a direct attachment on the hit point would make a lot more sense.

The building system was a source of constant headache from day one, I had a lot of issues with colliders and triggers in unity, and had to rewrite the system several times until I had something that at least worked half of the time.

Well, I hope I learnt something. xD
Gotta save some of the ramblings for the post mortem. ;)
Also, timelapse coming soon!
madpew
27. Aug 2012 路 15:36 UTC
Strange gameplay. Nice mechanic. It took me 2 attempts until I noticed I can assemble my "thing". played a while but it gets repetive very fast. Nice game. Well done.
camdensegal
27. Aug 2012 路 19:32 UTC
Really cool idea, with some polish (more body segment types easier attachment and maybe slow down action a bit) it could be great.
LiteLab
27. Aug 2012 路 19:41 UTC
It was pretty nice, didn't really get the point.
SethR
28. Aug 2012 路 00:29 UTC
Congrats on doing something ambitious, it's a neat experience to be able to pluck 3d body parts off the ground, stick them on your head and create a dragonbeast with 5 heads that shoots crazy and moves fast. Well done, sir.
Follett
28. Aug 2012 路 05:48 UTC
Best!
aschearer
28. Aug 2012 路 09:04 UTC
As others have said the core idea is really neat. The problem is it's really difficult to attach the parts you want. I also found the enemies attacks were relentless making the game challenging but not fun. I would make the enemies more interesting to combat and streamline how parts are assembled. I think you have a great idea and if you keep working you could have a great game, too.
jujule
28. Aug 2012 路 09:11 UTC
As others said, I like the idea but I found it way too hard. I think that the player should keep at least a basic shot even in its most "de-evoluted" form. Once you lost your weapon, it is almost impossible to avoid enemies shot and get back your head at the same time.

It could be really fun with just a little more polish and maybe something to dive the player ( story, different environments ). Still, I feel quite a lot was done in such a short time.
chipcaramel
28. Aug 2012 路 12:23 UTC
I had quite a bit of fun with this one, sure, there's flaw in the game, but it didn't really spoil things for me. I rather enjoyed myself. It was quite fun attaching loads of parts to my character, seeing how terrible of an abomination I could make. :)
chamberlainpi
28. Aug 2012 路 13:00 UTC
Well, I died way too fast to enjoy this game. The graphics and isometric section design was good, but as soon as I entered a battle... I died almost instantly lol
Qaterknan
28. Aug 2012 路 17:02 UTC
I realy liked the idea of attaching parts of body, but it was a bit weird how they attached. I also noticed, that it's very difficult to enter a room with great body and don't get shot immediately.
littleball
28. Aug 2012 路 18:15 UTC
I found it hard to get into this game. If you had a little more health it would help. Still, I like the idea and with some more work it could be a great game.
Grouflon
28. Aug 2012 路 20:34 UTC
The idea of picking enemies body parts is good, but it's a pity it don't affect the game so much. Maybe it would have been much more fun and motivating to get and discover a variety of powers from the body parts you find.
recursor
28. Aug 2012 路 21:03 UTC
Strange, and strangely cool. I like the lego-like body parts, but it was a bit too difficult for me. Also, I left my head in another room and when I came back, it was gone!
whilefun
29. Aug 2012 路 01:09 UTC
This was a well executed idea :) I loved tacking on more globs of goo to my guy so I could shoot and move faster. I did find it hard to figure out where he was when the level was crowded with other guys. Good job :)
AdventureIslands
29. Aug 2012 路 21:04 UTC
Pretty cool if difficult game. I like the idea of breaking your enemies apart and attaching their parts to yourself to make yourself stronger.
Kmad
09. Sep 2012 路 10:30 UTC
Great idea! Just needs a bit of work on collision and polishing up the attachment system.
Dark Acre Jack
13. Sep 2012 路 05:50 UTC
You got an excellent minimap working. You are the best.