SURVIVE by Ragzouken

[raw]
made by Ragzouken for LD24 (COMPO)
GAME:
Survival of the fittest fight for supremacy. You control organisms with the ability to drain health from each other, and create stronger children from their own health.

You win if your hue is dominant, you lose if you die and there are no more organisms with your hue to take control of.

CONTROLS:
* WASD - move
* Left click - drain health from other organisms (if you are not full)
* Right click - repair an organism or create a new one

* b - colour-blind mode (brighter organisms are closer to your hue)
* n - disable birth sound (bleep bloop)

GUIDE:
* your health is the portion of colour within your hexagonal border
* if you die, you take control of an ally
* if you are low on health, left click on enemy organisms to stealth their health
* if you have high (especially full) health, right click on the ground to create offspring, or on an ally organism to heal it
* win by stealing health from other colours and converting it into babies of your colour

NOTES:
The idea was originally to have a heavier emphasis on creating better offspring, but as it stands offspring are only a slight improvement on their parents. Offspring have a slightly different hue from their parents, so distant relations in the family tree will not necessarily be allies!

The bleeps and bloops are the sound of organisms being born! The lower the pitch, the less alike to you they are. The other sound warns you when you are low on health, or too full to attack.

With more time, I'd ideally make the organism AI better - they ought to run away when in danger, and create children away from enemies who are likely to consume them immediately.

POST COMPO FIXES:
* Collision - organisms now collide loosely, preventing too many organisms swarming in the same place
* Input fixes - clicking on organisms is now more reliable
* Sound fix - the sound no longer repeats after the game ends
* AI changes - organisms now try to run to safety to replicate, and find enemies to kill more easily

REFERENCES:
Made using love2d (https://love2d.org/) - the .love is just a renamed .zip of the source.

Font from http://www.fontspace.com/digitaldreamdesign/d3-honeycombism

Ratings

Coolness 100% 1
Overall 3.19 249
Audio 2.19 443
Fun 2.91 307
Graphics 3.56 147
Humor 1.86 449
Innovation 3.66 72
Mood 2.91 242
Theme 3.43 177

Feedback

Sakuyan
26. Aug 2012 路 22:20 UTC
I like the concept and the style of art you got there. The sound is a little bit hard to listen to constantly :(
Khayet
26. Aug 2012 路 23:32 UTC
I got an error:
http://s8.postimage.org/bmhmqgro5/survive_error_Screen.png
Am I doing something wrong? I don't know anything about LUA.
I extracted the files into a folder on my desktop and started the .exe
馃帳 Ragzouken
26. Aug 2012 路 23:36 UTC
That must be my fault somehow!
馃帳 Ragzouken
26. Aug 2012 路 23:42 UTC
(fixed)
Khayet
26. Aug 2012 路 23:51 UTC
Thanks for the fix! This game is frantic, I like it!
aschearer
27. Aug 2012 路 01:56 UTC
I really like the art style. The sounds could probably be improved. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing with the gameplay. Perhaps having fewer "cells" at the beginning might give the player a chance to figure things out.
TuxedoFish
27. Aug 2012 路 07:59 UTC
This an awesome idea for the theme and really orignal ;D i love it
zapaman
27. Aug 2012 路 08:36 UTC
One of the best entries played so far! I actually love it! Congrats!
Lucariatias
27. Aug 2012 路 09:12 UTC
It's an original idea, and it's a lot of fun to play once you get the hang of what you're doing.
Brilliantly executed and the graphics feel right for the game as well. The sounds are the most annoying part, and when you get pulled into a huge croud of the blobs in the middle to die multiple times and switch organism can be a little infuriating as well.
KhaoTom
27. Aug 2012 路 09:13 UTC
Wow, difficult and interesting gameplay with a very effective visual style. Well done!
Krobill
27. Aug 2012 路 10:45 UTC
Interesting though a bit confusing at first. Visual hints of what is happening would have been more useful than annoying sounds imho ^^ ... and also as someone proposed earlier, less cells at first
MaximSchoemaker
27. Aug 2012 路 12:46 UTC
Very neat concept. I found it hard to get any control on the situation, mainly cause in the end all these cells kept cluttering in the middle and instantly sucking away my health :P but I can see how this could turn into a very interesting balanced game :)
Vordux
27. Aug 2012 路 12:58 UTC
Great concept, nice graphics as well, the consistency helped create a nice feel for the game.

I had to disable my sound, the game was better. Apart from that it was fun to play.

Cool game.
馃帳 Ragzouken
27. Aug 2012 路 12:59 UTC
Thanks for all the feedback guys :)

The sound is annoying, I admit - I thought it'd be better than silence, but it seems it's more irritating than anything, especially since it only really serves to hint that you are winning or losing.

The fact that they cluster is a big problem - they need to try and spread out more - fleeing from attacks, building children in safety, and collision are possibly solutions that I'll try when I come back to this :)

And yeah, it's quite difficult to tell what's going on - fewer starting organisms is probably the way to go, but improvements to choosing which organism to take control of after you die will probably help too.
iandioch
27. Aug 2012 路 14:07 UTC
It's a fantastic looking game, of that I have no doubt. But gameplay-wise, I had little idea what was going on. And yes, the sound wasn't quite perfect :P
Sanguine
27. Aug 2012 路 15:26 UTC
I like how the game matches with the theme very well, and I also liked the graphics. It was hard to tell what was going on though.
NedortGames
27. Aug 2012 路 15:50 UTC
Sound was annoying ,crashed :(
馃帳 Ragzouken
27. Aug 2012 路 16:01 UTC
Could you give me any more information about the nature of the crash? You can disable sound by pressing "n" btw.
vidarn
27. Aug 2012 路 16:54 UTC
I found it both pretty and fun to play. Oh, and thanks for including a color-blind mode! :D
madpew
27. Aug 2012 路 17:27 UTC
original idea, I cant figure out how to win this.. I always get overrun by the other cells without being able to build my own tree. nice art style. enjoyed it, but it's too hard for me :/
pighead10
27. Aug 2012 路 17:49 UTC
Best LD game I've played so far. It takes a while to get used to, but after working out the best strategy for making childing and keeping myself at full I did well - there was a huge bunch of people in the centre at the end and I just died every time I switched character, but they were mostly mine so I won.
mdkess
28. Aug 2012 路 00:15 UTC
Cool! This game took me a bit to get the hang of, but I think that the underlying principles are really great. A lot of fun!
LuizHGMonclar
28. Aug 2012 路 00:59 UTC
It's always the little games that get most of my attention... congratulations man. Found it a little hard to understand in the beginning but after playing with it for some time I really liked it!
Cosmologicon
28. Aug 2012 路 02:05 UTC
Well, I don't think I ever got the hang of this game. I lost once, then I think I won once, because all the bleeps and bloops stopped, and everything looked roughly the same color. But even if I don't fully understand it, I can tell it's pretty creative. It would be really nice for us Dvorak users if you made arrow keys work too: the keyboard switcher doesn't always work for Love. :)
jijaweb
28. Aug 2012 路 06:29 UTC
I like this one. Nice graphics and gameplay.
munchor
28. Aug 2012 路 10:08 UTC
I guess I was the best organism, I was always the biggest, nice game :)
emveyh
28. Aug 2012 路 17:02 UTC
Wow! Cool game & graphics. The sound was a bit annoying, though :/
jplur
29. Aug 2012 路 05:45 UTC
This was a pretty good game, I played through a couple of times, picked up what was going on very quickly. My third game they started breeding out of control, creating this singularity of blip boop beep that progressively got more psychedelic as the program crashed. Great work!
MurrayL
29. Aug 2012 路 11:27 UTC
Very interesting game! I'm not sure if I won or not, but everyone was pink.

The AI seemed to have a tendency to create a massive cluster in the centre of the game area. Winning was just a matter of hovering around it, spawning new cells. Would be very interested in playing a version with better AI!

I quite liked the sound, too! If you added some ambient background noise (perhaps related to the current game state in a very subtle way?) it would create the perfect atmosphere.
Barry Abrams
29. Aug 2012 路 12:27 UTC
I like how the audio kind of makes it's own music.
Mach60KAS
29. Aug 2012 路 13:40 UTC
I really loved the graphic style of this - thought the fine art of staying alive eluded me. Great job!
PickledBrain
29. Aug 2012 路 18:24 UTC
The ending gets a little insane and I can't really see what's happening. Other than that, great graphics and the gameplay is unique.
pbdiode
29. Aug 2012 路 21:13 UTC
Using a track pad with this sucks! BUT a fun and interesting game :)
AaronGordon
29. Aug 2012 路 21:19 UTC
Really cool concept. Feels quite similar to osmos. Was a bit confusing at the beginning, and can get a bit chaotic. Awesome art and nice sfx's. Nice job!
Gungnir
30. Aug 2012 路 14:09 UTC
Well done, looks very nice.
juaxix
30. Aug 2012 路 14:47 UTC
I found impossible to manage the balance of life drain/inject, it's a very good project, thanks for coding it in Love, you can export it as web also, there is a bug when you deactivate the sounds...it keep emitting audio 驴?
I think you can use the shapes to create some kind of rule and transform entities when color mixes, create mutations inside the cell and so on.
Best wishes.
Cell
30. Aug 2012 路 15:34 UTC
The style is strong in this one.
AdventureIslands
30. Aug 2012 路 18:06 UTC
The concept is pretty cool, pretty difficult game. Also the sounds are very annoying, even if you turn off the birth sounds, the other wooom wooom sound keeps on playing.
gnx
30. Aug 2012 路 18:15 UTC
I think this is the first entry I've played that uses sound also to communicate the lifeforming process, very cool.
Gameplay is confusing, rather chaotic.

My interest was held during the time I played it though.
TinyPlatypus
30. Aug 2012 路 20:47 UTC
An interesting take on evolution! Nice!
infernet89
31. Aug 2012 路 09:02 UTC
I loved the idea, very clever.. Unluckily soon there are too many cells in the same place, and it becomes quite unplayable..
bobiniki
31. Aug 2012 路 11:03 UTC
I'll vote you high just for the color blind mode(I'm color blind :( )
Overall nice idea, but I think that it is realy hard to die :D
I tried dieing and it took me a minute or two. I don't know if this is good or bad just saying :D
馃帳 Ragzouken
31. Aug 2012 路 12:09 UTC
Thanks again for the feedback guys :)

Really sorry about the sound bug (the warning sound should stop when the game ends!).

I was worried it would take me too long to implement collisions (it was actually shamefully easy :(), which would have (and has, post-compo - along with some changes to make the AI try to give birth in safe areas) solved the clustering problems.

There were also a number of bugs with detecting which organisms you were clicking on, if any, so there are some cases where it's difficult, if not impossible, to drain/heal/breed when it looks like it should be - I have fixed those post compo.

The other problem that seems to have come up is that a mutual attack on someone stronger than you appears no different to your attack failing as an organism kills you. I haven't worked out how best to solve this yet.
Maple
31. Aug 2012 路 17:15 UTC
Unfortunately it wasn't executed as well as it could have been, but the concept is amazing. I'm sure if you worked with it you could end up with something quite awesome. Other than this, hmm, I guess I should point out the ringing noise that gets more prominent as the game goes on, can get kinda annoying. :) Not bad.
aeveis
03. Sep 2012 路 01:20 UTC
game starts stuttering/frame skipping and not sure why i respawn as a different color, but interesting concept! on windows 7 64bit
馃帳 Ragzouken
03. Sep 2012 路 09:20 UTC
Probably due to the code being inefficient. When you respawn you take control of an existing allied organism, so you won't be exactly the same colour.
Dan C
07. Sep 2012 路 16:19 UTC
Nice! Took me a while to fully understand what to do, but quite fun once I got the hang of it.

Unlike some others I rather liked the sound :).
Manuel Magalh茫es
15. Sep 2012 路 21:22 UTC
The concept is cool. It doesn't have much design on it aside from draining health from other organisms and create new ones, but there's potential for a full lenghted game. The graphic style is nice.