The Underground Court by caranha
You are a faerie, half insect, half man, who lives in a world separate from our own. In this game, you must venture from your comfortable home underground into the realms of men, in order to find delicacies to your queen.
Your final goal is to enter the very lair of Men, avoid his monstrous guardians, and acquire the ultimate prize for your queen. Can you do it?
***
This is my second dare. My initial idea was based on the movie "The Secret World of Arrietty", where a family of tiny people lived hidden in a house, taking food from the house while avoiding the "big people".
The original plan was to have other aspects to the game such as expand your own underground realm with specialists to help you, dealing with humans who would try to close the ant holes, etc. But due to my terrible time management, I only got so far as the "keep the queen alive, and go for the prize" part.
At least, compared to my previous LD entry, this was a big improvement. Mobs, Music, Real time, pausing, this game has many technical options not present on Maze Explorer, even if it might look a little less polished. More info about that on my upcoming post-mortem.
Your final goal is to enter the very lair of Men, avoid his monstrous guardians, and acquire the ultimate prize for your queen. Can you do it?
***
This is my second dare. My initial idea was based on the movie "The Secret World of Arrietty", where a family of tiny people lived hidden in a house, taking food from the house while avoiding the "big people".
The original plan was to have other aspects to the game such as expand your own underground realm with specialists to help you, dealing with humans who would try to close the ant holes, etc. But due to my terrible time management, I only got so far as the "keep the queen alive, and go for the prize" part.
At least, compared to my previous LD entry, this was a big improvement. Mobs, Music, Real time, pausing, this game has many technical options not present on Maze Explorer, even if it might look a little less polished. More info about that on my upcoming post-mortem.
| Web (all platforms) | http://claus.castelodelego.org/games/LD23/applet/ |
| Jarball (all platforms) | http://claus.castelodelego.org/games/LD23/UndergroundCourt.jar |
| Source | http://claus.castelodelego.org/games/LD23/UndergroundCourt-src.tgz |
| Time-Lapse | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC3GeK9PHo8 |
| Journal | http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/caranha |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7847 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall | 2.81 | 524 |
| Audio | 2.94 | 246 |
| Fun | 2.36 | 674 |
| Graphics | 2.64 | 563 |
| Humor | 2.49 | 307 |
| Innovation | 2.89 | 451 |
| Mood | 2.60 | 492 |
| Theme | 3.41 | 231 |
On the other hand, I'm impressed with how far along this path you managed to make it. This was a really ambitious concept and a nice take on the theme to boot.
Once I figured out the controls and that you had to stand on the middle of the queen to feed her, it became possible to venture outside (and get fruits), but those cats/rats were fast!
Enjoyed the audio
I guess the main problem with the movement is that I ended up implementing it as entire tiles (16 pixels), and the engine did not allow anything more precise than that. I will try to work out how to do tile-free movement/collision before the next dare.
I don't want to play the game in the wrong conditions and risk to rate it worse than it worth.
And at what you said about my game, I did realize but I thought it could not be used. Will fix in future versions though :)
Kind of hard though ;)
To be quite honest, I am quite disappointed with the game myself. The problem is that I wanted to do something different from my last entry, while using the same tricks -- that is specially true for the movement.
I'm not sure I'm going to fix all the problems in this game, though -- it would probably be better to just re-make it from scratch with the same idea, and a non tile-based engine.
Aside from all that, it was a decent game and i had fun once i got the hang of it. Didn't beat it though since it was too hard for me.
I amazingly managed to get through the clustered area full of cats once by dumb luck. I hope in future versions the cats will give you a little more reaction time since it's really brutal in that you can farm food to get the food count above 100 and then get killed by a cat you weren't expecting :P A larger viewport could also help with this. I like the effort that you put into the graphics and sound.
It was pretty hilarious when a cat would get excited and chase you but immediately go to sleep a split second later :P
I'll be interested to see expanded versions of this!
Overall a great entry. Well done :)
Clever.
I wished I could fly over walls (I'm a fly, right?) and get away from the darn cats. The controls were so fast that I had no hope of really diving into my hole to get away from them so once I activated a cat it was game over.
Clever concept. I hope you add build!
I also liked the game idea and the mood, the cats actually scared me the first time!
I do find that the game is quite hard, tho!
Too bad there is no building
The idea is that you are as fast as the cats if you are unladen, but if you are carrying food you can't just outrun them, but have to find your way around without getting noticed. Of course the idea would have worked much better if I had time to balance it.