Amoebattles by LevelUpJordan
Full screen is recommended.
A stylish top down shoot'em up inspired by Geometry Wars and WE Are Doomed. Kill enemies, gain experience and become more pointy.
The catch? Lacking the ability to aim at the enemy you must maneuver yourself so that your bullets make contact with your target.
Your bullets aren't your only weapons in this microorganism eat microorganism world though, when under pressure you can hold space bar to unleash a spinning laser.
A stylish top down shoot'em up inspired by Geometry Wars and WE Are Doomed. Kill enemies, gain experience and become more pointy.
The catch? Lacking the ability to aim at the enemy you must maneuver yourself so that your bullets make contact with your target.
Your bullets aren't your only weapons in this microorganism eat microorganism world though, when under pressure you can hold space bar to unleash a spinning laser.
| Web | https://levelupjordan.itch.io/shift-the-shooting-shapes-shape |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=26920 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.65 | 189 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.43 | 243 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.63 | 151 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.54 | 427 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.43 | 548 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.08 | 519 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.20 | 462 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.58 | 362 |
Thanks for checking out the game
Overall its really nice and slick. Keep up the good work!
Enemies come out of spawn portals fast enough that it's pretty much like them spawning right on you sometimes, too.
Plus, I don't really get the point of Arcade Mode. You're invincible and you can get infinite points, but for what? What's the goal there?
Chaos Mode is more like what I was expecting, but it's way tougher than Arcade Mode. Kinda weird considering it's also the mode where you're mortal.
Anyway! Pretty sure the highest I got was the one after Glip Glop, but only for a second. Haven't seen Spike yet.
I'd like to see this built on and improved. I would make it so that the spinning blades make you invincible, activate for a set time with each press, and spin much faster. I can think of some other tweaks, but that's the biggest by far.
There are two things that would make it a lot better though I think, and they are:
- Make the player more visible, maybe play around with a stronger color pallet for the player, maybe saturate the colors of the player a little more against the desaturated background/enemies.
- the special ability feels like it take a second or two to actually kick in, which, in this style of game, is a second or two too late. I do like the fact that you are punished if you just sit on it though (growing in size, then slowly shrinking again). Maybe swapping the slow turn with more of a rapid spin that pulsates (eg. rapid spin>pause for half a second>rapid spin>etc).
Other than those two nitpicks, I loved it!
Great game!
thegooffromspace: The laser is definitely underpowered, I didn't really get much time to balance it I'm afraid.
Arcade mode isn't endless, it should end after wave 20. It's all about score, the punishment for getting hit is your multiplier resetting. I feel like forcing you to restart is unnecessary.
As Chaos is endless lives (or a time limit) become necessary so that's why it's like that.
A couple of things you could definitely improve on, though. To start with, death is far, far too punishing and far too quick. Once I'm knocked down from death machine to Kobe I can't really do much if all the enemies around me are still balanced as though I was the death machine. Sure there's more experience to pick up, but I can't get to the experience with all the overpowered enemies around me. As a simple improvement, you could make damage remove only one level, instead of dropping down to Kobe. If you do want to go down the traditional twinstick route of bringing the player down to zero, have player death cause most of the enemies around the player to be vaporized so I'm not instantly swamped with enemies while I'm trying to regain my power.
I've already praised the visuals, and you do make a good effort to distinguish the enemies, but they're the same color as your shots, and as such the screen gets really busy really quickly. It's hard to make out what's enemy, what's projectile, and what's a spawnpoint. Most of my deaths in busier moments of the game were to things I didn't see coming. More color variation between projectiles/spawnpoints/enemies/enemy explosions would have helped a lot, as well as a bigger contrast between foreground and background, and smaller/less pronounced graphics for the player's projectiles.
One further aspect of visual design is the point/experience popups, the +100's and such. Half the time I'd have the entire immediate area around me covered in the stuff, which made it really hard to see the enemies through the fog. I'd have much preferred a bar at the bottom of the screen, or an arc around my character, that just increased as I picked up the pellets to signify progress. Something less obtrusive.
Finally, this might just be me being used to standard single-direction-pointing twinsticks, but the fire rate seemed incredibly slow and threw me off many times, where I'd be expecting a projectile to appear a lot earlier than it did and get killed because of it.
Still, I had a good time with the game. Nice work.
had a lot of fun playing your game
Cons:
- controls are very slippery, it has an "ice surface" feel to it, which isn't bad in itself, but here it's too much. I kept sliding into enemies
- super weapon is missing some kind of "punch". What I mean is, that there's no real feedback. Enemies just go through it with out knackback or any hit indication
Good things:
- super easy to pick up
- audio is great. Sets a nice mood and is very nice to listen to
- visuals are minimalistic and fit very well
- different enemy types and AI make it more challenging, because you have to remember how enemies act
So overall: Great job!
Some improvement that you can make:
- Enemy should be more visible (it's hard to know the exact hitbox, a little bit too big)
- When you die in Chaos mode, destroy the player, here you can always move during the fade out animation.
- Show a progress bar of transformation to know how we are.
- Show the level of our player, what form you are? the first, the second, the 10th?
Very good job!
Can't understand why it resets my shapeshift when I take damage
I like the fact that it's hard to see, it makes you wanna practice more.
The concept is cool, as are the designs for more spikey versions of the shapes.
The super attack could be more super though, I liked the idea of forcing the player to spend XP on it, but it didn't feel worth it most the time.
keep up the good work!
But it's hard to percieve the enemy due to their mat colors. it can really help to make the enemy stand out more.
Otherwise, high marks all round - great visuals and audio, fantastic concept and polished gameplay. Good job!