99Hearts by barret
OVERVIEW
You are building the world around you by laying down the rooms in the world. You get upgrades and fight enemies while potentially becoming insanely powerful. Your life is the currency so you use it for everything you do.
Inspired by the board game Carcassonne. I love the ideas of placing down tiles to build a world so I wanted to explore that concept within a game. Other game inspirations for this game include spelunky, risk of rain, and forager.
💜 Hearts to build the world with rooms (32 Hand Crafted rooms)
💜 Hearts go down if your timer lowers (only when enemies are present)
💜 Hearts go down if you take damage from enemies (6 enemy types)
💜 hearts can be used to get upgrades (9 upgrades)
💜 Enemies scale up as you progress
💜 Game will endlessly loop so you can keep playing with all your upgrades
TIPS
- Hold Down Space/Action to shoot in place without moving
- If you get negative hearts you can still earn hearts to get positive again
- Bombs can set off other bombs causing chain reactions
- Spawner enemy types don't move they just spawn and do no damage
- If the game feels too hard use R key to restart it's all randomized
# CONTROLS
GAMEPAD SUPPORTED
GAMEPAD DPAD AND LEFT STICK = ARROW KEYS
ANY FACE BUTTON AND TRIGGERS = SPACE
press ARROW KEYS (or WASD) to move and shoot
press SPACE to lay bombs which hurt enemies and destroy rocks
hold down SPACE and press ARROW KEYS (or WASD) to shoot standing still
press SPACE for in game actions like building rooms and buying power ups
press R START to restart
press F4 to toggle fullscreen
press F1 or SELECT to toggle stats
press F2 to mute all sound
GAME PLAYTHROUGH
https://youtu.be/IEYaHDZijNM
CREDITS
Code , Art, Sfx by Barret Vasilchik
Color Palette by KerrieLake
https://lospec.com/palette-list/rustic-gb
Music by Failpositive
| Windows | https://barret232hxc.itch.io/99hearts |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/99hearts |
Ratings
| Given | 14🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
Still a cool game, liked the take on the theme and the retro mood. Liked the random chest with the upgrade, but in the end I had too many of theme making me too powerfull. Maybe scale the cost with each loop ?
The gun sfx was maybe a bit too strong and got annoying as well because it's basicallu firing the whole game , faster and faster, had to turn down my volume.
Cool entry !
I like the idea of scaling the cost with the loops. If I had it where you could carry over the heart amounts to the next loops I think that idea would of worked since you would have more hearts the next loop.
The sound thing was another one I wasn't sure how to handle b/c I was like yeah it's going to get annoying after a long period of time. I'm actually curious now to look at other games that have constant shooting to see how they handle it.
I must say, I really wish I had read those instructions before playing. I didn't realize I could stand still and shoot simultaneously XP
I saw the post about your game on the feed and went straight to the game.
Anywho, amazing job!
Edit: Forgot to mention I found a bug! Before I got a bomb upgrade, I could place a second bomb right as the first was exploding, and have them both explode at the same time!
Edit 2: I decided to do another run, and managed to get OP. It was a blast! I do with there was more of a challenge at some point, or a reason to keep playing after you get to that point, but hey. Ludum Dare. The Graphics, Audio, and Gameplay worked perfectly together. One of the best Ludum Dare 44 games I've played so far!
Graphical weirdness: If you pick up multiple upgrades they stack the images on top of one-another.
I wanted to do a better job scaling the enemies. I was trying to scaled them with you but instead it sort of has this inverse difficulty where it starts out hard and gets easiser and easier b/c you become so OP, but being OP can be fun for a point which is kinda why I think it works for the jam game. The endless loops don't really offer any challenge, so If I ever decided to make this a full game I would need to really work hard on that. I wanted to have that risk of rain 2 feeling where you just can keep playing and it gets harder and harder but instead I just let you get OP haha. Balance is everyhting.
Oh yeah the bombs, so I did something where bombs chain react and you can kinda lay bombs infinitely. The bomb and the explosion are actually 2 different objects so when you have 1 bomb you can't lay another bomb if one exists but once it explodes there are no bombs just explosions so I think that's one way to kinda bypass it but I figured what the heck i'll just leave it in
I wasn't aware of the images stacking on top of each other I think b/c I wasn't paying as much attention to the upgrades, that's a good catch though thank you for alerting me.
I am glad you enjoyed it :)
I will admit I have had this idea of a game brewing up in my mind where you lay down rooms for awhile so I kinda just used this gamejam to execute that idea and tried to make the theme fit in how I thought it would make sense. Your life goes down every 30 seconds there are enemies with the timer, and you need to use your life to purchase the upgrades and build land. There is technically one aspect where you can get negative hearts but you have the chance to get back in the positive again. If you have negative hearts and you try to build land you lose, so I had a time where if I bought the power up it would bring me negative so I just bought the land which at the time of purchase I wasn't negative but aftwards I was , so I had to gain up my hearts and it was pretty intense.
The palette is what truly saved me. I am not an artist so I wanted to limit myself b/c I am very limited in my artistic skills. I am glad you liked that aspect