DraBot by gil4



Genre:
Platformer/Arena Brawler
Description:
Help lil' DraBot dispose of his irritating archnemesis, Van HelBot! Naïve vambot hunter expects our hero's batteries to run dry real soon, but he underestimates DraBot's energy sucking abilities. Shall we see who ends up out of juice first?
Second level is still in development (no boss, so not included), third level is in "beta" (as in it's less tested but completely playable all the way through).
Controls:
- Arrows - Movement
- Space/Up arrow - Jump
- Q/W/E/A/S/D/Z/X/C - Attack everyone around yourself and heal off the damage inflicted
- Enter - Selection in menus
- Escape - In-game pause
Credits:
- Art - Tay Elenberg (@tay-elenberg)
- Programming - Gil4 (@gil4)
Disclaimer:
As a lot of the comments say, the controls are hard to get used to, but I'd like to mention that's intentional and not just an oversight. I'm a hardcore platformer player myself and having slower, punishable moves is something I've come to like after years of genre experience. Consider it a challenge. :)
Not trying to make an excuse of "everything is intentional, guys" though, obviously the game does need some balance tweaking (combining game designer and programmer roles is hard and leads to the quality vs. quantity of content choices, so had to make tons of compromises). Plus quite a lot of planned stuff (like additional skills and enemies that'd make the game a lot more dynamic and enjoyable) was left out since, well, it's a jam, you know the drill. That said, we like the end product considering the time restrictions and find it fun to play ourselves as it is.
Hope you like it too!
Hotfix 01.08.2017:
- HP of the first Boss fixed - during some last hour testing made it smaller for faster walkthroughs and forgot to reverse the change, haha.
- Attack of the final Boss bug fixed.
| Windows | https://gil4.itch.io/drabot |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/drabot |
Ratings
| Overall | 453th | 3.317⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 633th | 2.82⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 583th | 2.787⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 505th | 3.377⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 41th | 4.525⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 303th | 2.673⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 357th | 3.333⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 117🗳️ | 67🗨️ |
Sluggish controls make it quite a challenge. Faster movement speed and more control over jumps would definitely help this game shine.
I also wasn't able to finish any levels.
Interesting concept although the enemy designs are a little annoying, as the non-moving enemies don't really play to the 'need to be right next to them' playstyle.
Interesting concept although the enemy designs are a little annoying, as the non-moving enemies don't really play to the 'need to be right next to them' playstyle.
I feel that it needs some kind of tutorial - I died a lot at the beginning.
Otherwise very solid entry!
Maybe make your attack stun them for some microsecs, or something like that.
Also, why make the attack button being Q/W/E/A/S/D/Z/X/C if all do the same, attacking "everyone around yourself"? Wouldn't it be best to go for just one button? Or, if I read that wrong, and really each button attacks one different direction, why make the attack animation being a circle around you?
Btw, the concept is interesting and the game could be very fun, but the controls made it too difficult and kind of got on the way of the experience.
All solid 5's. Love the music and soundeffect. Some of the best art i've seen on LD. Amazing job. Having great art and sound of course makes the mood great too.
Innovation.
Not innovate really, nothing special in terms of game mechanics. 2/5.
Theme.
Doesn't follow theme that well, using his attack increases his power/hp. It's basically a hp bar. 2/5.
Fun.
Surprisngly despite simple gameplay I enjoyed playing it. 3/5.
Overall needs a faster character, the enemies can catch me jumping and by the time I land I'm dead.
I agree with comments, levels are a bit difficult, but you made really good job!
But everything else is very cool
Great LD entry, especially art!
Rates and explanation:
## Fun: 4
The game have a pretty simple mechanic, but I see that you tried your best with the balance of it in tough deadlines.
#### A few points I think shoud be changed:
1. Player controls feels uncomfortable when you try run out from enemies.
This feel may disappear if enemies hitboxes will be reduced. Hitboxes here are really big.
Also for dynamic gameplay it would be better to have a bit faster and agile character.
2. Sometimes enemies spawn on your place and kills you.
It's a frustrating death because it is not based on the player's lack of skills, just lack of spawn point knowledge.
Here you can add some VFX on the spawn point right before the appearance of an enemy.
## Innovation: 3
Nothing really new with mechanics.
But the idea, art and setting are pretty and have an element of innovation in themselves. :)
## Theme: 4
Theme is carried pretty good by setting and gameplay.
## Graphics: 5
Solid 5 :) Graphics are just great, nothing to say!
Only want to notice that it may be cool to add change position animation with 1-2 frames. But not sure, current change position looks good by design.
## Humor: 3
Funny idea of an energysucking robot and graphics looks funny as well:)
## Mood: 4
Generally game feels good first of all thanks to the graphics.
Sound effects picked well.
With game design polish it will be completely great.
## Overall: 4
It's a great LD entry! Visual and code polished well!
Still lacks some balancing and it is great that you know this. :3
Good job :3
* While graphics are outstanding, everything seems dead, especially the enemies with guns. With limited time, you often need to know when to sacrifice sprite quality for animation fluidity. Of course you're post jam, so you can only go forward from this point. Myself, I made spaghetti animations, so maybe I should shut my mouth.
* From a new player's perspective, [this is how the difficulty curve would roughly look like](https://i.imgur.com/w45hMgg.png) and it's not a good thing. The red tanks are arguably the most tough to deal with, because you need specific positioning to kill them (they're the only ones to outdps you, and ranged attack isn't much of a deal on such a small arena) and the wizards are no threat at all. Their order of appearance should be logically swapped, if you ask me.
* Judging from other comments, the game has music, but it did not work on my Wine. You opted out of an audio score, but you apparently provide a foreign bgm.mp3 track; maybe it's an issue with an evil closed fileformat, as the other sounds are wavs. Please refrain from using mp3 in any public released, ever; Vorbis and Opus are better and open compressed formats.
* While at it, you could hold to the tradition of indie developers and make a native Linux build. Pretty please. 
* SFX is honestly so obnoxious that I had to mute it. The akward, periodical attack sound (with a constant attack) takes the cake. Again, you opted out of it, so it's probably and hopefully a set of placeholders.
* There should be some randomness and proceduralness, or checkpoints. I timesinked about twenty minutes into this game ~~and still spent more than that writing this wall of text~~ but it soon started feeling repetitive and tedious speedrunning to the boss through so many waves and having memorised all patterns.
* Having made a GnG clone, and having been absolutely mocked on LD37 for "bad controls", I more than understand your reply to people complaining about slugginess/hard controls. Please keep it as it is, because it's great in its current state. Expand the game around *your* concept, and don't ruin muh skillcap.
* The hell are all these Android and iOS widgets in the data catalog? It weigths 850 KiB, so not a big deal, but it's funny.
Of course a comment wouldn't be complete without a few words of delight and admiration. Nice, unique gameplay, astounding graphics, mainstream but nice interpretation of theme, et cetera. Wish you the highest of places and a Greenlight ticket, and sorry for being too verbose and my bad angielski. TL;DR Linux build or riot.
The fact that enemys drain your health by touching you is ok but the enemy hit boxes are really large and there's no clear indication that you are touching the enemy other than the dim red overlay and health bar going down. When you also take into account that you can't move whilst attacking and the attack range is really small it leads to multiple instances of thinking you're attacking but you're actually dieing instead and you can't move away which feels really unfair. I had to slowly inch my way towards the gunners and magicians whilst testing my attack on each step which is not the kind of gameplay you should want on a fast paced brawler. If you make it so the player bumps into enemys instead of going through them and also add a brighter flash of red over the whole screen whenever you take damage that could improve things a lot!
There's a lot to improve on but you've still got the base of a really nice game! What you needed here was just a little play testing (possibly from friends or family) to see what worked and what needed adjusting!
I was really drawn in my the visuals of this game, but was completely baffled by the need for so many buttons to do the same attack, unless I'm missing something. Having only an AoE damage attack meant that I almost always had to take dame to deal damage, which was incredibly frustrating no matter how carefully I played. I also found the jump to be quite floaty but I suppose that's down to personal preference as the rest of the controls were responsive.
Overall solid entry but the core mechanics need some love for it to be fun.
I'm not particularly good at this kind of games, so maybe it was because of this that I was unable to kill a single enemy and I didn't get to understand the controls at all.
I thought that some keys wil be used as some different kind of power (I don't know, maybe a A to hit, D to heal...) but then I realized that all keys does the same thing.
So it is a nice work, good graphics and art in general, but maybe it needs a better learning curve for those wh aren't so expert in this kind of games (like me :P)
-m
The gameplay was fun. Controls felt a bit unresponsive, especially jumping. Also, that you can't move while attacking really breaks the flow. However, I didn't find it difficult to learn the controls.
I think more complex and more fluid fighting mechanics would definitly improve this game. For example, the enemies should show some kind of response to being attacked. Just watching their HP bar drain is not very satisfying.
The music was good. I don't know if the tracks are random, but the mood of the second track that played didn't quite fit to the first.
Overall, I must say that I've never seen so gorgeous graphics in a Ludum Dare game, really impressive. The gameplay on the other hand could be improved upon.