Zone Slayer by mmason
WEB - link
Post Jam WEB version below
Finally, after 26 years of development, the totally awesome sequel to ZONE ENFORCER has arrived! See it here for the first time before its official cartridge release! Try this rad game out and have the 411 on it before all of your friends.
Story:
The year is 198X, it's been two years since the evil Dr. Mojo Badly tried to take over your neighborhood. He thought he would just take over the place, but sike! That space cadet didn't expect your trusty robot pal Sparky to bail you out. Sparky told him to get bent all the way back to Grief Mountain. Totally Righteous!
Now you're just hanging in your pad and you see some zombies walking by, and you're like "dag spanky! That's totally bogus right there! I bet Mojo Badly's up to his old tricks again."
So you go to the garage and patch up Sparky to go make road pizza of these goons. But oh dang, Sparky's internal battery is acting all whack. But he ain't no scrub, he's going to go tell that nerd to cram it back to Grief Mountain again.
Meanwhile you can sit back, order in a pizza and open a "cold one."
controls
- XBox controller support
- keyboard support with additional mouse controls
Keyboard
- W/S Up/Down - Move Sparky forwards and backwards
- A/D Left/Right - turn Sparky left and right
- L-CTRL - Shoot Sparky's Electro-Blaster (careful this uses your power!)
- L-ALT - Use Sparky's Vibro-Saw to hack those zombies apart (this should work if you fullscreen the game)
X-Box Controller
- D-Pad Up/Down - Move Sparky forwards and backwards
- D-Pad Left Right - turn Sparky left and right
- A - Shoot Sparky's Electro-Blaster (careful this uses your power!)
- B - Use Sparky's Vibro-Saw to hack those zombies apart
Mouse
- Left Click - Shoot Sparky's Electro-Blaster (careful this uses your power!)
- Right Click - Use Sparky's Vibro-Saw to hack those zombies apart
Apologies in advance for people who a non-English keyboard configuration
Credit
Font
Arcade Classic Font by: Pizzadude - http://www.1001freefonts.com/arcade_classic.font Free for personal use
Music
"Cyborg Ninja" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
"Mega Hyper Ultrastorm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
"Voltaic" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Sounds
Post Jam Web Version
https://mmason.itch.io/zone-slayer-post-jam
Post Jam version Changes
- added alternate move mode (move and turn)
- added increasing difficulty by zone (zombies get faster, spit further)
- added maximums for zombie zone bonus
- increased the starting speeds for things (moving, turning, zombies)
| HTML5 (web) | https://mmason.itch.io/zone-slayer |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/zone-slayer |
Ratings
| Overall | 337th | 3.486⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 369th | 3.216⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 452th | 3⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 375th | 3.568⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 510th | 3.297⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 182th | 3.114⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 292th | 3.459⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 26🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
It went maybe a little too far in that direction, and things felt a lot better once I picked up a couple of oil cans. I did find it a little disheartening when I just fell too far behind and watched my energy drain out but then got a turkey but no batteries in the final half block I could still move.
But I loved the classic look and sound effects, great job!
Good job!
This could be really nice if you just spend another day or two on polishing, e.g. walking and turning at the same time, splatter effects when you kill zombies and all in all just speed up the game (try to set the timescale in Unity to 1.5 and it will feel completly different without changing a line of code).
Thanks for letting me play (and reviewing my PowerLessWorld), keep making games!
@parkermc, @marc-grabow the controls of turn or move or attack were an intentional choice that I don't think I'd change, the goal was to replicate that era as much as possible. The controls are frustrating but not impossible to play with, but I do see your points.
@marc-grabow the game speed was actually increased from what I had it set at origionally, some more balancing was needed here, there are powerups that make you faster so its sort of a balancing act to find a good starting speed. Everything probably could have probably been a bit quicker for sure though.
***ZOOOOOOOONE SLAYYYYYYERRRRRRRR!!!***
A serious lack of energy along the way, clearly not enough to see the end of the game, and I didn't even use the gun!!
General opinion: Several good ideas for a retro-like a game (tank control = nice), not very well exploited, but still a very good work
@artur-hawkwing, @ledez Glad you guys enjoyed it
@fangzhangmnm NES games actually could represent a fairly large number of colors, sprites were limited to 4 colors per sprite, but you could imitate 6 if you overlay 2 sprites (3 colors and 1 transparent per sprite usually) Mega man did this. With the exception of the robot we actually used explicitly the standard NES palette, although it was possible on the NES to change the palette. The resolution is 256 X 224, which is actually 16 pixels smaller than the NES resolution of 256 X 240. I actually did some research here to make sure we were mostly true to the graphics we were targeting.
@cydouzo everything was being passed through a filter, which probably added to the flashy pixels. Everything was being rendered normally to the unity scene not placing things pixel by pixel, maybe we should have included an option to turn the filter off.
@simonhutchinson you could probably do a better than that rotation on a NES, I think if you limited the degrees it's drawn at and only used the special rotation for the character you could probably get something much nicer on the NES hardware (maybe, I've never actually programmed for the NES). I agree though, too many zombie games, we did consider using bugs, zombies and other robots but didn't have time and zombies generally have the dumbest AI :grin:
Also to everyone whos game I haven't played, I'm gonna try to get to them tonight.
Good work!
Anyway, old games sometimes had clunky controls but I think adhering more closely to 8-bit standards and having only 4 directions to point in, maybe 8 with pre-rendered rotated sprites, and increasing the move speed by at least a factor of 2 or 3, would have made the game better and be more authentic to boot.
That said, you went for a consistent style and delivered a good retro+ game with good accompanying music and sounds.
@foodzilla You haven't played Zone Enforcer? you're missing out!
@zenmumbler we were sort of taking the Shovel Knight approach, but to be fair there is a bunch of limitations I just didn't have the time to look into. I'm wrong about the rotation, (apparently if I googled for 5 minutes I would have learned that as I did just now). I knew about the sprite limitations but just felt it wasn't worth trying to make sprite flickering appear as it would have on a NES. I agree with the control scheme thoughts, for some reason I had it in my head I wanted to game to behave like vindicators (honestly I don't know why) which for a tank that actually makes sense but not for a robot (although he was originally going to be a tank).
First attempt at making a NES styled game, but far from our first game. When you say delay do you mean because you can only turn or move forward in the Jam version? that was an intentional choice, albeit a poor one which has be improved in the post jam version. The alt key was a poor choice, I know in chrome if you make it full screen it works fine. There is also mouse controls and controller to attack and in the post jam I think I added space to attack with melee.
Visuals are subjective. Aside from the rotation stuff described earlier, the amount of sprites and detail and the lack of sprite flickering most of this should be displayable (if I wanted to convert everything and figure out all the NES tricks and ...) on the NES, although we didn't write the game to be displayed on the NES. The contrast with the player and the sidewalk was something we tried to tackle early, but due to the limited palette of the NES we eventually added a few colors for the robot that aren't part of the classic NES palette.
The game play had it's own issues, granted, but I did verify that the entire game is playable and beatable (getting past zone 4) before uploading. The game is difficult not impossible and if fact was actually much harder early on. I probably should have made it more obvious that powerups are hidden in destroyable objects (cars, trash cans, boxes...) and that all zombies need to be killed to continue. I probably should have tested with people while developing to make sure the play style was more fun. I did add an alternate movement option in the post jam version (due to feedback from others here) and sped things up.
The health bar was because I wanted them to be separate, using your gun drains your power so the choice there is when to shoot and when to melee.
All in all good feedback and its nice to hear someones thoughts even if they didn't like it. [Thanks and also not our first game](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/bureaucratic-deity-simulator-2018)