Amoebam by Sri Harsha Chilakapati

[raw]
made by Sri Harsha Chilakapati for LD35 (COMPO)
Amoebam is a cross platform 2D platformer where you are an Amoeba (like a slime jelly). You will be coming to the help of your friends, who are being eaten by other Amoebians who are infected by a virus.

Note that the desktop version needs Java 8 with OpenGL 3.3 or later. If you are on Mac OS X, you have to launch it with -XstartOnFirstThread VM argument.

Ratings

Coolness 30% 1854
Overall 2.71 830
Audio 3.12 278
Fun 2.24 895
Graphics 2.71 627
Innovation 2.24 877
Mood 2.40 731
Theme 2.18 903

Feedback

GAFBlizzard
18. Apr 2016 路 07:48 UTC
I like the roll move. Nice animation and fun to use. Maybe being able to roll through enemies would be cool? Having instant retries was appreciated.

I'm not sure which things are WebGL version bugs so please forgive me if I'm mistaken on these:

1. I told you about the air control thing (which is apparently a WebGL bug). It's very hard for me to do jumps without using it because some jumps seem to have very little startup time, and hitting the edge of a ledge bounces you down.

2. Another WebGL bug, hitting a ledge/roof bounces you sharply down. This is a problem several levels in for a long jump.
馃帳 Sri Harsha Chilakapati
18. Apr 2016 路 10:14 UTC
@GAFBlizzard

Thanks for the comment. Actually the only bug related to WebGL is my poor emulation. My framework used instanced rendering, but here I had to emulate them on CPU which is why the low frame rates.

1. The mid air thing is actually an experiment I thought of previously, like we get in old completely tile based platformer games.

2. I couldn't port the Java box2D bindings to work with GWT, so I had to hack the collision detection too. It's all nothing but rectangles, with a tree structure (similar to the Bullet's btDynamicTree) which does the spatial partitioning. Should be my mistake with premature understanding of the structure.

3. The rendering is the complete issue. I tried to do the matrix multiplication for each vertex of each shape directly on the CPU, in order to reduce the number of draw calls, which of course resulted in low FPS.

Will make sure I'll perform more better in the next LD.
Matzigon
19. Apr 2016 路 21:00 UTC
Nice entry. I found a bug in the webgl version where at last tile of the platform prevents you from moving left. Usually near water that means inevitable death.
dusho
20. Apr 2016 路 07:04 UTC
weird jumping controls and mechanic.. was a bit annoying
curtamyth
21. Apr 2016 路 01:44 UTC
Sorry, the jumping mechanics made this simply unplayable to me. Other than that it seemed like there was potential in this.
Miko
22. Apr 2016 路 21:49 UTC
Jumping in this was extremely hard, and it took me over a minute alone to finish the first level thanks to it. I wish I could had seen more of this entry, but the jumping mechanic made it hard to play.
AinoraZ
02. May 2016 路 19:45 UTC
Game def needs a lot of polish and has quite a few bugs. A fair entry non the less.
LeReveur
04. May 2016 路 19:59 UTC
Controls are a little hard to handle, can't pass through the second level because of that. ^^
Strike
06. May 2016 路 10:25 UTC
Good compo entry that just needs a bit of tuning on the controls to be really great. Good job !
Nomys_Tempar
06. May 2016 路 11:49 UTC
Pretty fair entry, need some polish but the level design is working.
yuigoto
09. May 2016 路 03:51 UTC
I could only play the WebGL version, since the Java version just opens and closes on my machine (Win10).

The audio on the WebGL version only plays on the right side for me, don't know if it's a bug or not. The soundtrack is nice, it gives some action feeling, but I think it's a tiny bit agressive.

The graphics are nice and work well, and I liked how you made mobs "locking" the hostages inside'em. :)

In gameplay, though, is my issue. Fps starts to drop on the third level and it becomes kinda unplayable. The run'n jump mechanics need some polish too, specially on jumping left/right.

But nice going! The level design is pretty challenging! With some polish here and there this might become a nice action-platformer. ;)

Congrats :)