Tiny Crusader by nilstastic
Tiny Crusader is a my take on a Lemmings™ rougelike crossover. It's a story about survival, blood and procedurally generated levels!
Play the game in the browser
Instructions
- Use the mouse to dig tunnels
- Enjoy the particles!
- I made it to level 29, beat me!
Behind the scenes
The game was developed using Pico-8, an 8-bit fantasy console that has all the limitations that make game development really enjoyable. The most problematic part was that I wanted a dynamic desructable background (worms, lemmings) but redrawing the screen at 30 fps was out of the question due to performance reasons. I'm not sure that I solved in the most graceful way, but it works (dirty rects and memcpy).
Takeaways using Pico-8
- Using an external editor is worked well, the built in editor is nice, but for something like this you'd want to use vs code, sublime or something like that.
- Before the jam I created a small .exe that sends a ctrl+r (run) to the pico-8 window which made iterating very smooth. Would recommend!
- Adding HUGE ascii comments during the later part of the jam really helped navigating the code when things started to get messy.
- Using gitlab pages and their ci pipeline for deploying the game every now and then was great. It's comforting to know that I was only an export and a push away from release.
Also, the game was supposed to be called "Tiny Crusaders" - but I was to tired to add the final s. =)
| HTML5 (web) | https://nilstastic.gitlab.io/ld41/ |
| gitlab sourcecode | https://gitlab.com/nilstastic/ld41 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tiny-crusader |
Ratings
| Overall | 108th | 3.814⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 60th | 3.879⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 250th | 3.552⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 464th | 3.337⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 122th | 3.826⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 288th | 3.018⭐ | 85🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 156th | 3.253⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 279th | 3.156⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 83🗳️ | 62🗨️ |
Just had a nice little play of your game and with some further development, it can really become a nice little game.
I remember playing Lemmings years ago, one of my earliest video gaming memories, your game didn't exactly give me flashbacks but is a nice take on the formula. The fact that you made procedurally generated levels is quite impressive, never bugged on me either, so good job.
The visuals were great. Seems like Pico-8 just keeps making awesome looking games. I love the sound effects, they're a nice substitute for no background music (which I feel isn't even necessary for this kind of game). Sweet particles too.
I just found it a bit... easy? To me it felt like digging down most of the time. Not knowing whether sending them down to the abyss was the right thing to do also worried me (some explanation of what your goal was would have been nice). There just wasn't enough variety or challenge and unfortunately I had to quit at one point because it didn't feel like anything was happening.
You have a nice game here. Good concept, good visuals, good sound. You just need to flesh the gameplay out a bit more (soldier types?), (special levels?), just more content to keep me interested. Good Job otherwise!
You also managed to fix that insane difficulty level from when I tried it early in development. Thats really impressive as well!
This game is actually a lot of fun to play. The difficulty level is pretty good, maybe a little on the lower side actually. I could play for a really long time before dying. Some variation as you keep playing would have made a lot of difference in longer playablilty, but hey, it's 48 hours. This is a solid entry. One of your top entries even!
Love the look and feel, nice a simple and clean, but fluid feeling with the particles and smooth movement.
I found the game speed to be a bit on the high side though, which made reacting to death drops when a new level first starts rather difficult and somewhat random feeling. I feel if the game was slowed down a bit more, with a speed-up button applied so the game doesn't slog down, it'd feel a bit more fair. Obviously just a random thought, and the chaotic nature with the current speed is already pretty fun as it is.
Regardless, awesome work!
I rate your game, if I can give a game in my game, Witch's Escape.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape
If you have time, check out my entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/golden-beak-golf :)
@candlesan yes, everything was random so sometimes things did not really line up
@Alex13 Yeah i was thinking about that, but i did not really want to limit digging (since it feels kind of nice). I'm thinking (if i get around to it) of adding treasures and traps to challenge the player, that might do the trick. =)
Seeing your suggestion of adding treasures and traps is really a nice idea I think, and I'd really like to see a version including such features someday
It definitively deserve a place in my favourite tab. A fantastic time-killer and a solid LD entry.
Cheers!
I think it's weird to see lost crusaders just randomly hovering in mid-air when you start a new level, and I can see from the reviews that I'm not the only one it confused. Dunno how easy it would be to change the engine so that they're always on or under the ground. Kind of a nitpick, though. Overall, a very good entry!
I think crusaders are too fast, so it's not so funny to dig and to see them falling so easily. Could be fun with some trap somewhere ! Nice job by the way.
Sometimes the levels are hard because the first path of the characters lead them to the death :/
I tried to beat your record but I did 26.
But I played it a few time, and the levels never changes. Too bad they're not actually procedurally generated ingame.
Some criticisms:
- the crusader to rescue for an extra life is a bit unclear in-game; I though it was just a graphics bug until I referred back to the text
- using procedural levels is cool and probably let you include a lot more content than possible if hand-authoring them, but it also means that the game felt unbalanced. I found that the levels were all way too easy, except for the occasional one which feels way too hard and starts off immediately funneling your guys into a pit
- you should probably hide the native cursor with a bit of extra CSS so it doesn't double up on the in-game cursor
- there seems to be a bug where there's a second in-game cursor baked into the map
Overall, it's a neat idea. I think it needs a bit more complexity in the game design for it to be compelling, but as-is it's a solid prototype!
Some way to influence that factor to be inreasing with every level or other threatening element would add an interesting develop of the crusade.
I missed some style matching music.
Excellent work!
I liked the digging mechanic a lot. Seemingly simple game but so fun. I had so much fun playing this. Took me a few tries to understand they fall and SQUISH if u're not careful :D nice and pleasant are and very old school arcady sounds which i liked!
Really beautiful yet simple mechanism. Everything works well together: music, graphics and sound effects, perfect for pico8!
I enjoyed it and memories of the lemmings that your game make remind are so fun!
Thanks and cheers for this entry!
Check out our entry here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/educational-beat-em-up-punches-delivered-with-math
Super fun game, I got a bad memory access on my first try though, and sfx would be awesome.
I think this is a cool game that deserves a post jam version :P
Congrats!
The only thing is that levels seems to be pretty much alike, so starting from levels 7-8 it is difficult to distinguish the growth of challenge form level to level