Last Key of Robotica 3 by elitegoliath

made by elitegoliath for LD 43 (JAM)

TO WIN:

Fill your Transcode bar to upload your consciousness off-world.
Enemies have a chance to glitch out and become your ally. They help you transcode your consciousness. Without them, you'll never make it!
If you must, sacrifice them to assimilate (gain health) or to self-destruct, clearing wreckage blocking the field along with your foes. Be careful though, detonations that powerful can destroy potential allies!

Controls:

WASD style movement. Arrow keys work too.
Q or Middle-mouse-button: (HEAL) Sacrifices a minion to heal you by assimilating with you.
Right-Click: (SELF-DESTRUCT) Sends a minion to mouse location to detonate. This kills all enemies and clears pre-existing debris.

Meet Paladin, the last surviving human brain on Terra. Your mission has been compromised and the forces of the Veil are converging on your position. In a last ditch effort to escape with the vital information you have secured, you are attempting to uploading your consciousness off world. However, the transcoding process is lengthy with your calculations alone.

Fortunately, you have discovered a flaw in the coding of a small number of enemy bots, allowing you to wrest control and focus their computation power on your transcoder. Be careful though, for your enemies are overwhelming and some of these Buddy Bots may need to be sacrificed to repair your exosuit or to rain fire on your enemies. Can you hold off long enough to complete the upload, or will humanity lose their last glimmer of hope?

Sacrifices must be made!

This is elitegoliath's 4th with Drekler's 4th jam together, EquisStenchman 3rd jam, and Squiglypig's first. It was a wild ride with lots of excitement, frustration, and caffeine. Overall, it went pretty smoothly for our second game in Unity and it was much more ambitious than the last. We learned a ton about Unity, C#, scope creep, and teamwork. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback and seeing if you can blast your way to victory!

Patches

Dec. 6

Fixed issue where game wouldn't start.
Added MAC build.

Dec. 7

Throttled graphics so the game was less prone to crashing.
Fixed AI breaking sometimes at random.
Fixed some issues with massive overhead when bots deploy from APCs.
Fixed broken spawn rates of enemies.
Fixed broken sound files.
Fixed broken death condition.
Lowered music volume so SFX could be heard.
Fixed issue with colliders on obstacles not working on lasers properly.
Added LINUX build.

Dec. 8

More performance enhancements by replacing some of the "invoke" methods with coroutines.
Balanced spawn rates.
Added custom cursor to make it easier to see.
Added menu allowing player to restart or exit the game at will (use esc).
Improved the "Detonate Companion" feature to make it more useful.
Added more descriptive instructions in the "Main Menu."
Added story elements to credit scene.
Made depleted "Power Core" health indicators to make them easier to notice.

Windows	https://arsenallagspike.itch.io/last-key-of-robotica-3
HTML5 (web)	https://arsenallagspike.itch.io/last-key-of-robitica-3-html5
Source code	https://github.com/elitegoliath/ld43-yank-train
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/last-key-of-robotica-3

Ratings

Overall	814^th	3.054⭐	30🧑‍⚖️
Fun	755^th	2.946⭐	30🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	998^th	2.339⭐	30🧑‍⚖️
Theme	919^th	2.696⭐	30🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	741^th	3.054⭐	30🧑‍⚖️
Audio	592^th	2.66⭐	27🧑‍⚖️
Mood	882^th	2.704⭐	29🧑‍⚖️
Given		25🗳️	32🗨️

Feedback

matevt

06. Dec 2018 · 11:22 UTC

I couldn't start the game. Neither the Start or the Exit button work for me. Please reply after you release a fix that. Liked the menu art and the sound, looks promising.

TalesOfPixelia

06. Dec 2018 · 11:30 UTC

Nothing appends on start or Exit ! :( Notify when fixed

🎤 elitegoliath

06. Dec 2018 · 22:14 UTC

@matevt @talesofpixelia Thanks for your patience guys. My burnt-brain forgot to add functions to the main menu buttons when they were made pretty by @drekler.

matevt

07. Dec 2018 · 00:27 UTC

As I expected, I loved the sounds and art. Had a great time blasting those bots!

nathanhoad

08. Dec 2018 · 23:03 UTC

Wow that was intense. Good Job :)

szabe

08. Dec 2018 · 23:10 UTC

I am not sure I understood the mechanics fully, but I did manage to get up to Wave 7. This sacrifice mechanic is quite unreliable and not very accurate, since it didn't seem like my droids were doing much at all. Shooting did feel nice, and the game feel was cool!

Drekler

08. Dec 2018 · 23:23 UTC

@nathanhoad Thanks!

@szabe Thanks for the feedback! There was an updated Main Menu with some UI indicators about the mechanics. It looks like it didn't make it into the latest build. I will be sure to get that info block out for future testers. We will also look into the sacrifice mechanic issue.

zgragselus

08. Dec 2018 · 23:38 UTC

I did manage to get to Wave 8 or so, the shooting was nice, and it was quite catchy once I understood that killing the ones with green light will turn them to my side. Destroying the vehicle is hard though!

A bit more contrast that you can't walk on the water would be good (I got stuck near it few times, and it often costs you either few lives or whole game).

Anyways, good job!

IceGold

08. Dec 2018 · 23:51 UTC

Cool concept. there's definitely room to keep expanding this and fleshing out a whole story with the world you made, and the mechanics were fun to get used to. The fights didn't feel too repetitive because of the health vs damage choice you were constantly presented with, but they did get a little easy once you had more than 2-3 bots helping out.
I kind of wished there was a second weapon or an alt fire mode, to break up the pacing of the fights even further, so if you do want to keep working on this that'll be cool to see.
Great job! Hopefully I'll see more of you next jam. Cheers!

PowerAnze

09. Dec 2018 · 09:54 UTC

Heya, just played and won, yay. I think there is a danger that you get stuck on one side of the map, because the of the vehicles blocking you. I could still squeeze through them, but they definetively made maneuvering difficult. I think the theme is quite weak. The buddy bots are not sparse enough that it really hurts you to sacrifice them. I very quickly gathered six of them and could just heal myself whenever I wanted.

🎤 elitegoliath

09. Dec 2018 · 18:18 UTC

@poweranze Thank you for the feedback! The bots can be detonated to clear debris to make it easier to move. And I think the spawn rate of them is too high as well.

Drekler

10. Dec 2018 · 00:02 UTC

@icegold Thanks for the feedback! We are definitely interested in expanding this game after the jam. An alt fire or additional weapon would keep things interesting! We wanted to include a melee attack, but ended up having to cut it to tie up some loose ends.

masterkrepta

10. Dec 2018 · 00:44 UTC

Those tanks are crazy. I loved the way your implemented the sacrifice mechanic. Watching the robots charge to their death was satisfying.

WiredOverload

10. Dec 2018 · 03:04 UTC

Ironically the way to win seems to be to sacrifice maybe one or two allies maximum. Overall pretty fun game although I did wish your allies had some kind of health indicator as they get hit as well.

Icehottet

10. Dec 2018 · 13:42 UTC

I like the game although I kept getting stuck on sharp corners. I didnt thing the WASD control and mouse would work when I first moved around but it becomes second nature quickly. Good Job.

Drekler

11. Dec 2018 · 01:08 UTC

@wiredoverload Thanks for the suggestion! We will definitely add some allied health indicators in the future!

@icehottet Thanks for the feedback. I thought that might turn into an issue but didn't have time to restructure the tile collision maps before the deadline. I'm glad to hear that the controls felt natural.

Mordokay

11. Dec 2018 · 02:48 UTC

Super hard at first. I thought the tanks were super overpowered but after getting myself into a corner and making 4 robots, I didn't sacrifice any of them and 4 became 5 and then 6 ... for me the trick was getting the critical amount of robots (I would say 6) and when they surround you you can pretty much take your hands of the keyboard and managed to win the game on Wave 7.

Overall a very nice game with lots of bullets flying around and constant running away from the tanks and hiding behind rocks. Great job!

pcmaster

11. Dec 2018 · 11:54 UTC

...sorry, wrong comment...

Biebras

14. Dec 2018 · 17:06 UTC

nice game, but first it was too difficult to understand it and the sacrificing was bad, cause it not worth it...

mccarlp

14. Dec 2018 · 17:45 UTC

I liked it overall, but the movement speed seemed a bit slow and the blocks/walls on the play field didn't stand out initially. I was getting confused why I couldn't move because I was stuck on a block I didn't notice.

Drekler

22. Dec 2018 · 14:30 UTC

@mccarlp Thanks for the feedback! We will make sure in future iterations that we provide more contrast to the obstacles.

kruemelkeksfan

24. Dec 2018 · 02:55 UTC

Well thought out top-down shooter. The mechanics are simple and still manage to get you a high fun rating. Your UI looks really pretty, too.

On the other hand enemies (both tanks and robots) feel a bit bullet-spongy imo, so maybe it would make sense to reduce their HP and instead spawn more of them. If I saw this correctly a single suicide bomber was not enough to kill a tank and holding left mouse for seconds on the same target isn't too exiting. Maybe an overheating mechanic would also increase the depth of the gameplay.

But still, bullet sponges or not, nuking people with minions looked awesome :)