PowerBot by Caffeinated Psychics

Gameplay + Controls
Repair stranded starships inhabited by bots gone rogue as a small rugged Repair Bot.
- Find and Repair all the Generators to fix the ship and Complete the Level
- You can defend your self with your electric arc welder
- Watch your Energy as Movement(Jump) and your Welder drains it ! Don't Run out of Power !
- Destroying Repairbots (Orange Walkers) will improve your repair speed
- Destroying Cleanerbots (Blue Roombas) will slightly charge your energy meter
- Watch out for Security Bots (Green Spinners) who will home in on you, damage will Drain your Energy
Move : WASD or Arrows
Shoot : K or Ctrl-Left
Jump : J or Space
Repair (next to generator) : L or F
Mute Music : M
Change volume : Page Up / Page Down
Screenshots



Download & Web
We'll try to upload an updated version with a way to restart the game without reloading the webpage or restarting the game executable. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Web Version Post LD Update 0.5d
Web Version Post LD Update 0.4c
Web Version Post LD Update 0.3
Changelog 0.5d
- Added Screenshake to improve player feedback
- The difficulty has been adjusted slightly again
- Added back in the 3rd level wich was originally scrapped
Credits
Dev Team : @ogma @mrmordem
Graphics Team : @nokusu @gorka
Level Design : @gorka
Sound Effects : @ogma
Music : @Drafura
We hope you have fun testing our entry :)
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/powerbot-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 246th | 3.625⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 243th | 3.45⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 662th | 2.641⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 282th | 3.7⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 282th | 3.875⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 162th | 3.641⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 379th | 2.486⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 389th | 3.282⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 56🗨️ |
### Positive:
- The game is fun to play, and the movement feels realy nice.
- I like how you need to explore the map to find the generators.
- The graphics and sound are really well implemented. They fit the game quite well.
### Negative:
- The shooting key is so weird, why not click or something more common.
Great job!!
The controls are also a bit funky. I'd recommend the arrow keys for movement (including jumps), Z to attack, and X to repair.
The pixel art was also really nice, and cohesive.
First things first, thank you all guys for the feedback, quite a nice surprise to see this many people tested out our entry, really appreciate it :)
As some troopers said in that one movie : "I'm doing my part ! " and really glad to see you guys liked the whole team's effort ^^
**Regarding the various issues :**
We'll try to iron things out controls wise (we were short on time at the upload, so the devs just put the 1st control scheme they had in mind so we don't miss the deadline)
It can always be tweaked a bit but, the "floatiness" of the jump was made as is to get the "space" feel of a low gravity environement
We always try our best to put out the most polished game during LD so your comments mean a lot really :D so keep em coming to help us improve our games !
From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the rest of the team, a real big thank you for the honest feedback
@tazumee @plepletier @ninjascribble @sebastian-m @travis-spuller @ironfroggy @ectucker1, you guys rock ! :metal:
Now time to play and rate some games, cheers !
@jaakko : Thanks, we had a 3rd level that almost made it to the LD build but unfortunately 72 hours go by way quicker than we thought ^^' we also had a more colorful sprite for the player closer to the artwork but this also didn't make it due to time constraints, anyway glad you liked our game mate :D
@tayopi : Thank you, really glad you appreciate our efforts :)
to answer about the unclear mechanics : Yep you can shoot the security bots, they just respawn really fast (at least at the moment), and you have to be near a generator to fix it with the "F" key, you don't have to be right next to it there's a little bit of a range within you can still interract though ^^
Graphically reminds me of [MegaBot](http://www.acid-play.com/download/megabot), while interaction-wise [Janitor Dan the Spaceman](http://www.groovylime.com/janitordan.htm) is closer. Them's some genuine retro freeware titles for you (so retro that you need a virtual Win XP run Janitor Dan, unfortunately).
Quite liked it, even if ultimately it is very simple. Some more power based mechanics and this would be quite something.
The overall feel is good, I don't really have too much in the way of suggestion for improving on this particular kind of game. Maybe the act of repairing the generators (holding F while standing still) was a bit tedious? But it's such a small thing.
Overall, great work! :-)
BTW - @nokusu I've seen a lot of your comments on other games. I think you're giving great feedback!
Don't feel bad about the cleaner or repair bots though, they've gone rogue and overrrun the ship :o
Anyway its always nice to see people enjoy our games, i'll hand it to you, the repair mechanic may indeed need a bit of tweaking XD (that makes it a repairception i guess ?) maybe add an animation or something and have it automated, i'll check out with the devs if we can improve this if it's not considered a "new feature" of course.
It would be nice to be able to restart the game when "Power Lost". Anyway ... great job!!!
Level design was fine, and I got into it easily. I also finished it on my second try :D I hate those flying drones :(
Good job, team!
Sorry for the late reply, Thanks to all of you for your feedback, it really helps us improve and really glad to see so many people seemd to like the game so far ^^
@toonteamj and @tero-pulkkinen :
don't really know what to say more than thank you guys for trying out the game and really cool you liked it :)
@markwolf :
I'm sorry that you had issues with the web build, don't think we can change its resolution unfortunately :/
@elede :
Thanks, always trying to outdo the presentation every LD, it's not much compared to some amazing games out there but always nice to see people like it :)
@christina-antoinette-neofotistou :
XD Thanks a lot, DOS-era games are total classics for the team, so they might have indeed influenced our game a bit :p
regarding level design, i know the devs are cooking a small update (don't know when it will be available yet) with some fixes such as the return to title problem, but i think Gorka wanted to try and add in a 3rd level if he gets the time of course ^^
Thanks glad you've enjoyed :) the sped up generator fix is supposed to happen after killing multiple repair bots (the yellow ones) if you had this under other conditions that's a glitch though.
Didn't know about the searchbar thing on the web version so good to know so we can hopefully fix it, i'll check out with the devs if they might know why this can happen, ogma is supposed to put out an update later today so maybe he can catch and squash it, we know the game is a bit easy at the moment and it is planned to tweak this, but i think ogma and mordem are gonna iron out the remaining bugs before anything is changed there.
@sinclairstrange :
Thanks man really appreciate it ^^ the controls were put during the last rush before submission so yeah they're kind of random basic default keys at the moment, hopefully in some updates they're gonna be tweaked a bit, not sure if they can be made customizable without some major changes (the devs certainly know this better than me :p) if it can that's probably what's gonna be done.
The shock gun was kind of a change we put in mid JAM to have a weapon that would fit the theme more as well as hit the smaller bots that a foward shot couldn't XD
We'll surely make this one into a full game, but not after we already finish our other post LD projects that are still cooking here and there. Hopefully there should be an update coming later today so thats that :p untill we make a more complete post LD edition :)
Sorry for the late and quite long reply ^^' But really, can't say it enough thanks for youre feedback guys have a good one :D
However, I know 72 hours is little time socongrats on creating a fun game that captures the theme perfectly.
Thanks dude :) we didn't have that much time to add in the details like the player feedback, we tried a bit of knock back in an internal update but that didn't turn out as we thought so it's not gonna change untill we find a better effect.
We added particles to the repair in the 0.3, but we plan to maybe add a bit of sparks on the claw as well to make it more obvious, then again like you said 72 hours go by so quickly so we're happy we managed to at least get something playable with more than just scoring this LD :p
@stuartmd :
Thanks ^^ as always nice to see people enjoyed the game, never heard of the game you mentioned though XD
I'm happy to see you're making changes and going forward with the game too! Eager to see what you all do with it!
Yeah no problem :) we're trying to improve the game whenever we can, there should be a 0.4 sometime around when ogma figures out how to implement some of the planned changes (so i can't really tell when since it can take some time)
We try and do this for every LD entry we can, although many of them will eventually become full games, we have to pause some's developpement to focus on others whenever we find neet ideas to expand upon. So any unupdated game we have isn't dead, it kinda serves as a base we can build upon, and LD themes inspired us some really fun IPs so far and we're gonna use them :p
again sorry for the late reply, i kind of check the site on and off to playtest some games and anwer people whenever i can ^^
(I don't know if there's a direct messaging on this site, so my apologies if this is an awkward place XD)
don't know if there's a PM system on the site :/ if you want, you've got our twitter and etc... on the team's profile page on the LD site, look on top of the entry page :)
@pavelsovushkin :
Thanks :) no worries they're rogue bots so it's only defense :p
Glad you liked it and think it's different ^^
@robotsandmuffins :
We generally like to go with simple core mechanics during LD so that we can manage to avoid any "feature creep" :p
this can always give room for expanding and improvement however, happy to see you liked it and the FX still find convincing lightnings effects are tricky to do with few pixels :D
@split82 :
Thanks man :) Retro was pretty much the goal so it's always nice when people feel the same way, it means we might have done some things right hehe XD