Space Taters by Jan
This is my 3rd published game for the Ludum Dare Game Jam and 2nd time that I've worked with a team. Space Taters was made by Jan, Ina & Lin.
We've had a lot of fun participating. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and a lot of the things we had in mind had to be abandoned (the usual with LD, heh). The game is playable, but not very polished. It is possible to win the game.
Initially, we wanted to make a Dungeon Crawler, but it somehow ended up as an Adventure game.
The game comes as a Java JAR file. So, as long as you got Java setup on your system, it should run.
Controls - WASD or Arrow Keys to Walk - Spacebar to Interact (need to stand on top of things) - Ctrl to Shoot the Space Shotgun (needs to be collected first) - Shift (hold) to sprint - Q and E to change active inventory item - 1 through 6 to directly select active item - X to drop active item - Mouse click for Computer Terminals and Dialogs
It is possible to drop essential items; there is no way to get them back once dropped. Which means you can get stuck.
Story
You are part of the crew of a prison transport space ship. After you wake up from a nap all of the crew is gone. You start on an adventure to find out what happened.
The engines are stuck in overdrive and the ship is heading for the edge of the universe. Soon it will run out of Space if you don't act fast to save everyone.
One of your bad habits along your journey is to take (steal) all kinds of items. Which is much to the dismay of your fellow crew members. However, your inventory is rather limited and you're running out of space fast.
If all of that wasn't enough there are also cute space animals called 'Taters'. They tend to multiply rather quickly and fill entire rooms. Which is adding to the whole space problem.
Caveats - there is no main menu - there are no sounds - the collision detection only works for walls, you can walk over everything else - it is possible to die in various ways, if that happens you have to close the game and restart it - there is no way to kill the Taters, they just keep multiplying while in view - if the number of Taters reaches 400 then the game is lost; this acts as a time limit - the Aliens (big eye & worm) don't cause any damage, but they can be killed, however the aiming is glitchy
| Windows | https://drive.google.com/open?id=1J7dKtWqMxqOpSXFPgPLRAwa_l6PIW7UK |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/space-taters |
Ratings
| Overall | 687th | 3.295⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 927th | 2.882⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 954th | 2.821⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 726th | 3.338⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 654th | 3.363⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 290th | 3.197⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 682th | 3.039⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 55🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
Good to see a fellow Java Jammer!
Graphics and animations looks great, the goal and the story of the game are bit unclear ingame. There's quite a bit of content for a game made in a jam, which is impressive! It would certainly a great game with a bit more polishing.
The only slightly annoying thing is that there is no reason to ever not use the sprint button, so the normal, slow walking speed was redundant.
But our game is better)))
Question: what tools did you use to make this in Java? (like for the graphics or anything else)
@belowparallel-ian the game was written with Eclipse as IDE. Graphic files were drawn with MS Paint and GIMP. No pre-made game engine was used, I just started with a blank new project and went from there. I used some code snippets from my last Ludum Dare entry for the core game loop and graphics drawing logic. We skipped on the sounds part as we ran out of time, otherwise we probably would have used sfxr as well as recording our own sounds and editing them with Audacity.
Good luck, Don't forget to take a look at ours if you don't mind and see what it's like when we just focused on graphics in this game jam!
Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spacelab-42a