LudumData

Pipe Dream by JavaSaurus

[raw]
made by JavaSaurus for LD 42 (JAM)

wnkv+L.png

Pipe Dream

They year is 2054. A giant corporation has discovered to mass produce crude oil, leading to giant cities being covered in transporting pipes and heavy industrial instalations. These are traditionally maintained by autonomous service units that automatically detect leaks, protecting the city from a black, all-engulfing flood. We find A.P.E.R (Automatic Pipe Emergency Repair), on his daily routine when he receives a call of a high pressure, main oil pipe leak near the trash processing facility... Could this really be the doing of a rogue robot? There is nowhere to escape, with increasing sections being filled to the brim with the black sludge. Try to stay ahead, but be aware that you are running out of space...

Please aid A.P.E.R in discovering the source of this problem, as the oil starts to slowly flood the entire city !

Oil.Gif

Standard platformer controls apply : NOTE : LEFT CONTROL to fire on pc!

| Name | Description | Looks | | ------:| -----------:| | A.P.E.R. | This is your friendly neighbourhood plumber bot. | MainChar.gif | | Juke box | This little musical menace is known to drop hearts to heal your soul ! | Jukebox.gif | | Goldifingers | This former oil town sherif enforcer bot has not lost his tricks just yet ! |ShootyGuy.gif | | Batbot | In these days, even baseball sparring was automated. Careful ! This one can easily strike your cogs out ! | SwingGuy.gif | | Trash n Bash | This cube has lose wiring... His trash missiles will rip your iron skin straight off ! | Compactor.gif | | Mysterious Robot | A mysterious robot awaits at the end of the tower. Storing oil in barrels, it is a mystery what this behemoth is up to... | ???? |

Bug fixes

  • The initial version of the procedural generation mirrored rooms, causing the doors to be off center which allowed for unsolvable combinations. This has been fixed

  • The restarting function wrongly reset the entire scene, causing duplicate audio, highscores to be frozen and reset the entire progress to reach the end boss. This has been fixed (the player has unlimited restart tries and can submit highscores in between)

  • The physics on the controller were wrongly left in a debug mode. They have been changed to remove the "floaty" controls and should now be a lot more snappy. They also caused the colliders on the oil and spikes to sometimes instantly kill players, which was not the intention.

UPDATE

  • Javasaurus has made a new build with optional ZEN mode. Note that this is mainly to demonstrate the concept to people that already have played the entry, please consider rating the non-zen mode.

  • The oil is now transparent in the new version

Credits

~ Pixel art by LurkinMcClerkin

~ UI and lead programming by JavaSaurus

~ Assisting programming by James Leib

~ Audio by BenJoe72

Windows https://lurkinmcclerkin.itch.io/pipe-dream
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pipe-dream

Ratings

Overall 919th 3.088⭐ 42🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1061th 2.714⭐ 44🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1106th 2.561⭐ 43🧑‍⚖️
Theme 753th 3.31⭐ 44🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 185th 4.091⭐ 46🧑‍⚖️
Audio 331th 3.359⭐ 41🧑‍⚖️
Humor 620th 2.542⭐ 38🧑‍⚖️
Mood 642th 3.073⭐ 43🧑‍⚖️
Given 48🗳️ 15🗨️

Feedback

JCMonkey
14. Aug 2018 · 21:03 UTC
i tried to play the game a few times and the procgen wouldnt let me finish, i always came up with end points and got killed. the controls are floaty, but not that bad, the only bad part of the controls is the wall jumping sometimes is buggy. the art work is really good, i wish the enemys had more intellegence with them, like moving back and forth, and the baseball bat guy was just a walk past, and i tried jumping behind him to kill it, but i couldnt, the only killable guy was the gun shooter. so with some fixes to the game this could be a pretty neat game.
megamasterx
15. Aug 2018 · 00:23 UTC
The transition to the second level was extremely buggy. I think that the movement felt fantastic, especially the wall jumping. I'm a bit biased, but the graphics are absolutely phenomenal. Every animation is impactful and the sounds compliment them quite well. There are a lot of things that can be done to polish this, and I think this shows signs of a title that was a bit rushed in a few points. Perhaps budgeting time a bit better and perhaps cutting down on the featureset (at least for a jam) would help polish this out and ensure future entries get to completion with a quality that your team can hit. All things considered - a very solid entry.
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 07:58 UTC
@jcmonkey Thank you for the important feedback ! The enemies were designed to be stationary at first, mostly due to time constraints (we had quite some issues during the development phase and the fact that we live in completely different time zones did not help). In the end we decided a full rewrite of the enemy ai system. However, there is the boss fight! (I am not sure if anyone made it that far yet, maybe I should add as "test boss" button later on ! The procedural generation you discussed indeed broke when I tried flipping rooms to increase the variability, that seemed like a good idea at first though ;) Would you mind playing it again in the current version ?

@megamasterx Hey ! Thank you for the feedback for sure. There are no controls in the transition to the next level, the movement is automatic. I left this in in case we would have had time for more advanced generation of rooms and dungeons, which would need some time in the background. I am not sure if that is what you meant, if not could you elaborate please? On the time budgeting comment, you are absolutely right. We already cut a lot of features on day 2 and in the end I wounded up rewriting most of the game due to collision problems induced by the "new" character controller... For all of us this was a first team-jam, with members spanning from the US to Eastern Europe and I have to say, time zones make or break everything (I for one was the team member that was most central AND stupid enough to work till 4 am on 3 days just to be able to communicate with all of the team members)... In the end, it was a rich experience in the end !

Thank you for playing !!!
TheDouche
15. Aug 2018 · 08:07 UTC
I think the game is to hard at the start, I love the art, it so cool!
But my over all experience is not that good sorry!
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 08:23 UTC
@thedouche Thank you for playing nonetheless, how would you suggest changing the game to fit your needs at the start, if I may ask ? In a jam there are decisions to be made, in order to deal with the limited amount of time to generate a lot of content, we decided to make the game a tad harder, stretching its replayability. It is perhaps a shame the boss can not be reached easily. I wonder if the LD rules allow for a "button" on the menu screen to "fight the boss" instantly. In a way it is not really adding content, since it is already there !
YamiFive
15. Aug 2018 · 09:19 UTC
Really nice, but why platforms are made of ice?
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 09:27 UTC
Do you mean physics wise or graphics wise ? If the latter, I noticed problems with Unity's lighting. It looks completely different in the editor unfortunately... But thank you for playing !
HAUO
15. Aug 2018 · 09:27 UTC
Really like the style of the game, the SteamPunk theme really shines with the awesome art and some fitting sound effects, also with a surprising amount of enemy types! However, gameplay wise it was not my cup of tea, and could not get very far before I was to frustrated to continue.

Found the controls way to floaty, and felt very punishing as it felt as I was sliding and hitting ceiling/edges made me miss jumps all the time. Its worth nothing that I'm that good at platformers to begin with, but I have enjoyed games like Super Meat Boy before. I feel the controls must feel tight at all times if the focus is precision platforming where one mistake can mean instant death, something that's missing here.

Also, while the theme is well represented with the rising oil (a classic!), I cant help but feel its a bit of a boring way to do it. Remove the Oil and you still got a rather solid platformer (you even have spikes as environmental hazards). Would have liked to see it represented in another way that made it more of a integral part of the gameplay, maybe something the player could directly control? Have the procedural level be effected by it? Have the player pick up parts that attaches to a limited amount of slots on the robot? Just some random thoughts.

In the end a game with great potential! Great work.
James Leib
15. Aug 2018 · 10:42 UTC
@hauo Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the use of the theme wasn't the most creative. We tried to improve this with the boss (which attempts to trap the player into the oil).
CNB
15. Aug 2018 · 11:17 UTC
Fun game. The animations and art were solid and cohesive. Found the controls quite difficult; just needs a little tweek to provide the player with a bit more precision in the movement. All in all enjoyed it!
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 11:57 UTC
@HAUO The oil is actually limiting the player movement options. The intention was to incorporate this in puzzle mechanics, but eventually was unfortunatly cut short (mostly due to code design conflicts).

@HAUO & @CNB As every comment was on the controls, I took another look at the build and noticed the debug values were in the controller settings (triggering the wrong jump animation was also due to this it seems). This isn't really adding a feature or anything, so I decided to change them to the intended ones (in a new uploaded build) for all that matters. I'm sorry the first experience was ruined for you this way, but perhaps you can give it another shot !

Thanks for the feedback !
chaitae
15. Aug 2018 · 12:37 UTC
Controls were a bit floaty, and would like something other than mouse button to attack. I was really surprised when there were other levels. Great job guys!
Sublustris
15. Aug 2018 · 12:40 UTC
Nice gfx, reminds me "Mashinarium", cool game at all!
radow
15. Aug 2018 · 13:04 UTC
Really like the Graphics and overall feel of the game. Gameplay is a tad repetative, given that there are only so many screens, but with a few more it would be a really solid platformer.
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 13:11 UTC
@chaitae Thank you. There actually is left control to fire as well.

@sublustris thank you for playing !

@radow @chaitae In the spirit of LD we can't add more rooms to the build to vote on (not allowed to add content post LD), despite it being really easy to add rooms. However... if this is allowed we can add rooms and upload a second build for people that casually want to play ! :)
radow
15. Aug 2018 · 13:14 UTC
If you do a postjamversion, keep the jamversion as is and lable both accordingly, so that people will rate your jamversion it's fine =)
Alexey Tarabrin
15. Aug 2018 · 14:26 UTC
I like this oil, but generation works wrong sometimes =c
Swini
15. Aug 2018 · 14:29 UTC
I love the sprite animations so moch. The enemies are so beautiful:) Keep it going!!!
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 14:40 UTC
@alexey-tarabrin could you elaborate on that? Because that should have been fixed before. What exactly happens ?

@Swini thank you ! The artwork was done by LurkinMcClerkin though, the oil is done through programming :)

Thank you for playing !
AGsilverAG
15. Aug 2018 · 16:13 UTC
Very good art, and I like the feel of the player controller for the most part, but it definitely suffers a lot from a lack of room variety. Also, the best strategy for all the enemies seems to be just to run past them (the only strategy for batbot?) and the oil was never really much of a threat. I made it to the final boss but accidentally jumped out the map before I could figure out what to do. Anyway take or leave the suggestions, the art, the oil effect, and the seed based level generation is a feet for a weekend anyway and you should be proud!
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 16:48 UTC
@agsilverag Thank you for the suggestions. I will try to upload a second final version with more rooms, separately from the actual LD entry though!
SgtWeirdo
15. Aug 2018 · 17:09 UTC
Nice setting, the art is really good. The controls are a little floaty which I was able to manage, not too much of a problem. My only issue was the limited amount of rooms, I played the same room literally 8 times within the first 3 worlds xD. It is impressive that you guys got a seed system up though! Overall good job! :ok_hand:
🎤 JavaSaurus
15. Aug 2018 · 21:55 UTC
@sgtweirdo The limited amount of rooms is indeed an issue, mainly linked to the lack of time. I had a maze generation algorithm but it was not completed at the time of submission so... rules are rules right :) Either way, feel free to play the Zen mode !
Crave
16. Aug 2018 · 02:55 UTC
Pretty good animation! Your gif dump made me want to play it
posho
16. Aug 2018 · 03:21 UTC
Great job!

I liked how the game focuses on the jam's theme and the progression of the game. The controls are a bit weird but the art and sound are unbelievably good. I can't believe you guys had time to include a seed system and an online leaderboard. You madmen.

Here's a lil' fan art:

![Animate_2018-08-15_22-17-18.png](///raw/fc4/b1/z/19f03.png)
aug
16. Aug 2018 · 04:42 UTC
I love your concept and artistic execution! I think that the game is a bit lacking in terms of mechanics and how they were implemented (slippery controls although that's been mentioned a bunch, there's not really much of a difficulty or learning curve, and the next level hitbox at the top being too wide, leading to me teleporting to the next level by bashing into the ceilings), but I think that's more of a side effect of the time constraints than anything judging by your bug fixes! Incredible work on the art, music, and overall vision of the game! I'll definitely be looking out for updates. Expanding on what you have could make a real gem of a game.
LurkinMcClerkin
16. Aug 2018 · 06:24 UTC
@posho Love the fanart! Thanks!
posho
16. Aug 2018 · 06:29 UTC
@lurkinmcclerkin Thanks a lot! :smile:

Hey, by the way. Can you please tell me how you made the table with the name, description and looks of your enemies that is on the top of this page? I don’t see how on the Markdown guide and would love to have something similar for my game’s page.
James Leib
16. Aug 2018 · 07:08 UTC
Remove slashes and replace link with a file and then this is the formatting.

/| Name | Description | Looks |

/| ------:| -----------:|

/| **A.P.E.R.** | This is your friendly neighbourhood plumber bot. | (Link To Gif) |

/| **Juke box** | This little musical menace is known to drop hearts to heal your soul ! | (Link To Gif) |


@posho

I love the fan art as well!
diesdas
16. Aug 2018 · 20:09 UTC
Great art! The controls where a bit wonky for a platformer, but it was still fun to play and really challenging. My highscore after several tries was around 20.000! At one point I had to dive into the black goo, which was hard without transparency.
🎤 JavaSaurus
17. Aug 2018 · 11:10 UTC
@diesdas I have made the oil transparent in the ZEN version. Thank you for the tip ! :)
digital bacon
17. Aug 2018 · 12:58 UTC
Procgen seemed to always give me no way out but the game otherwise is fun. I loved the graphics, and the music was pleasant to listen to while playing. Good effort.
Zicboy
18. Aug 2018 · 08:33 UTC
Awesome game! I enjoy the art and mood of it. Keep up the good work!
🎤 JavaSaurus
19. Aug 2018 · 11:33 UTC
@digital-bacon @zicboy thanks for the reviews ! :)
Stegobubbles
20. Aug 2018 · 07:54 UTC
I love platformers :-) Well done, the game cool!
Cassio Eduardo
20. Aug 2018 · 15:52 UTC
I really like the SteamPunk style and the overall presentation is pretty good (specially graphics). I also enjoyed the enemy variety of types and patterns. On the other hand, the floaty controls were a bit of a letdown because it made the game seem less precise and less responsive. As for improvements, I think there should be powerups for the player to pickup (permanent and/or timed) to add bit more variety to the gameplay.

Good job.
James Leib
21. Aug 2018 · 01:19 UTC
Thanks for the review @cassio-eduardo @stegobubbles

Powerups are a good idea. We'll definitely keep it in mind.
Karai17
22. Aug 2018 · 06:08 UTC
A decent entry but I found the game a bit confusing where I had to play the same levels twice in a row each time. Wall jumping is also a bit buggy.
bob152
28. Aug 2018 · 12:06 UTC
The graphics and controls of this game were really good - the art really blew me away, although the game was a bit buggy. I sometimes half went through walls and the oil came up almost instantly during the boss fight, and a few more levels would have been nice. It was quite a fun game overall through!
ursagames
30. Aug 2018 · 16:09 UTC
Gorgeous platformer! Really dug the setting and art direction. Procedural generation is really hard to tune in the span of a game jam, so props on what you accomplished! Thanks for sharing your game with my stream awhile back. Your game was played around 2:00 into this vod: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/297885983
mrjoshuamclean
04. Sep 2018 · 13:21 UTC
Quite a few bugs made it difficult to see what you were going for here, and for the most part it was just jumping right up through all the levels. Lots of them were repeats as well. Seems a bit over-scoped for the jam (more people isn't always going to allow a bigger project) but there's definite creativity in here.

Here's a video of my play and feedback: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/303342347