The Spark by Le Don
The Spark is a stealth game made by one person in Game Maker 2. Carry your spark with you and avoid getting shot!
Use W, A, S, D to move and E to interact. Pick up your spark or let it drop. You can charge your spark at power stations and you can also hide under tables!
The game is over when you got shot or your spark is out of energy. You can only progress when you carry your spark with you.
With P you can also activate a little help for color blindness - or at least I hope it helps. The colors of the enemies show their alarm state and I figured, the colors might be too hard to read, so the enemies just tell their state via textbox.
Also you can press alt + enter for fullscreen, which is just an upscale and might not look very well.
The game was solely made by me, so the art isn't amazing and there's also no music.
Other known problems: - Laser beams might have a weird collision and sometimes miss the player. - I forgot to remove a debugging tool. You see, there's a certain button that creates a ping, attracting every guard in the room and playing a small soundbite from a very well known game. That was not intented to be in the final version. No, I don't tell you which button it is :). - The last room is suppose to show a little text like "Congratulations! You beat the game!" and so on. So at the current state the game just ends without much fanfare, while it's supposed to look like this:
| Youtube | https://le-don.itch.io/the-spark |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-spark |
Ratings
| Overall | 1322th | 3.462⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 781th | 3.539⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1814th | 2.974⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1942th | 3.269⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1733th | 3.218⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1775th | 2.306⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1556th | 3.194⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 53🗨️ |
2. The player is too slow
3. For some reason level 6 is much harder than the other levels
It was pretty fun tbh
@pilarius Dude, I know and I will come to it when I have time :).
Biggest feedback: my friend and I would just let ourselves die to get 75 spark to start a level with, making the spark lifespan more of just a 75/100 timer than a mechanic where we needed to recharge it to keep going. Starting the spark amount on respawn as a lower number (like 35 or 50) would have better incentivized charging the spark to a higher value on the prior level in prep for the next.
Definite big plus though, having a colourblind mode. Huge kudos for that, thank you :)
It has some problems but nothing that you couldn't have solved if you had more time.
I had a really good time completing it, great entry!
@jesterseraph yea, I agree with your comment and I'm not sure if 75 is the right min value when the player restarts the level. I don't want to make it too hard, as there a lot of LD games to play, but making it too easy also hurts the recharging mechanic. I think about adding harder version with a lower number.
Also I'm glad to hear the colourbling mode might be helpful :).
@fer9001 yes, MGS was definitly an inspiration for this game.
@rongefilet Oh yes, I'm going back and forth about adding vision coins, but I think it doesn't fit with the NES-aesthetic I'm going for. I hope the yellow and orange states helps to give a little safety net.
It was hard to navigate into corridors.
Generally a pretty neat one!
@phantomeniasll ... the lack of abilities, as the player has no real abilities. And I think it is this one, which leads to the game being...
@halflemonstudios ... not that innovative (but hopefully still fun :>). I think adding an additional twist to carrying the spark would also help to this.
I was thinking about having the spark creating a little ping when carried - the enemies would hear this ping, adding a little risk to it and also encourage to put the spark down, which drains the energy faster. But I scrapped it because of the time constraint.
He, love how I could combine your comments :).
charging the spark seems to be useless, unless you're planning on stopping and eating a sandwich or something, i don't think this detracts from the experience at all though
i think the enemy ai is a little funky, them running to exactly where you are once you've been noticed enough gives you no chance of cool-ly dodging them. it'd be sweet to hide under a table while an enemy is coming to my position, but at the moment they just stand infront of the table until you come out.
i also found that sometimes they were able to spot me from weird angles, and could perhaps see me from too far away? getting blasted from off-screen often feels a little cheap ;)
another quick note- i thought the last few stages become much more fun, with the enemies circling around smaller areas and taking relatively clear paths.
:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iekGOi3IPcE
Oh and that sound effect is a little familiar eh? 🐍
@sugarsores Yea, I think I mentioned it in the description, but that one is part of my debugging tool and wasn't meant to be in the game, but I forgot to remove it. I did remove it in the 1.1 version.
@virtuaworlds Ha, yea, I thought about using it as a ability in the game, but hadn't enough time to do it properly. It could work really well with a cooldown (or once per level charge) and as a code "Orange" distraction (meaning the guards will check out the pinged location, but will be alarmed and search the map afterwards, as opposite to a ceode "Yellow", when guards just check a distraction and go back to their route).
Really solid overall!
thanks for sharing