Kubble by MemoryLeek
This is a "simultaneous" turn based game where you and the AI move all at once as soon as you press a key. Note that you need to release the key between each turn.
You start out as a cube, your objective is to reach the flag on each level with one cube without being killed by worms. To do this you have a few different abilities, these are triggered by standing on special (colored) ground. You can clone your cubes so that you may control multiple cubes at once (and sacrifice them if necessary).
The cloning pads are located at certain places in the maps, these are connected to an output pad by a wire along the wall. The nearby arrows indicate source (up) and destination (down). Note that your enemies can clone themselves as well.
The different abilities are:
- Green makes you grow to three times your original size, you can now safely roll over and kill worms without dying.
- Orange will attach a bomb to the cube that will detonate after 5 turns and kill everything in range.
- Blue will freeze the cube in place for 4 turns, all your other non-frozen cubes will still move normally.
- Red will remove any ability you currently have.
- Brown does nothing, it does not give nor take anything, it's just ground.
Keyboard controls, two buttons:
A - All your cubes roll left
D - All your cubes roll right
There's five levels in the game, I wish we had time for more but it's pretty tricky to make good levels for this. After you finish all 5 maps the game will loop at the last one, there's no score or victory screen.
The game is fixed at 1280x720 so we didn't have to bother with scaling making the pixel art look bad. I hope this works for all of you.
The Windows version comes with all the .dll-files you should need.
The Linux build however requires that you have SFML 2.3 installed on your system, as well as fairly recent versions of some other common libs (it was built on Arch Linux), if you can't run it for whatever reason, please tell us in the comments and we'll make a new build on an older Debian or something and bundle the .so-files.
It's licensed under GPLv2 so feel free to check out the source on GitHub.
You start out as a cube, your objective is to reach the flag on each level with one cube without being killed by worms. To do this you have a few different abilities, these are triggered by standing on special (colored) ground. You can clone your cubes so that you may control multiple cubes at once (and sacrifice them if necessary).
The cloning pads are located at certain places in the maps, these are connected to an output pad by a wire along the wall. The nearby arrows indicate source (up) and destination (down). Note that your enemies can clone themselves as well.
The different abilities are:
- Green makes you grow to three times your original size, you can now safely roll over and kill worms without dying.
- Orange will attach a bomb to the cube that will detonate after 5 turns and kill everything in range.
- Blue will freeze the cube in place for 4 turns, all your other non-frozen cubes will still move normally.
- Red will remove any ability you currently have.
- Brown does nothing, it does not give nor take anything, it's just ground.
Keyboard controls, two buttons:
A - All your cubes roll left
D - All your cubes roll right
There's five levels in the game, I wish we had time for more but it's pretty tricky to make good levels for this. After you finish all 5 maps the game will loop at the last one, there's no score or victory screen.
The game is fixed at 1280x720 so we didn't have to bother with scaling making the pixel art look bad. I hope this works for all of you.
The Windows version comes with all the .dll-files you should need.
The Linux build however requires that you have SFML 2.3 installed on your system, as well as fairly recent versions of some other common libs (it was built on Arch Linux), if you can't run it for whatever reason, please tell us in the comments and we'll make a new build on an older Debian or something and bundle the .so-files.
It's licensed under GPLv2 so feel free to check out the source on GitHub.
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.29 | 548 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.13 | 457 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.07 | 587 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.35 | 566 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.35 | 672 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.28 | 415 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.10 | 614 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.66 | 528 |
[etsvigun@Jotunheim kubble]$ uname -a
Linux Jotunheim 3.18.24-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Nov 3 21:34:29 UTC 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[etsvigun@Jotunheim kubble]$ pacman -Q sfml
sfml 2.3.2-2
[etsvigun@Jotunheim kubble]$ ./kubble
*** Error in `./kubble': free(): invalid pointer: 0x00000000013a6fb8 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x72055)[0x7fb94c33e055]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x779a6)[0x7fb94c3439a6]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x7818e)[0x7fb94c34418e]
./kubble[0x4269d5]
./kubble[0x4069ea]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf0)[0x7fb94c2ec610]
./kubble[0x406be9]
./kubble: error while loading shared libraries: libsfml-audio.so.2.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I believe your problem with the "clumsy controls" is due to the round not being over. The hourglass at the top of the screen will be showing when a round is still in progress, and you have to wait for it to disappear before you can make your next move :)
This made some of the levels really sad - I beat the third level without ever knowing what it really looked like.
The first level took a long time to beat. I think the second one was actually easier. I beat the third one, as I said, without knowing what the heck I was doing.
The graphics (when they work) and the music are really cool. The gameplay is also pretty cool - I like freeze-time platformers. This one is also unique because you can have multiple guys at once.
And yeah, in hindsight we should've reordered the levels.
I understood the mechanic, and was able to get through blowing up worms on the platform above the goal, but I could not ever figure out how to successfully drop from the left side of that platform to the flag. Probably me not being super great at puzzle games.
Absolutely well done!
Also would be good to have a win screen instead of looping you back to the same level :P
I agree with hyperscope that showing a countdown for timed abilities would be really helpful - especially on the last level, I found myself having to keep count in my head in order to manage the solution.
Good entry!
A couple of suggestions for minor improvements, similar to what others have already said:
- The difficulty curve could do with some work
- The camera should probably take all of the cubes into account, as there were a couple of times that I couldn't see some of my cubes (such as at the end of level 3).
- I feel like the freeze icon should disappear a turn earlier (right after your last frozen turn) so you know the cube is about to move. Currently it seems to show whether your cube was frozen in the previous turn, whereas I think showing if it will be frozen for the next turn is more useful (might be fixed by the addition of countdowns).
- Perhaps an indication of the range of the bomb would be useful.