Unstable Prototype by digital bacon
My entry for LD49, I didn't get this finished, although I was a lot more organised this time round. It's basically a proof-of-concept for an idea around how power-ups could work for a vertical scroller. As the player accumulates power-ups, they're added as modules to the left and right of the player's ship. If one side of the ship has more power-ups, then the ship becomes unstable and starts to drift to the side with more power-ups. The bigger the difference, the faster the drift.
Enemy fire can destroy the power-ups, and if a power-up is lost, so are all power-ups outboard of the destroyed one so you can go from a perfectly balanced ship, to a massively unstable one with one enemy shot >:-).
Tried adding controls to move modules left and right, as well as to auto-balance, but the auto-balancing currently doesn't always work (okay, it very rarely works).
| Executable | https://digital-bacon.itch.io/unstable-prototype |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-prototype |
Ratings
| Given | 10🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
The game plays well actually, although it is on an easy side, and the controls feel just fine. It's very cool how the pull increases as the disbalance of power-ups does. At one point, I moved all the power-ups I had to one side, just to see what happens, and the pull dragged me practically off-screen, I could not move the other way at all. But I could just alternate Z and C to move the ship around by the power of the disbalance drag. That was fun :)!
I also love the fact that those power-ups arrange themselves in a line, so the more powerful you are, the easier it is to get hit. The bigger they are, the harder they fall!
I don't think you should have a working auto-balance in this game at all. It feels like it would sort of invalidate the whole point The current system works niece and the fun of it is exactly in the imbalance and the penalty imposed on your movement if you allow the enemy to shoot one of your sides.
Would be nice if those icons indicating the type of power-up were larger. Right now they are quite hard to make out, especially in motion. Stars, on the other hand, I would make somewhat smaller - they make for a quite unnecessarily busy background.
All in all, I think it's a very cool concept and could make a fine game.
On my "nice-to-have" list, there were more enemies (including bosses and mini-bosses) but I just ran out of time (again). :alarm_clock:
Removing the auto-balance would make things easier :laughing: I was thinking of replacing it with something that would just move one power-up from the heavy side to the lighter side, so the player can still balance things out, but not as easy as having the game do it for them.
Yes, the icons definitely need a rework. They look fine in Aseprite, but once I got them into the game I realised I'd accidentally made them too large so they have to be scaled down to fit with the ship :rolling_eyes: And you're definitely right wrt the star size -- way too distracting.
your concept is really fun, if you can work on it, i think that can be a nice project.