A Crowded Place by DestroyerTech
You are a person. You wake up in a strange place under mysterious circumstances. You go outside and find yourself in a crowded place.
This is a simple little game. * Arrow keys to move * A and D keys to aim * Each playthrough is about three and a half minutes including title and end screens * There are three different endings to find depending on what you do in the game.
Resources/tools used
- Haxe programming language
- Heaps.io game engine
- Gallet City tileset by Adam 'Atomic' Saltsman (public domain)
- Tiled map editor
- BandLab DAW
- sfxr.me sound generator
A bit of eleventh hour reflection
Wow. This has been an experience. I've only started learning game development very recently, and as a result, A Crowded Place was my first game. Ever. Before this, I'd essentially just been following a couple of tutorials and the introductory documentation for my game engine of choice (heaps.io). I have now discovered that choosing a game jam to make your first game, when you are barely in tune with the basics... is a TERRIBLE idea. Well, if you actually want to come up with a game that looks anything like what you intended. If you want to challenge yourself, make a bit of progress on honing your skills, and learn a hell of a lot in doing it, it's a great idea.
So that's what I've done. As a result, I have a finished submission! Granted, it's very unpolished, rudimentary and basic, and nowhere close to what I envisioned at the start of the weekend, but hey, at least it seems to work (on my end anyway, fingers crossed for yours). So I'm pretty proud of this, even if I know there'll be plenty of other, better submissions.
All that aside, I'm looking forward to playing and rating everyone else's games, and to improve for LD50!
| Link | https://destroyertech.com/games/a-crowded-place |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/a-crowded-place |
Ratings
| Overall | 1456th | 2.773⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1442th | 2.591⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1131th | 2.935⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1239th | 2.952⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 845th | 2.935⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1102th | 3.065⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 34🗳️ | 42🗨️ |
At first it seems like a shooter? Or is it? Or was it depends on what the player want to play? Then it kinda become a "make your own challenge" game.
Really good for a first game ever.
The multiple endings was a suprising layer of complexity, nice work there.
The lack of a user interface was kind of confusing.
@tsfreddie You're right, it's pretty much a shooter in its conception, but the player can choose, well, what they want to shoot at (which varies the ending) :-)
@skyward4d True, I would have liked to add a UI if I had time to figure out how best to implement it - will definitely be prepared for next time!
@pious Yep, definitely agree the gameplay isn't so engaging, but glad you enjoyed the ending(s) :-)
Just as a general remark about the endings:
#1 was my personal favourite, but is probably the one with the most boring associated playthrough (if you catch my drift)
#2 and #3 will be the ones that people get on their first try
If anyone is/was in the mood for multiple playthroughs, it might be fun to compare the endings, all three combined give off a fuller impression of the backstory, so to speak :)
Great entry. For being your first game is huge huge achievement.
I would've made the storyTelling a bit faster, but overall was pretty good.
Great job for your first jam! "A finished product" is generally the sign of success, even if you have to change what "finished" means ;)
My biggest feedback is that the movement/aiming mechanic wasn't so easy for me. I would have preferred left/right to aim and up arrow to move forward. I feel like that would have been a little easier to control.
Some interesting choices on the tools that you used! Definitely ambitious jumping into a gam jam while also learning the tools.
By the way, I uploaded a Windows build of my game if you'd like to try again. Sorry Firefox didn't work!
Btw, I remember seeing your 'Stupid game ideas' post before the jam started, looks like quite a few people adopted your suggestion for this one ;)
@stroe-andrew True, I definitely didn't intend it that way originally but it is giving off that kind of .io vibe in a way!
@tobold-h Glad you enjoyed the end!
@pink-shard-games Thanks for playing all of the endings, that's really great :) I agree the pacifist one should have been more challenging (and my original plan would have made it so), but oh well, just didn't get to it I guess
@hawkin Exactly right, I had very grand plans indeed compared to what I finished with (and I definitely had to alter the definition of 'finished' haha). Thanks for your feedback on the mechanic, I'll definitely consider it for the future. Yes, bit of a variety of tools there; the only one I really knew well coming into this is BandLab (which I use when I have a good music idea and I want to put it down quickly). For your game, yes it's quite odd Firefox worked for you and not me. I'll definitely boot up my Windows machine tomorrow and try it out though [ Linux user ;) ]!
@joerenglish Thanks for playing through all three :)
@kr4ft3r Happy to be a member ;) Thanks for your compliments!
@tony-li @andresbochi Thanks!
@aymarx Thanks for the feedback! I will certainly think about something like that for future games. I guess there are two reasons why I didn't do that for this one: (a) mouse input is a tad harder to work out than keyboard input, at least for this engine, and (b) the idea for this game specifically isn't necessarily to shoot everything you can or to be able to turn to shoot precisely where you need to (although I guess it could work as well).
@barrier True, true, given more time and know-how I would definitely have tried to make it less boring/more challenging *not* to shoot people. Thanks for playing!
@weirdybeardyman :laughing:
Sorry about the end text, had to make a bit of a last minute decision because I wanted it to have the same duration as the title music; I guess I'm a bit of a quick/skim reader haha. I did notice the pedestrians ended up down there, that was a little weird since they're supposed to just run around randomly, didn't get time to fix it so I just had to hope that didn't affect gameplay too much. I didn't come across any bugs with sound (or thought I ironed out any) in playtesting, what kind of glitchiness did you hear?
Thanks for trying out my game anyway :)
1) I think the game doesn't need to last as long, 3 minutes or so is actually quite a long time - on my 2nd+3rd playthroughs I left it to do something else while the timer counted down
2) It's easy to get the 'good' endings if you can just make it to a wall and face outwards - you could avoid this by having some kind of barriers that you can't pass but the NPCs can, so there's always a risk of there being people in front of you and you can't just leave the game running - but maybe it's nice to be able to solve it by facing a wall.
@weirdybeardyman ahahaha, I see - yes, I can imagine that happening. I definitely could have fine-tuned the volume levels to be more consistent across the whole game. Something I'll remember for future!