Atomic Rock Paper Scissors by lucasvb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hldqf1ESOws
A weird vaporwave puzzle variant of the Rock Paper Scissors game!
Move the pieces around following the Rock Papers Scissors beating rule in order to get points. Chain attacks to get combo bonuses, but beware of what’s at the end of the chain!
As you make mistakes metal blocks start to appear, making it more difficult to create attacks. Whenever the metal bar is full, a new metal block is guaranteed to appear.
Get things right and you’ll eventually charge your NUKE BAR, which gets you a NUKE you can use to blow stuff up and clear the level. To detonate, put the nuke at the end of an attack chain. Create a nuke chain reaction to get a ton of extra points!
As you progress, metal blocks will start to appear naturally more often, which will force you to make strategical sacrifices in order to keep playing.
Notes:
I couldn’t finish title screen and other options in time (like muting sfx or music, resetting the game, detecting game over conditions, special effects for combos, etc.), but the core gameplay is here. It probably needs balancing too. But such is the nature of Ludum Dare! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The power bars at the bottom indicate whether a nuke will drop or a metal bar will drop next. The nuke bar fills as you do good attacks and combos, or explode a nuke. The metal bar fills every time you make a mistake (your move ends up with your piece beaten). (If you do a combo attack that ends with your piece beaten, the metal bar fills with the combo too!) The original intent was for the CPU to counter-attack every move, so that’s what would fill the metal bar, making the game more and more difficult with time, requiring strategy. But due to time-constraints, I ended up making metal blocks appear randomly more frequently despite the metal bar level. So it kind of ends up confusing to have the bar around. But it’s too late now to change. :P
The original intended gameplay mechanics involved the CPU counter-attacking your moves with some extra chain reactions happening, and pieces coming from all sides. This was our take on "unstable": the fact any move could throw off a whole range of actions. But due to time constraints we had to sacrifice theme for fun, and stick to this simplified mechanics, which, admittedly is not on theme, but it's at least simple and fun enough for a playable release!
I developed the game under Chrome, but also tested with Firefox. Both seem to work fine, but hopefully there's no serious bugs! Small-screens are not supported, sorry!
Featuring:
- A crappy engine written from scratch! (what was I thinking?! D:)
- Double-retro vaporwave 16-bit aesthetics/graphics. (We heard it’s all the rage with the kids these days!)
- A shitty soundtrack loop made by a guy who has zero musical skills!
- ~~A pesky flickering bug that I have no idea where it is coming from!~~ OH MY GOD, FIXED IT!
- GreenSock's animation library and Howler's audio library.
- And ... not much more!
Anyway, we barely made it this time, and it was a lot of fun! I hope you guys enjoy whatever we managed to put together. <3
Changelog:
POST-JAM update: after you've done playing and rating the jam version below, you may check out the post-Jam version as well! Many improvements were made in all aspects of the game, and gameplay is much more fun now.
v0.20:
- Fixed major bug where getting a nuke with only metal blocks queued in to fall would hang the game. Major bummer for late-stage games!
- Added particle cap to improve performance in huge explosions.
- Fixed issue where too many explosions would make further explosions silent. Now a single sound is played and loudness is adjusted instead.
v0.15:
- Fixed the sprite animations not playing, sped up the attack animation and FIXED THE FLICKERING BUG. It was caused by me removing sprites from the rendering list as I was drawing the list. This messed up when the particles were getting removed off the list halfway through the animation, and messing up the rendering of entities.
- Fixed "shine" of selected sprites not animating (pause = true was in the wrong object!)
| Link | https://1ucas.itch.io/atomic-rock-paper-scissors |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/atomic-rock-paper-scissors |
Ratings
| Overall | 393th | 3.784⭐ | 192🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 406th | 3.717⭐ | 191🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 416th | 3.613⭐ | 192🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1306th | 2.837⭐ | 192🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 599th | 3.764⭐ | 193🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 593th | 3.382⭐ | 188🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 971th | 2.58⭐ | 159🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 903th | 3.274⭐ | 181🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 111🗳️ | 166🗨️ |
Good job!
Finally I have found how to use the nuke. It's really fun to achieve multiple blasts.
@mega-marlon: Thank you for the feedback! The animation was indeed too slow as I was trying to understand a flickering bug when new pieces fell (you can see it in the video), and I thought it was related to animation speed as it improved when it was slower. Turned out to be related to the particle system and how sprites get removed from the poll. Should be faster paced now.
@bhughes: Thank you! @m1nus originally suggested that too, but I felt like it could be ambiguous, implying the player could choose how many pieces to take? We will think about it in any future remakes! There's probably a good way of doing it that doesn't feel too much like "thinking for the player" visually.
@enya454: Thanks! Yeah, balancing is probably off. We had many ideas of how to make it interesting, but many would take too long to implement. We'll try them out in any future remake!
@glebshik: Thank you! :) Yeah, we're a bit upset about it too! The original plan for the gameplay involved the computer doing counter-attacks and new pieces being added from every side, not just the top. The cyclic nature of Rock > Scissors > Paper > Rock would lead to weird chain reactions that would make everything chaotic, and more "unstable". But it turned out to be very difficult to implement on short notice, or even to conceptualize, so in the spirit of the Jam we opted for getting something playable out there that's fun, even if it meant sacrificing a little on the theme! We'll see how much of these ideas make it to a potential remake in the near future! :D
I enjoyed this a lot. The simple graphics work, the music never gets old, the game is good fun.
It looked like the metal blocks were spawning even though the bar at the bottom wasn't filling, not sure if intentional, but did help me actually stop playing to write this comment.
This is a bit of a hack, though, because the original intent of the game was for the computer to counter attack you after every move, so the metal bar would grow based on that attack, and difficulty could be tweaked based on some crude AI and/or making the metal bar easier to fill.
But there was no time left, so we went for something simple for now! :)
Also, I felt the need to show a gif of the most satisfying chain I got while playing :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
The metal bar fills every time you make a mistake (your move ends up with your piece beaten). (If you do a combo attack that ends with your piece beaten, the metal bar fills with the combo too.) The original intent was for the CPU to counter-attack every move, so that's what would fill the metal bar, making the game more and more difficult with time, requiring strategy.
But due to time-constraints, I ended up making metal blocks appear randomly more frequently despite the metal bar level. So it kind of ends up confusing to have the bar around. But it's too late now to change. :P
@namnam: Thanks! Ah, I never thought about sliding! That's a good point. We focused on desktop, so the thought of using the mouse like that never occurred to me. Could work in a future mobile version! Thanks for the suggestion!
@pink-shard-games, @quoc: Thank you so much! :)
My main complaint here is just the length of the game; others have commented on this as well so I won't harp on it, but I struggled to see the game through to the end after I'd started to succumb to too many metal blocks, just because I knew I wouldn't be getting too many points but the slog of clicking through all the little 1-2 tile chains was a lot. I played for a very long time regardless.
The art and music are great for this too, very satisfying to clear tiles, and the "heartbeat" music track was very conducive to a focus mindset. =) I especially love the shine animations, a nice little touch (though I did keep thinking the movement out of the corner of my eye earlier in the game was a sign that the game was progressing while I took some time to think, leading me to rush a bit before I realized it was just an aesthetic touch).
I would definitely return to this entry for a version 2!
I think if I had a gripe, it would be that I would prefer to click & drag in a direction, instead of click, and then click again in a direction.
Overall a lot of fun. Nice work!
I had a lot of fun playing this. I was a bit worried that there would be no endgame condition with continuous perfect play, but the faster and faster trickle in of metal plates even without errors (which I still occasionally made even after I understood how things worked) made it a really good experience; slowly ramping up the difficulty while giving a clear horizon for the end of play. I wish there was an endgame screen with detection of whether any move is possible or not. I think I set up four or five entire columns or lines to break at once, it was very satisfying. I wish it had just a little more juice, maybe with some numbers popping for the score showing an increase in score, little things like that. But it was still super polished, a very complete, self contained, entirely intuitive experience. Controls felt a tiny bit wonky at first, but at the end it just felt natural. I liked the sound design and the tiny bits of polish like that little screenshake and the occasional shine on the plates and gauges. Main gripe would be that I don't feel like the connexion to the theme is very strong! But otherwise excellent entry.
The final position I got to, I am actually quite proud of that score.
@alex-aspa: As it is, the game starts adding metal blocks randomly with increasing probability. At some point it is literally impossible to continue! The trick is getting nukes early on to ensure you get rid of them, as later in the game it's too difficult to do anything. But this was not the intended gameplay, it's just the hacky version I managed to implement on time!
@Baturinsky: Yeah, totally agree! The game needs a lot of balancing still! I ended up implementing these features at the last hours. I'm working on a post-LD release of the game with the intended features and some tweaks to the gameplay, and nukes will be a lot more plentiful and fun to play around with!
Great game! One of the few that I played that feel complete for the core mechanic. I spent an hour playing and I was enjoying doing the strategies on what beat what and how I wanted to build the columns and so on. I read some comments and I agree that the end game is a bit boring and you get dragged by the small exchanges just to finish. Twice I crossed the 100k and I was "ok... do I want to really push this one? Maybe I can call it done and move to the next game?" I end up finishing it, but I felt the weight to extract each small point. I think this one will be an interesting problem to solve if you will work more on it.
great job! congrats.
Pretty fun! Feels like it might be fun with some little extra oomph to add that addictive gambling-like element of crazy chains (either by luck or by skill) a la bejeweled. As is the gameplay is more slow-paced and strategic, which definitely works, but maybe I'm just too lazy to bother thinking out every one of my moves as much as I should ;P Sometimes simpletons just want big stuff go boom, you know what I mean?
Still, there's nothing wrong with what you have, it makes sense and I can see it being a pretty good time-killer. I almost wish I had an option for a smaller board so that I could progress to the end-game faster.
Nice idea and great realisation
As good as the pixel art is, and as much as I love pixel art, I think a cleaner, more hi-rez modern look would be a better for this genre.
Good game overall!
Great work! Had a lot of fun :D
Very addicting gameplay and cool idea.
Keep the good work.
So the decision to *not* have chain reactions in the player's favor was deliberate from the start, and a central point in our game's design. We wanted the player to be in full control of what's going on, and chain reactions to typically have unintended *negative* consequences.
The point was that you could not rely on things randomly going your way, like in typical matching games where you earn a lot of points for doing nothing. You have to earn your combos, and if you don't act carefully you miss out on most of the bones the game throws at you.
This is even clearer in the newer post-Jam version (to be released soon). Having bombs create a chain explosion is a core aspect of the mechanic, but it's not always desirable to do it. In many cases your strategy is to work around the bombs to prevent a premature explosion. It's much more challenging and interesting this way.
This is also why we did not want to include timed events/moves. We wanted the player to be in total control of the game. It's supposed to be a thoughtful action puzzle.
I finally had the time to come back and rate everything I played so far!
Here is a link to the vod of the review if you wish to see it again: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=AiVWayIqffU&t=5616s
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/atomic-rock-paper-scissors/atomic-rock-paper-scissors-gets-a-major-update