ORGAN GRINDER by Xeke-Death

Story
Harvest the organs of the skeletons attempting to invade our reality. Use the teeth the Tooth Fairy has collected for you to protect reality from the hellish invasion of organ harvesting skeletons! Take back the organs they have harvested, and use them to improve yourself, or to upgrade your weapons, or turn them into ammo and make them regret wanting our organs!
Controls
- WASD to move, space to jump.
- Left mouse to shoot
- 1-5 for weapons.
- E to purchase UPGRADES (purple flame) and AMMO (orange flame)
- P to cheat in a bunch of resources if the drop rate is too low for your liking. It didn't get much balancing.
Upgrades
With enough collected organs and a bit of luck, you can purchase upgrades to make the fight easier. The offered upgrades and locations changes every 2 minutes. Keep an eye out for the purple beacons - Crosshairs - Move speed - Jump height - Air control - More damage - Faster firing rate - Enemy HP bars - Upgrade locations - Impact explosives - More HP - Damage Reduction

Edit:
Fixed a game breaking bug that prevented anything from working the second time you started the game (without a page reload). Always remember to clean up your listeners!
| Link | https://xekedeath.itch.io/organ-grinder |
| Link | Link above. Unity stand-alone build |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/organ-grinder |
Ratings
| Overall | 241th | 3.725⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 236th | 3.647⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 332th | 3.412⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 414th | 3.706⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 271th | 3.912⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 207th | 3.618⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 153th | 3.549⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 193th | 3.804⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 81🗳️ | 103🗨️ |
I did encounter a bug where once the skeleton was killed, it didn’t despawn and stood still, killing the run.
Upgrades strewn throughout the room are awesome and make movement and gameplay progressively more enjoyable (though as you mentioned, due to not being able to balance much, the game was quite difficult organically).
While I would have liked to have some sort of reticle (even just a dot to show where I was aiming), not having one does add that layer of challenge - I whiffed a lot of shots and had to keep recorrecting which is cool in its own way.
Receiving damage could use more of an indicator; the small sound effect that plays when you get hit is dwarfed by the BGM and your shooting sounds. I’d be too focused trying to hit my shots that I wouldn’t notice my HP was critically low.
Otherwise, loved the main menu screen as it lends itself to the type of game I was getting into, as well as the “story”. Really cool, rockin’ out game with a solid foundation.
but it's not what I anticipated with harvesting theme, so good entry)
Congrats for the whole team!
Looking forward to see you on the next one!
- No crosshair. (Maybe an intentional design choice, but I'm not a fan.)
- No Audio/Visual feedback for taking damage.
- Really high mouse sensitivity with no way to change it.
- No movement acceleration.
- No enemy pain or death sounds.
- No enemy attack sounds.
- Unsynced attack animations. (Damage is dealt at the beginning of the animation rather than when the punch actually happens.)
- Melee attacks that are way longer-ranged than they feel like they should be. (I thought they were shooting me, at first.)
I wasn't able to get very far in the game because I kept getting ambushed by skeletons from every angle and not noticing I had lost half my health until five seconds later. The very open-ended map design doesn't help things here.
That said, what you did manage to accomplish is impressive. There are a lot of custom assets with animations, and they're quite well made for the time constraint. The title screenshot is particularly eye-catching. And I'm glad to see someone else who thought of organ harvesting as a take on the theme. :)
I also appreciate the built in option to cheat in extra resources. I didn't do too well in my first few runs, so it let me get to experience a bit more of the game. Nice work all around! The animations are great, the level is well designed, it feels good.
Some suggestions in addition to rebalalancing:
-Make store signs billboard towards camera
-Some more dramatic lighting needed in game, make it more like menu has
-Bright red skybox to give it some much needed contrast and vibrancy.
Also i'd like to suggest you make standalone build because HTML5 is god damn slow in Chrome. I have Firefox and it work OK there, but not anyone have.
Anyway, great entry!
Overall: A great and funny entry.
Overall, an amazing game!
The optimization is not really good, I can't stay at 60 fps while playing the game.
The music is awesome!
It definitely needs some more feedback on damage, I often felt I was dying suddenly without realising I was even being attacked.
I never made enough to buy a single upgrade. Thanks for providing the infinite money cleat, I had much more fun with it after that.
Its funny the skeletons lie down when they attack you when you are above them.
Great models and animations, though! Really liked the aesthetic.
A few issues I encountered: one last enemy was somehow stuck up ontop of a small wall, which meant that the wave didn't end! I hunted him down and slayed him though, so all was well :D Secondly, maybe it was the FoV, but I felt like it was hard to gauge if the enemies were close enough to damage me or not. Felt like they could hurt me from further away than I expected!
Great job team!
I gave this game a few runs, i wish there was a short sprint that would let me get out of tight situations, as it stands it felt a bit inevitable that I'd lose health all the time from enemies cornering me. Having to jump over tight obstacles was a bit frustrating, especially when I'm trying to kite a group. Obstacles aren't bad per se, but when the level looks uniform and randomly generated, it's harder to build a spatial sense for it. A sound or extra visual indicator would've been great to help me notice that I'm being hurt from somewhere out of view.
The real fun of these oldschool shooters comes from being able to manage overwhelming odds through skill. Outside of the weapon choices (for which the ammo felt a bit too precious to spend), I felt my options were a bit limited. Ideally the ability to thrive should come mostly from the user's experience, rather than upgrades. With some tweaks, this could hit some high marks with me, as I really like this type of game.
The aesthetics and especially the guns were very stylish, i liked that!
My big complaint was lack of crosshairs. also i think you could have added a bit more bass to the sfx on the bones.. more bone-crushing, less clattering bones
Super fun!