Delivery Squares by Elementary
A simple HTML game about squares. Keyboard required (wasd or arrows to move, space to skip text).
I fixed the speed issue in v1.1. The original is in the downloads so that they can be compared.
Controls - WASD or arrows to move player - SPACE to skip text or restart
How to play
Tiny squares around player indicate direction of sources, the distance of these squares change depending on the closest source to the player, orange square does not change distance as this is the direction of the city.
Four bars on the left indicate amount of squares currently in the city, the right four bars indicate the player's storage.
To collect squares follow the indicator squares around the character and hover over the same colored square to collect, then return to the city to deliver. Sources can be drained, when this happens the source will disappear and a new one will spawn in a new location.
The aim is to keep the bars from falling below the red bars, which will decrease your score by one every second for every bar below the red, red bars can be decreased by overfilling and they will slowly increase over time. Overfilling will grant a bonus to the score value for the resources that would have been consumed.
If your score reaches zero or one of the bars fall to zero it is game over. You can then press space to try again.
Difficulty
For those interested I've also added the relevant difficulty variables at the top near the script tag, so that the speed and difficulty can be adjusted, these variables are also available from the console when played from the downloads.
consumptionRate can be set to 3.2 or above to make it slightly harder.
playerSpeed determines acceleration.
friction determines the deceleration.
maxSpeed determines the players maximum speed
Known bugs
There's still some movement issues, for example acceleration not going to zero, so the screen might appear like it's flickering at times when the player moves without input, it can also cause some other interesting effects.
Acceleration and deceleration are tied to frame rate, which was a mistake on my part, but it shouldn't be a problem in most cases due to the speed cap.
Changelog for v1.1:
Fixed a mistake with calculating the maximum speed for the player.
Fixed the range for area blocks to give a better indication of speed.
Ratings
| Overall | 389th | 2.586⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 368th | 2.655⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 311th | 2.946⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 349th | 3.155⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 398th | 1.81⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 339th | 1.185⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 336th | 1.857⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 386th | 2⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 41🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
It's always interesting though how hooked one can get from such a simple game.
I really don't like typewriter effects because I often read faster than the type appears. My little pet peeve, I guess. I didn't realize I could skip with [space] until I started trying different things.
The radar feature was nice, although I don't quite understand why it was smack in the middle of the screen. It didn't block anything, but I didn't realize initially what it was trying to tell me.
The game balance was upset after fixing the speed problem, so it's relatively easy now and I didn't want to change the code too much to compensate, but even before the the fix, game balance wasn't perfect, so I moved the variables to the top of the script so that anyone can change it to make it harder or easier depending on preference. There are a few other things I can do to fix the game balance, for example the distance of the sources, but I'll leave it like it is for now and maybe add a fixed version to the downloads when I get time, if it's even possible to fix.
Now that I got some quality sleep the game seems pretty terrible in my opinion, but I haven't entirely given up yet. Besides I did get some pretty good ideas and base code for future projects from this.
The four different types were actually meant to be lives, with different rates. Rates changing depending on how much it's filled, which is kind of still left in the game in the form of the red bar limits. Having a bar fall to zero would lead to losing a life, but I couldn't really get everything to balance so I removed it. There was a lot of other things that also had to removed due to balance issues for example the four towers of the city were actually meant to represent the ink stores, which could break or be rebuilt and upgraded. I would really have liked to make it more coherent and fun, but I'll leave it for after the jam if I have time. I still think there's potential here, kind of reminds me of Leaf Blower Revolution in a sense, but I thought it would have been slightly too ambitious to make it an idle type game instead of a simple score based system, since it would require decent variation in content, but now that I had more time to think, it might have been the better approach to this style.
I tried to win. But it were too hard for me.
If you have trouble with controls let me know what's wrong, is it the speed, slow down rate or acceleration, there's still a bug with the acceleration speed which is tied to the frame rate. I accidentally removed a delta multiply with the fix, but it shouldn't be significant enough to cause issues since the max speed is capped.
Cheers
I'll add an explanation of what to do to the description and I'm working on a post jam version so any feedback on bugs or mistakes are welcome, thanks for playing.
Also bug: WASD controls don't work on non-english keyboard layout.