Our little strategical puzzle-action game Atomic Rock Paper Scissors just got a major update post-jam!

PLAY IT HERE

Plenty of new features and tweaks, and major gameplay changes that make it much more exciting and interesting. A ton of extra polish went into it! We even got a fancy intro now! :D

New features

The update includes:

• Better controls: More intuitive controls! Thanks everyone for the feedback! (Note: We tried the "flick" many suggested, but it felt a bit odd and clunky. We'll try it again in a future release!)

• Better gameplay: Many additions to the gameplay make it more challenging and interesting, like a move-based level system, larger explosions, accumulating nukes and a better difficulty ramp system.

• Improved graphics: new more satisfying explosions, smoother animations, a fancy title screen/intro!

• Special effects: puffs of smoke, combo numbers, more impactful movements and animations.

• Shiny new interface: featuring some pretty looking chrome numbers!

• Music & sound effects: a proper soundtrack (within my unskilled abilities!) and many more sounds!

• Specials & combos: a ton of cool little effects that make everything you do more exciting
• More rewards: the game is now chock-full of little score bonuses, rewarding better players
• Funny remarks: inspired by pinball machine displays, the game now teases you and describes what's going on!
• Easter eggs: many little Easter eggs are scattered throughout the game now!
• A new challenging block type: you'll have to play to find out!
• Mobile support: It should work now! If not, let me know in the comments.

Challenges

The game was coded from scratch for the Jam, the custom engine and all, which was pretty reckless for a Ludum Dare game! It doesn't help that we only narrowed down our idea nearly a day into the Jam and that I've been behind the times with JavaScript!

Working with a custom engine and rushed-in spaghetti code with outdated coding norms makes everything much more difficult, however. Even little features like a title screen or basic user interface become a huge hassle! So I did my best to fill in these gaps these past few days.

It's probably super inefficient and buggy, but it should be playable just fine. If there are any major bugs, please let me know!

Leaderboard?

One thing we're still hoping to add is a leaderboard, but we are unsure if there is even demand for it for such a one-shot Ludum Dare game. It would require a significant amount of extra work due to our custom engine, especially with a proper backend that's not trivial to post fake results. So we're still on the fence about it!

If you would really like a leaderboard, please let us know!

Post Mortem

Over the next few days me and @m1nus will be covering a few of the design decisions we've made, and document our struggles as novice game makers in approaching this game! Stay tuned!

Future

Over the past weeks we've come to be quite fond and proud of our little game. Me and @m1nus decided to save our best ideas for a future remake of it, using a proper full-featured game engine and higher quality graphics. So expect a mobile & desktop version of Atomic Rock Paper Scissors soon! :)

Go play it!

So if you have some time to spare: PLAY ATOMIC ROCK PAPER SCISSORS (POST-JAM UPDATE)!

Have fun! ☢ ᗝ ☐ X