It was fun to frantically look for more things to suck up to get more power. the difficulty was fun
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This Place Sucks: A Vacuum Story's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #123 | 3.836 | 3.836 |
| Originality | #148 | 3.803 | 3.803 |
| Fun | #185 | 3.393 | 3.393 |
| Presentation | #204 | 3.721 | 3.721 |
Ranked from 62 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game represent "Power"?
Suck up junk to grow big, then take over the world!
Your character, a vacuum gone rogue, has to manage its power levels in order to complete each level. Suck up junk to level up. Be quick! Your power can run out.
Comments
28 days ago(+1)
I had an idea for the cat - if you sucked it up it’d get stuck in your tube. You’d have to mash the space bar to spit it out and turn it into a projectile. Ran out of time for that.
28 days ago(+1)
Thank you! I think if I cranked the difficulty way down then it would let the player get their bearings and figure out what sucks and what won’t. It can definitely use more jungle breaks too :)
Other than the collision stuff you already know about, I think the only real issue I was having was the speed the power decreased once the bar got to around half way depleted. I tried it numerous times on web and using the exe and it did look to start depleting faster once it reached that point.
If it ever dipped below that for any reason, it feels bordering on impossible to get it back up and this was a huge problem if I got stuck between a chair and the wall and the nearest pile of small stuff to suck would have me close to half depleted once I went down a size. Once I got the groove going though and figured out the "right" routes to take, the gameplay was very fluid (got stuck on a tiny key once though?!?!? crazy and very realistic tbh)
This also happened once when I was zipping through trying to see the full map and it would nooot return to me XD
Overall a very good job though, especially for picking up Godot for the first time! I know it's got a few peculiarities other engines don't. The art is charming and I can see the work that went into it.
28 days ago(+1)
Hey slogboat! Thanks for playing and such detailed feedback. You're amazing. I did not know that the power-meter depletes faster after halfway... I'd have to take a look at the code, it's supposed to be a constant speed! I'm sure my code would make the average programmer die a bit inside lol
28 days ago(+1)
Great feedback, thank you! I did play around with max nozzle speed and the reach of the suction, but it's good to hear your thoughts. Thanks for playing.
29 days ago(+1)
88% is a dang good score! A re-balance is on its way after the gamejam is over. thanks for playing :)
29 days ago(+1)
I had to go look up Tasty Planet, it's like if Spore was a flash game. Very similar vibe! Thanks for playing. I will definitely keep working on it before I move to my next project :)
If you still don't understand collisions enough, here's a quick rundown: there are layers and masks. Masks detect layers of the same value.
1. Mask of 1 will collide with layer 1, but not anything else.
2. An object with a mask but with no layers will get easily stopped and pushed around by other objects with a layer the same value as mask
So for your game, you could have the vacuum be all 5 masks at the start (from small to big) and different objects to be different masks AND the same value layer, depending on size as well. Once the vacuum grows, change the smallest mask into a layer of the same value.
If im not completely insane, this should make that vacuum pushes objects smaller than it is, but also get stopped by objects bigger.
The first person to get all 6 stars, congrats! Thank you for playing it until the end. The collisions annoy me too...
My intended idea was having the smallest objects have no collision with the player, that way you could run right over them. When you get big it gets really difficult to see the small objects, and unrealistic that they'd stop you.
When I disabled collision layers and masks though, it'd make running into small objects fly all over the place. I really couldn't figure out how to make no-collision happen. This was tricky because the player's nozzle needs to still interact. On top of that I had certain objects like tables and counters that needed to let other objects sit on top, exit, then not return, all while colliding with the player.
On my last attempt to get it all working I nearly broke the whole damn game and decided to leave it and move on.
29 days ago(+1)
Thanks for playing, and sorry about the difficulty! That's my biggest regret so far. I plan to fix that and release an update soon with more content.
29 days ago(+1)
I spent WAY too much time trying to make the little dust bunnies something that you don't collide with. But still do in the sense that you can suck them up.
I'm new to godot and this was my first substantial project, and holy smokes the collisions stuff still doesn't make much sense to me.
Glad you enjoyed it though. Thanks so much for playing!
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