technically it was supposed to be used more. in the current state it is still not 100% useless though. if you happen to shoot a fish directly above you, the fish would hit you when falling down, making you fall down as well. so if you get the timing right, you could avoid that falling fish in that situation.
I do have some questions about the “redistribution” part in your license though. I always wonder, what exactly redistribution encompasses, as I would need to provide the assets with my game, if I make a game with them.
So would I be required to prevent players from simply accessing the assets by putting them in some encrypted format or is that unnecessary?
Extending on that: I like to open source my projects. Would it be problematic to have the assets inside the repository?
I played this game waaaaaay too long. This was an incredibly polished and fun Tetris experience. The soundtrack fit perfectly. I still could play for hours, but got other things to do xD
Really fun game. Only nitpick are the unforgiving explosions. I can’t count how often I died from an explosion that was almost gone already, just because I walked in a little bit too early.
As this submission doesn’t get much love because of PICO-8, I decided to record a playthrough.
So if you can’t play it yourself, but still want to give it a rating, check out my video :)
I got to say it was a risky choice to make a game for PICO-8 as you can see, quite some people don’t have any idea about that.
I had fun playing your game. The only issue I found was,
when you hit too many people without collecting all the coins,
then the amount of coins will slow down the game drastically.
Still great little game, good job :)
While the game is luckily quite bug free, I actually found one.
Spoiler warning (details on how accuracy and other upgrades work)
The survivors have a base accuracy of 33%. The remaining 67% depend on distance and speed of the bots. (further away/faster = harder to hit)
As the bots have minimum speed at the beginning, that means, we are already roughly at 66% hit chance.
So depending on how close the bot is, when survivor shoots, the hit chance is somewhere between 66% and 99%.
Never upgrade accuracy would mean, because the bots get faster with each wave, that the hit chance at some point would get as low as 33%, as it cannot get lower than the base accuracy.
So to counter that, the player needs to increase the accuracy.
Originally my plan was, that every time the player chooses this upgrade, the accuracy would increase by 0.01. Meaning after one upgrade you are at 34% base accuracy, after 17 upgrades you are at 50%.
So example after 17 upgrades:
hit chance = base accuracy (50%) + distance(0-1) * 25% + speed(0-1) * 25%
In the most trivial case (only upgrading accuracy 17 times and somehow surviving),
the bots at that point would be at a speed giving them a factor auf ~0.5, so the last component would be 12.5%.
the only variable is the distance again.
so at this point, the hit_chance would be between 62.5% and 87.5%, depending on distance.
as it is more likely, that other upgrade were also necessary, one would reach 50% base accuracy
probably at a point, where the speed factor is always 0, meaning the final hit chance would only be between 50% and 75% depending on distance.
but technically, if you increase the accuracy further, you would reach a point, were the survivors always hit, because the base accuracy is so high, that distance and speed don’t matter anymore.
so this was intentional, because even though it is frustrating and unlucky to die from missing shots, it can be countered through the other upgrades.
for example reload time starts at 4 seconds, but multiplied by 0.9 (10% decrease) every time the upgrade is taken.
at some point the reload time will be faster than the shot animation, which allows the bots to shoot infinitely often, because the magazine size does not matter anymore.
so there are quite some ways to get this to go infinite, but it was supposed to be hard,
because lets face it: in round 50 you see nothing you haven’t already seen in round 1.
so there needed to be an end to the game and at the time I didn’t want to put a hard end at some round like “gz, you survived 30 rounds. game over”
so loosing to faster bots, because they should get missed more often, seemed like a reasonable choice for me.
okay but now to the bug I found:
instead of increasing the base accuracy by 0.01, I actually increase it by 0.1 every time.
this means that already after 7 accuracy upgrades the hit chance is alway greater than 100%.
so if you push for that early game, you should have not much trouble getting an infinite game going.
that being said, almost all my playthroughs go infinite when I playtest with this bug,
and as mentioned… there is not much going on later on. the waves take longer.
you don’t need to move the survivors. so it’s just choosing an upgrade, clicking on next, repeat.
I did some balancing “fixes”, but I won’t upload them right now, as they were not part of the jam submission and one could argue that my new difficulty is actually more game breaking than the old easiness xD
just some developer story here xD in the future the game will probably get more survivor types, more enemy types, permanently unlockable upgrades for later runs, an actual leaderboard (currently the button is always disabled, because I just hadn’t time to implement one),
and the plan was even to add a tutorial, which explains the whole gameplay.
I fear it doesn’t have much more content though. Timely constraints ;)
But we’ll see what I can add in the future.
A lot of points mentioned by other commenters were actually planned,
but needed to be discarded, because I didn’t have the time for it.
