Thanks so much for the feedback! I'll keep that in mind after the jam when designing other levels
mabakerbauer
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Thanks so much for the feedback! I'm playtesting with a static camera right now since I read your comment, and I really like the idea. I was trying to make the game look as close to the original retro Asteroids as possible. It makes the game drastically easier when you can see everything on the screen, maybe even too easy. With the size of the map being so huge it looks a lot less pretty to be zoomed out so much you can see it all, but since there have been comments about needing reduced difficulty / balancing, the tradeoff might be worth it. I think I'll add it as something like an "easy mode" after the jam is over.
I love the idea a ton, and the intro was epic, but it was way too easy. It was also possible to win immediately after pressing play before you can even see pacman. Maybe if you zoom out the camera and spawn multiple pacman it would be more fun. There was also a bug where when pacman eats the food, he sometimes flies and can no longer die or kill you. When I was brainstorming old arcade games to reverse the roles of, I'm shocked that I completely forgot that Pacman existed lol, but I ended up happy with Asteroids.
Holy cow that was fantastic! I got totally addicted. Everything about that was great, super creative. I could totally see this being expanded after the jam with multiple levels and you need a certain amount of points to beat the level, perhaps adding new enemy types. The only thing I would change is to decrease the time you need to wait before making another move and to make it so when you have a skeleton at 0 he can still defend that 1 turn (it feels bad when you get a score of like 154,000, but lose track of your skeleton number, thinking you can still get the kill.)
Awesome idea and art. When I was brainstorming ideas this was one of the ideas I considered, but I opted to make retro Asteroids with roles reversed instead. I think this snake idea has a ton of potential, but it is too luck based and there isn't a clear goal. If this was turned into a puzzle game I think it could actually be super awesome. Different levels could have different spawn points, different number of lives, levels have obstacles or different shapes, multiple snakes with different speeds and/or movement patterns, maybe even have special mice with different abilities.
That was really good for your first game jam. The animation when you swap between cat and mouse was really cool. Gameplay aside, I think the idea is really cool. If you want to make it harder with an update after the jam, an idea maybe: when you are a cat there are many mice all around, which die in 1 hit. When you are a mouse, there are a number of cats equal to the number of mice you killed last round... Also the enemies get stuck on walls super easily so probably reduce or get rid of the friction on the walls
Thanks you so much for the feedback!
The technique I used to win was:
-Constantly maintain a killstreak by getting a kill at least every 1.5 seconds (if enemies shoot each other or a background asteroid crashes into them it still counts as a kill). The killstreak is needed because it increases score multiplier, but more importantly it increases the spawn rate
-Making enemies shoot each other is super good because your HP doesn't go down so it allows you to play much more aggressively like by pressing Right-Mouseclick to boost into enemies
-In the first few seconds, mostly use your projectiles to get kills as fast as possible. If your score multiplier is only around x8 to x25 you won't get that many points anyway, so the important thing it to kill enemies as fast as possible to get your score multiplier closer to around x100
-After that, try to get more points by crashing into enemies. Crashing is worth 4x as many points, so this will allow you to accumulate points faster
-Finally, now that your killstreak accumulatedPoints is getting high, and enemy attackspeed should be high if you have been killing enemies fast enough, there should be a ton of enemies shooting really fast, so you can get a ton of points by making them shoot each other , plus a lot of extra points by crashing into enemies which is also easier since the asteroid spawn rate went up. If you are doing well, your score multiplier can regularly get to around x300 - x600 in the late game.
All of the art and sound effects came directly from retro Asteroids lol, and the text was just the default Arial font because I'm lazy when it comes to graphics XD.
I finished the game during the 1 hour extension period lol, so I didn't have that much time to fine tune the difficulty. I ended up distracted having a ton of fun trying to reach the difficult goal instead of seriously playtesting to find out what the goal should be, so I just quickly adjusted the level timer from 30 seconds to 38 seconds hoping that would be enough. Feel free to set a personal goal of like 50,000 or 100,000 if 200,000 is too high, or just have fun ignoring the goal (the Victory screen is just a blank screen with "YOU WIN!" in Arial font so you're not missing much XD.) I thought 200,000 would be an okay, difficult challenge to get because I was getting points super fast towards the end because accumulatedPoints (accumulatedPoints is the killstreak points you see above your character) increases the enemy and asteroid spawn rate by a ton, which in turn makes it easier to accumulate points and the score multiplier is also influenced by accumulatedPoints.
void Update()
time -= Time.deltaTime;
if (time <= 0f)
Spawn();
time = .3f / (1 + (accumulatedPoints / 32000f));
if (time < 0.12f)
time = 0.12f;
I made it so the score multiplier is based mainly on the ratio between enemies currently alive and background asteroids, so as more enemies spawn your score multiplier goes down if you don't kill them, whereas it will gradually go up as the number of background asteroids increases. I definitely should have made a normal, easier to understand system for the score multiplier. I ended up with this super weird code for the score multiplier after some testing because I couldn't decide which variables I wanted the score multiplier to be based on, so I made it based on everything lol.
ratio = (1f + (lives / 30f)) * ((float)asteroidPickupCount / enemyCharacterCount);
scoreMultiplier = (float)Mathf.Pow((ratio + 0.333f) * (0.5f + ((30 - lives) / 30f)), 3) * (1 + (accumulatedPoints / 24000f));
I wanted the game to be very difficult but very short, so you can replay it tons of times to get better, but because the points are so exponential it would be satisfying when you get a really high score when you were getting low scores earlier. I was worried that if I made the timer too long it would be less replay-able and if I made the points goal too low, you miss out on the super satisfying moment when your points are going up at a ridiculously higher rate, so I think I ended up making the difficulty of reaching the goal way too high, especially with the only playtester, me: really good at games, the developer, and enjoys nightmarishly difficult goals. Also, since I just was reusing a lot of code from the enemy spawner from a different game I was making, you need to get a little bit lucky with enemy and asteroid spawns even if you play perfectly.