MiniLD16 First Day: Combo Trader
I started late, last night at 7pm, and I’m going to work until 7pm Saturday. So now I’ve had just over 15 hours of possible work time. Of course, I’ve used very little of that–how much I’m not sure.
I have done something at least. My goals will have to be a little scaled back, but I do have a working framework for the majority of the action part of gameplay.
Before I go into what I want this game to be, here’s a link to the current version and a screenshot.
The screenshot doesn’t do a great job of describing it. The goal (for now) is to go as fast as you can. You can do this by combining two “fuel” boxes and one “oxygen” box (yes, that’s what they’re supposed to be). If your bar is full of oxygen, you get a big speed boost and it’s all randomized. Any order can be used in the fuel-oxygen combination, but if you combine anything other than 2 fuel and one oxygen, your speed decreases. Your ship also decelerates over time. And for now you can ignore the “you’re going to fast” message, because I haven’t implemented damage yet. There will be enemies and weapon combinations eventually, as I put in damage.
Eventually I’m going to make the game live up to the “trade” in the name by making this sort of arcade side-scroller take place between planets, between which you carry cargo.
And as for the rules, I’m sort of breaking the palette one. As you can see in the screenshot, when moving fast the background gets blurred. I just put this in to make tearing less noticeable, but maybe I’ll remove it later with different backgrounds for different general speed categories.
Oh, and don’t bother trying to win, all that happens is that “You won! Congratulations!” appears in the text box in the lower left and the distance remaining goes negative.
Hope the game will turn out to enjoyable.
Looks like a really cool idea. It took me a while to get used to the controls and figure out what I was supposed to do, but it’s an interesting mechanic for speeding up, and the art looks pretty cool.