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Kallista's Dream - zez - Competition Entry

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I took sort of a weird approach to the theme, and based it more on the unconscious significance of islands then on islands themselves. There is an Island, its even a fairly important part of the game, both in gameplay and in premise, that being said, there is also a much larger metaphorical island.

It plays somewhere in between NiGHTs and any good old fashioned treasure shootem up.

Sense the tutorial text kinda jumps by sometimes, I guess Ill just post controlls. Move with the arrow keys, fairly straight forward there, double tap a direction to dash attack. Dash attacking into an enemy kills it (or at least hurts it,) and gives you a glowing aura. You can use that aura to figure out how close you are to the objective (blue = really far away, red = close) There are three levels, kind of, even tho they are all the same, just with more enemies that move slightly faster. You get some plot between levels, and then the DRAMATIC PLOT TWIST at the end. Its kind of a depressing game. Sorry. You also will fire a huge spread of projectiles that home in on enemy's if you dash attack enough. These frequently end up killing offscreen enemies and giving you randomly awesome kill combo multipliers. THIS IS A FEATURE! NOT A BUG!... okay, well, maybe its a bug.

The For loop that builds the level is kinda broken (actually, the whole level building part is kinda broken...) so it takes a second to load the playstate, just bare with it, it (probably) didnt crash.
This needs some hardcore optimizations to be totally honest, but its still pretty fun, and this was a totally new experience for me. (I have all of one other game under my belt, and have only been learning actionscript and flixel for a few months...)

Oh... code note, I made this in flash develop using flex 3.4 and flixel v2.34.
I used some vst stuff, fruity loops, an old midi man keyboard, a simmons sd7k drumset, and an old epiphone guitar for the soundtrack. This includes the sound fx. I was trying to get all of the audio to blend together and create a really surreal feel, and Im fairly happy with it. I wish I could have synched the piano to the text better, but ala's flash is balls for handling sound.
The graphics where all drawn in Graphics Gale, mostly with the pencil tool, although I did cheat and let code do some of the work for me (like the water is actually just a 32x32 square that gets re sized to make waves...)

Anyhow, Enjoy.

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Comments (archive)

KavuDX says ...

Really liked your approach to the theme, but I had one huge problem with the game. The text scrolls TOO FAST! "My mother was pregnant and then..."
And the help text, on the beggining of the actual gameplay was hindered because of my sudden movements, I felt like I skiped 3 or 4 instructions because I accidentaly left the island or dashed too soon or something like that.

But, nevertheless, it was real fun, and the story was very interesting.

sander says ...

I got a 60 kill combo and I don't know how.

dock says ...

This was a very nice surprise. I loved the graphics and theme, and the controls were fun too. I had some performance problems on my laptop, but for the most part this was very pleasant.

Sophie Houlden says ...

honestly the game ran too slow for me to actually 'play' this, but I really liked the feel of it :)

refrag says ...

I have no idea what I was doing! I definitely like the way you interpreted the theme though.

Tom 7 says ...

I liked this weird game. Is there any reason not to be dashing constantly? You fly much faster, you get a beacon, you damage enemies instead of dying, and it's the only way to go upward to where the floating babies are. The objective was always in the same place, so once I found it, the later levels were pretty easy. I upgraded only my health. I didn't really understand how to damage enemies or how to avoid getting damaged, but I did get "better" at it. Lots of spelling mistakes in the text, btw. Good job on the audio atmosphere.

Endurion says ...

Actually not that far from art game ;)
Not too much of a game but quite gripping emotionally. However I wished I could speed up the text in the passages between stages. And it really takes a minute to actually start a stage.

Entar says ...

Weird. Interesting and more emotionally involving than the typical LD entry, though. Good music too.

eli says ...

One of my favorite entries so far! I especially love the music. Some of the sound effects bring to mind Amon26's games, also the enemy sprites.

You did a great deal of ambient construction here, which I am quite fond of. The parallax clouds and smudges, the sound work.

The game ran very slow, including some of the text effects (I think it showed the text before it trashed the level, and some update loops might still be running).

For only 48 hours, something definitely has to give. I would humbly suggest that perhaps you concentrate on a smaller piece of the world, maybe getting one or two levels working better, instead of spreading yourself "thin".

But the outcome really is interesting, and I am not complaining =)

Hamumu says ...

This sounds like from the other comments that it's not working right for me (but it's flash, surely it's the same?). I absolutely can't tell when I'm killing enemies, and I seem to dash right through them, and then die randomly. I can't even see the enemies most of the time. The whole thing moves at uber-light-speed, but also is jerky, and the movement jumps all over oddly. It feels super broken. It seems like on each level my movement got more erratic (but after writing and erasing this comment I did manage to pass the levels!).

The stuff I saw before playing was cool and interesting, but playing was... a mess. I think more to do with bugs than intent. I really liked the jittery glitch effects on the title (which I will assume weren't bugs...).

philomory says ...

I really wanted to enjoy this game, it looked pretty awesome. However... you aren't kidding when you say it 'needs hardcore optimizations', I spent the whole time with the CPU spiked and it took whole minutes for the plot sections to go by. I enjoyed the plot, but by the time I gave up and closed it, I had actually spent more time (much more time, really) watching the plot than playing the game. I know this isn't entirely your fault, largely it's my computer, but...

SonnyBone says ...

This was a trip. A good one.