Ludum Dare 24
August 24th-27th 2012 :: Theme: Evolution
Evolutionary Designer - FrozenCow - 48 Hour Compo Entry
Web | Web (Post-compo) | Source | Timelapse | Kongregate
Tutorial is highly recommended! Chrome or Firefox highly recommended!
Mixes World of Goo with Qwop by allowing you to design your own organisms and control them to get to the end of 6 levels.
Controls are explained in the tutorial, but to summarize:
Space: switch between designer- and play-mode
In designer-mode:
Drag left mouse on blob: create muscle/blob
Drag middle mouse on blob: drag blob around
Right mouse: remove muscle/blob
Hovering on a muscle and pressing any key will bind the key to the muscle
In play-mode:
R: resets the level
Any key you have bound to muscles for movement (numeric, alphabetic and arrow keys)
You can also share your creatures with others when you press escape in designer-mode.
If you can't figure out a level, you can watch my playthrough for some inspiration (contains spoilers): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq9deX4v7Ss
View FrozenCow's journal. | View all entries by FrozenCow
Ratings
![]() | Coolness | 63% |
| #7 | Innovation | 4.17 |
| #22 | Overall | 3.89 |
| #79 | Fun | 3.50 |
| #88 | Graphics | 3.83 |
| #190 | Theme | 3.39 |
| #201 | Humor | 2.62 |
| #335 | Mood | 2.70 |
| #454 | Audio | 2.17 |
Comments
Wow. Beautiful game, seems very polished.
I do think the simulation is a little hard to control--it is kind of the point of QWOP, but it makes it really difficult to design and control things. Dragging the blob creature (for example, to right it) feels very slow. The muscles did feel very gooey, though, which felt nice.
With regard to difficulty, I think it is hard to balance a game like this, and while I can offer criticism I can't really blame you for the 48 hours you had. For every level up to the one with the ledge, I simply used a triangle-creature, as it was easy to control and got the job done. When I got to the ledge, I felt under-prepared, and couldn't pull it off. I like to think that I'm a spacial thinker, but it was beyond me how to move something big over to the right when I had previously only used a triangle. Perhaps allowing freer level flow would have helped, letting me try out complex designs on my own within environments.
Overall, though, it looks awesome, and I really like the concept and theme matching.
I really enjoyed it! I liked messing around with it and trying to beat my highscore! The level with the ledge was too hard for my mind to comprehend though :P
Here are some fun creatures I've found during development:
Big: http://pastebin.com/E6SLvaGr
Wheel: http://pastebin.com/0qC2VKiK
Walker: http://pastebin.com/5DPMZye5
Simple walker: http://pastebin.com/rhGRH2rU
One issue though: you can bind the 'R' key to a muscle, but that's the reset button. Nothing game-breaking but an oversight.
Used the wrong box to comment, apparently scores only save with the top comment box.
@31eee384, Thanks for the helpful comments. I think the gravity is a bit too low and the velocity-damping too. I'll play a bit with these values the coming week.
With regards to the levels, yes, I tried to 'force' the player to change their design a few times, but for small creatures, yes, the last one is the only time you need to change it. Maybe bridging a small gap might force the player to create bigger creatures.
@My Milked Eek, yes I should fix that, escape also binds to muscle.
For anyone who can't figure out a level, I recorded a playthrough with one possible solution for each level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq9deX4v7Ss
@Barry Adrams, what browser were you using? Have you tried Chrome or Firefox?
Good game! I like the game mechanic. There are a lot of fun!
I made a blob that glitched the physics and slid along on its own xD great game though, shame that you didn't really need to evolve for most of it :/ I'm sure that could be fixed with added mechanics like wheels and such
Wow amazing game and idea ! I love it !
Just upset when all blob at are ground blocking any deplacement and forcing us to restart.
Beautiful. Thank you making this.
btw, I kept getting stuck in design mode, on Chrome on a Mac.
I will make the creature reset back to its original position when switching from controlmode to designmode. I hope I'll get some time coming week. Also been looking at highscores for the finish-times.
Very clever idea, and highly polished! Impressive! (doesn't work well on firefox, but works on Whrome)
My only question is : Why did you used World of Goo graphical design ? You could have created your own design to give your game more personnality.
While using firefox 15.0.1, my mouse buttons do not process in edit mode. The tutorial was fun and I liked the concept.
Very polished!
I so bad at finding effective combinations :D
Great job!
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Pretty fun to mess with, even if most of my designs just end up tangling themselves up in a ball.