Chaos
A 2D one-stick shooter made only with particles where you have to bring the chaos back to the world.
You have to take down the order to please the Jellymancer.
Destroy as many united soldiers as you can to create the perfect chaos.
The destiny of the Alakajam is in your hands. The reign of the order is at its end.
Highscores are on, show the Jellymancer what how good you are (less than him) !
Tools used:
- The rust language to compile to web assembly
- quicksilver a library that made it easy to open a window and draw circles
- A nice font by Tiny Worlds
This was the first game I made that runs in a browser and the first time I create something in rust without following a step by step tutorial, but I'm pretty happy with the result ! The only sad point is that I couldn't find a way to play audio from my code (I probably wouldn't had time to create some anyway), so… no sound :(
Don't hesitate to criticize and suggest improvements !
Comments (7)
Well that's certainly colorful :-) It plays smoothly, though I always find shooting in the move direction hard when it's not with the keyboard. But that may be more on me.
In the first wave (at least, I think it gets better later, when there are more different kinds of them) the opponents have the the tendency to cluster together.
There's also a bit of a negative feedback loop, in that if you're already dong poorly, then you have to pick lives, which in turn gives you less chance during the next round. This is true for a lot of games though!
Sorry to hear about the problems you had with sound. If you do get it working, I found that for sound effects a very quick way to make them is to generate (sort of) random ones with BFXR. Multiple times I was done within 15 ~ 20 minutes with all of my sound effects, including writing it into the code (I've been recording my own lately though). Sadly BFX uses flash :-/
P.S. How's Rust working out for you? It's been on my 'like to learn someday' list for ages.
Wow, a Rust game, that's the first I've seen in a jam I think! I love Rust as a language and have been meaning to try it for gamedev, but am stuck on analysis paralysis: there are just so many half-complete alpha-stage engines, libraries and frameworks to choose from! Amethyst, Bevy, Quicksilver, Piston, or just mix and match libraries (winit, wgpu, specs, …). So, like @remco, I too would love to read more about your experiences so far. (Btw @remco now that I'm highlighting you anyway, jfxr can do pretty much everything bfxr can and then some, and does not need flash.)
Anyway, I think this is a really impressive result, given the limitation of rendering only text and basic geometry. It looks and feels colourful, dynamic, action-packed; very juicy even without the sound effects, to the point that I can almost hear them in my head. It runs smoothly too. Moving into the end-of-level upgrades is a cool feature that makes it more immersive than simply presenting four buttons.
Merging the moving and targeting controls both into the mouse is an interesting design decision. It means you always have to move towards the enemies if you want to shoot at them, so if you get too close you'll have to back off and go around to try again. Moreover, you can choose between moving the mouse far away from your character, which means having more accurate aim but also moving further towards the enemies, or not moving very far but also losing accuracy.
I'm no good at these types of games, so I didn't get very far, especially because the difficulty ramps up rather quickly.
Bug: I didn't get any enemies at wave 2, it just ended immediately and let me pick two powerups.
There is audio, actually, and it goes like this: click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click! Not a fan. Interesting visuals make up for the lack, but they don't sooth my aching hand.
The "single stick" idea works while the power level hasn't gone through the roof. Once it has, this becomes an exercise in pushing towards a mass of enemies driving them back with a mass of bullets and repeating said exercise for many a wave. Rather easy unfortunately, as it is a cool idea. Maybe reserve this push mechanic to a temporary power up and keep the standard weapon less spectacular.
About the only thing keeping the challenge alive at later stages is the ever increasing ache and enemies arriving off screen. The former is not pleasant and the latter is not fair. With less particles on screen, enemy appearances could be signaled before hand with an arrow per chance. Alternatively they could appear on screen to begin with, first as a shadow or some sort.
Given the technology, this is certainly a successful demo. Nonetheless, interaction design shouldn't be forgotten and neither should the physical well-being of the end user.
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| # | User | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @AaronBacon | 1526 | View all 1 scores |
Chaos I see. "Ships" of a sort. I dont see maps.
I see this as having more potential as a twin stick shooter?
Good job.