Sailing the seas of chaos
Find mazes in a mandelbrot fractal, find the map to find the next maze!
How to play:
For the maze levels: navigate the maze and collect the map! Avoid the ghosts! WASD or arrows will move your pirate ship. You can shoot cannons with the space bar, but that will depend on the orientation of your ship, and cannons are slow moving projectiles. However, they may clear the maps to make navigation easier, and help deal with the meddlesome ghosts.
The ghosts will remove one heart every time they touch you, and when your hearts are gone, it will be game over. :(
For the fractal levels: navigate using WASD or arrows, and Q/E or page up/page down to zoom in and out. The map will give you coordinates to get to, and the center of the UI will tell you if there is a level to enter.
Extra: The "O" button turns on and off sound.
Extra: In the fractal level, the "T" button turns off all non-fractal elements, should you want to just browse the Mandelbrot fractal to your hearts content.
Score: +1 for shooting rocks (hey why not it's fun), +50 for collecting the map. And -25 for shooting ghosts, we want to promote nonviolence even if they are already dead, and attempting to remove your hearts.
Things that will get fixed in the post-compo version!
I have the coordinates reversed in the fractal levels. I should fix that.
Better indication of where levels are. This was not easy and will easily take some time.
The places where the levels are, are not very interesting in the mandelbrot set.
There are only 10 levels. In fact, it might crash if you attempt to go further.
Sometimes the cannonballs do not collide with the rocks.
Ghosts could move smarter.
Your HTML version of the font may not render the hearts correctly, so you don't know how many lives you have left.
I'm sure there are many more issues but I can't think of them now.
Extra info:
Fractals done by methods learned from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY7liQVPQSc
and
https://github.com/nicolasmaclean/Mandelbrot/blob/master/mandelbrot/Assets/
Maze done by the methods learned from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_generation_algorithm
(specifically I am using the Depth Search algorithm)
Perlin noise (used in the background of the maze levels)
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mathf.PerlinNoise.html
No really Unity does that for you, it's easy to use! Compared to the other things I implemented.
Comments (5)
That was surprising. I was amped to start exploring the Mandelbrot fractal, but was given simple mazes instead. Why? Why complicate a simple and interesting idea? Zooming into the fractal trying to find clues about the next location while getting lost in the detail could have been pretty cool. Well, better keep that idea for the future then.
I was hoping for a similar gameplay than what Huvaa described, so like him I was quite excited at the idea then had to lower my expectations a bit!
Too bad you couldn't develop the "fractal overwold" navigation more, I'm sure it would have been awesome. This gives many ideas like trying somehow to inline puzzles/mazes in the same world as the fractal… Maybe even having the fractal collide with the ship, making it an actual island around which we have to navigate (alternate game name: "Coastline paradox" :D). It could then let you use the fractal features part of the puzzles themselves… well, having ideas is cheaper than implementing them!
The gameplay itself turned out quite good actually. Mixing Pac-Man with Bomberman mechanics is a good mashup in itself and it gets challenging as levels progress. The art felt inconsistent though, in particular those painted rocks that serve as maze walls don't blend well with the rest.
I like the mysterious music played while exploring the fractal :)
You might want to add the "Web" platform tag to make this easier to find!
The game is an interesting mishmash of art styles, reminding me of the good (‽) old days of early Windows 95 indie games. In this case, it works!
I picked up the map in the first level, but nothing happened. Am I missing something?