August 24th-27th 2012 :: Theme: Evolution
-Swarm-
Trapped in a field, our hero attempts to fight of swarms of creatures that seem to evolve after every wave. How far can he get?
*XP Users and other's who have the game crash upon starting: I've Forced software processing and changed the texture pages if that doesn't work then I really don't know what will (Use Alternate Version)*
*After 48H Bugfixs: Added an auto evolve key that was originally accidentally commented out, "U" press to autoevolve and start next round. Reduced time between spawns,tweaked movement algorithm, decreased laser lock-down time*
*To play original download this http://www.mediafire.com/?i0c62eug09qjy3t*
Controls:
- In Game-
WASD: Movement
Mouse: Aim
Left Click: LASERS!!!!
Right Click: Bullets
- Selection -
W and S: scroll through Evolution options
A and D: Modify said options
Space: Accept
Each round forces you to select the next form of evolution's for the swarm. Every 20 waves up to wave 100 a new spawn page is unlocked and must be enabled to continue.
Dodge through the enemies bullets (blue) and lasers (red) while returning your own bullets (white) and lasers (red). Lasers have a slight charge time in which they are lighter then it's damaging stage. For the player it also freezes your character for 1/2 a second.
How high of a score can you get?
Highscores: http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/arcade/swarm-ld24/9347/#high-scores
*the spawn type "Just Don't" is extremely powerful but provides x2 multiplier per spawn page it is on*
Downloads and Links
Ratings
![]() | Coolness | 100% |
#245 | Theme | 3.23 |
#320 | Innovation | 2.97 |
#348 | Fun | 2.83 |
#396 | Graphics | 2.87 |
#442 | Overall | 2.85 |
#544 | Humor | 1.59 |
#559 | Audio | 1.61 |
#585 | Mood | 2.20 |
Comments
Has huge potential for fun, but it took some trial-and-error to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do on the very first screen. The UI was not very intuitive...
Personally, I think I would have preferred some kind of automatic evolution of the waves, rather than starting and stopping a lot. It's breaks the potential of getting into a "zen" state that works well with these sorts of games.
I'm also not sure that I ever want to rely on the laser. Being stunned is pretty sucky -- you might want to remove that component. It's already challenging enough to use with the charge-up time.
space doesn't work for me. I can select everything and set "enable" to yes, but nothing happens when I press space. Am I doing something wrong?
You should give more infos how the menu on the right screenhalf worked. Was hard to figure out, especially the current selected option is not highlighted that much.
For others: use arrow keys UP and DOWN to select an option und use RIGHT and LEFT to change it.
Nevermind. I didn't refresh the page so I couldn't see everchangers comment. I figured it out now.
It took me a while to get how the game worked, but once I figured it out, it became a fun and trippy experience.
As already mentioned, this game could potentially be great fun. I like the idea of letting the player choose how the difficulty is increased.
I had a few problems, though:
-The GUI is unintuitive. I would not have been able to start the game without everchanger's comment.
-The movement of the player feels a bit too "spongy" (in lack of a better word). Maybe the acceleration rate is too low.
-no audio. Some sound effects would have done a great service to this game.
-The laser seems underpowered because you stop when you use it.
Well. Given a lot more time to balance the game, and a lot more explanation than the UI, this game would be really fun. For now it's still fun, but it doesn't feel balanced at all, and to be honest the evolution system feels a bit broken, and enemies of higher levels seem to have a negligible effect. I can't for the life of me figure out what the "upgrade points" are, either.
(T)rippy mode was awesome though... before my eyes started to water.
It just crashes on me without any hint of why, as soon as it opens.
Here (Windows xp, 32 bit) game crashes at startup. Both fixed and unfixed versions.
Game blows up for me, but I'm trying to run it via wine under linux. Sorry! http://i.imgur.com/zGWue.png
This was a cool concept, although, like quill18 said, it sort of kills any flow if you're stopping every 20 seconds to evolve everything.
The graphics needed work; not so much from an aesthetic point of view (I'm usually fine with a game that looks charmingly unpolished), but more so in the sense of clarity. For one, I feel like the camera is zoomed in far too much, and the cyan boundaries are too hard to spot, so I end up crashing into them more than I should.
After 5 rounds, there's no new spawn page to enable, so it seems like that's the unofficial end of the game.
It's a good effort, and could be more interesting with some extensive post-comp work.
Patched the bugfix version to fix the page's it should be every 10 rounds it enables a new one not every 1
http://screencast.com/t/rTKtxi1VJ it doesnt seem to work for me.
Updated again, should fix the XP problems / graphic card incompatibility. People with weak graphics cards but strong cpu's should also try it for speed improvements.
The first link mentions Java, but I couldn't tell if it runs on anything other than windows? I tried the GameJolt link from my mac, but no joy.
Kinda tricky to get started, but it's really quite enjoyable when you get into it - I love dual-stick styled shooters, and this stays quite true to the genre. :)
Man, this is crazy. I like the idea of having to give stats to things that aren't in your favour. You have to choose how you want to die. The downside I think, well it's good, but it's also bad, is that you can make so much of a difficulty jump when choosing things, so it forces the player to test how the game is affected a few times before they are able to get a fun difficulty. I think to combat that and also give others the choice, you should have some preset spawn pages, and allow players to not have to start a new one each time, because that means after they make 5 spawn pages they can't make another one and thus can't play the game again without restarting. But yeah, you did well.
Agree with the other comments here. Great fun once you get going but a little tricky to work out what is going on at first. Having to improve your opponents rather than yourself is very original.
Innovative idea, but not sure if it works. The action is basically that of a multidirectional shooter, but it doesn't have the same satisfaction. The stages are too short and shooting does not seem to be worth the bother.
Web version crashed for me, standalone worked fine however.
I'll chime in about the selection UI took me a few minutes plus a restart to work out that I need to open a page.
After a few levels game gets hectic. If you stop your dead :D
Space didn't work for me, but using the auto upgrade worked. Overall i think with some polish it could be pretty fun, but I do think the menus were a little hard to read/vague
I was confused by the menus, not sure exactly what I had to do to progress. Having said that I really liked the idea of the gameplay, running away from stuff was fun.
So yeah, had to read the top comment to get through the opening screen but then I kinda got it. Nice visual style.
Pretty good. I like the graphics and gameplay, but don't really like the upgrade interface. It could be more intuitive. Other than that, good game!
Once I found out you can defeat enemies by running into them without losing health it became a very different game. I really like the cube trail when you're moving around fast. Pretty interesting game overall that was fun to play.
sorry none of them worked. Maybe I'll download gamemaker and try with the source
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Fun game once you get past the initial menu, some more instructions might be needed, to start the game the player needs to enable a page, at the bottom of the screen, then the player needs to use all of the evolution points first then will the game strt when the spacebar is pressed. Quite fun, nice use of the theme!