A Ludum Dare 49 Jam game by m1nus (@m1nus) , and lucasvb (@lucasvb)

arps_screenshot.png

A weird vaporwave puzzle variant of the Rock Paper Scissors game!

Move the pieces around following the Rock Papers Scissors beating rule in order to get points. Chain attacks to get combo bonuses, but beware of what’s at the end of the chain!

As you make mistakes metal blocks start to appear, making it more difficult to create attacks. Whenever the metal bar is full, a new metal block is guaranteed to appear.

Get things right and you’ll eventually charge your NUKE BAR, which gets you a NUKE you can use to blow stuff up and clear the level. Create a nuke chain reaction to get a ton of extra points!



As you progress, metal blocks will start to appear naturally more often, which will force you to make strategical sacrifices in order to keep playing.

Notes:

  • I couldn’t finish title screen and other options in time (like muting sfx or music, resetting the game, detecting game over conditions), but the core gameplay is here. It probably needs balancing too. But such is the nature of Ludum Dare! ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
  • The power bars at the bottom indicate whether a nuke will drop or a metal bar will drop next. The nuke bar fills as you do good attacks and combos, or explode a nuke. The metal bar fills every time you make a mistake (your move ends up with your piece beaten). (If you do a combo attack that ends with your piece beaten, the metal bar fills with the combo too!) The original intent was for the CPU to counter-attack every move, so that’s what would fill the metal bar, making the game more and more difficult with time, requiring strategy. But due to time-constraints, I ended up making metal blocks appear randomly more frequently despite the metal bar level. So it kind of ends up confusing to have the bar around. But it’s too late now to change. :P
  • I developed the game under Chrome, but also tested with Firefox. Both seem to work fine, but hopefully there's no serious bugs! Warning: Game seems broken on Safari browser and Apple devices. As I have no access to these, I cannot really tets or fix this.

Featuring:

  • A crappy engine written from scratch! (what was I thinking?! D:)
  • Double-retro vaporwave 16-bit aesthetics/graphics. (We heard it’s all the rage with the kids these days!)
  • A shitty soundtrack loop made by a guy who has zero musical skills!
  • A pesky flickering bug that I have no idea where it is coming from! FIXED!
  • GreenSock’s animation library and Howler’s audio library.
  • And … not much more!

Anyway, we barely made it this time, and it was a lot of fun! I hope you guys enjoy whatever we managed to put together. <3

Mobile Support: Game seems to run fine on a tablet (Android), but on phones there's no scaling so the screen gets cut. Sorry! This would be considered a new feature in my book and would require major changes (I think).

Credits:

  • LucasVB: Code, music, some of the art, concept.
  • m1nus: art, sound effects, concept, QA.

Changelog:

  • v0.20:
    • Fixed major bug where getting a nuke with only metal blocks queued in to fall would hang the game. Major bummer for late-stage games!
    • Added particle cap to improve performance in huge explosions.
    • Fixed issue where too many explosions would make further explosions silent. Now a single sound is played and loudness is adjusted instead.
  • v0.15: 
    • Fixed the sprite animations not playing, sped up the attack animation and FIXED THE FLICKERING BUG. It was caused by me removing sprites from the rendering list as I was drawing the list. This messed up when the particles were getting removed off the list halfway through the animation, and messing up the rendering of entities.
    • Fixed "shine" of selected sprites not animating (pause = true was in the wrong object!)
Updated 5 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars
(5 total ratings)
Authors1ucasvb, m1nus
GenrePuzzle
Made withFL Studio, Aseprite
Tagsbomb, Ludum Dare 49, Retro, rock-paper-scissors
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsMouse
LinksLudum Dare

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

I did not expect this concept to be that fun, well done ! Very simple mix of mechanics, but from which emerge a lot of depth ! I played it for a lot longer than I expected ^^

I think a little more feedback on the metal gauge would be neat, it took me some time and a re-read of the description to understand properly how it works. It is not obvious at first that it is detrimental to end a combo on a wrong element. Other than that, great job !

Thank you for the kind words! :)

Yeah we had some other ideas about gameplay, as well as sound and visuals planned for the metal bar and the combos and "bad combos", but we did not have time to implement it all.

We're thinking of making a proper game out of it in the next months, so it should get a proper polish then. Cheers!