Apoapsis - A game I made woo (not complete, but functional) - v0.3!

[TristanLuigi]

So I've been working on a game called Apoapsis. It's a game where walls come at you and you have to go through the holes. It's a pretty familiar concept, but the twist comes when you have to control yourself in polar coordinates (radius and angle) rather than rectangular. The game is more or less fully functional - the gameplay elements are done, but I need to add music, a start menu, lives (for the time being, it tracks misses instead), and a game over screen. The game gets harder over time (you can keep track via the level counter) but it caps at level 20. The counter will keep going, but the game won't get harder; you level up every ten seconds.
Controls:
W/S - Increase/decrease radius
A/D - Spin anticlockwise/clockwise

Windows Executable
Love2D Source

Feel free to criticize the hell out of this, I definitely need some input on how to improve it (mechanics-wise) although I probably won't do anything like power-ups.


Changelog:
v0.0 - Initial public release
v0.1 - Added damage and level up flashes, added music, tweaked relationship between radius and angular speed, tweaked difficulty curve, removed debug mouse control
v0.2 - All timing now uses time instead of framecount. The balance of difficulty might need more tweaking.
v0.3 - Increased minimum radius (to prevent spazzy rotation), used a .ogg instead of a .wav to reduce filesize by a factor of 7.

[Ad Bot]

[Ipquarx]

Can't run because love.dll is missing apparently

[TristanLuigi]

Can't run because love.dll is missing apparently

odd
i can run the exe just fine?

i recompiled it, hopefully it works
i see no reason it wouldn't, i'm assuming you downloaded the .exe rather than the .love

[gebenuwell]

uh

i tried renaming the love file

[Headcrab Zombie]

odd
i can run the exe just fine?

cuz you have the dll
either a) there's a love.dll binary in the same folder as the .exe that you need to distribute with the .exe or b) love is bad and makes players download a whole library to play the game

i don't know anything about love to say which it is but i'd hope the former

[Maui69]

should've read the distribution guide better!
https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution

[TristanLuigi]

should've read the distribution guide better!
https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution

yeah i just read that and you don't have to be a condescending forget about it
i saw that and assumed that the DLLs were added when you appended the exe, as it was kind of written in a "just make sure" kind of way

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45988099/Apoapsis.zip

[Maui69]

yeah i just read that and you don't have to be a condescending forget about it

i wasn't trying to be a condescending forget, i was just trying to help
:(
i tried out your game and i thought it was pretty neat
my only issue was that it kept doing weird 360s across the entire circle which would make me lose
otherwise tho it felt really nice and smooth and the art style was nice and minimalistic which i liked

[TristanLuigi]

oh you're not supposed to use the mouse
it was a debug feature i forgot to remove

and i'm really sorry i was kind of irate when i posted, the way you worded that came across as "haha you didn't read the thing durr!"

[Maui69]

oh you're not supposed to use the mouse
it was a debug feature i forgot to remove

oh that explains things
i tried it with the keyboard now and found it super hard
keyboard movement is a bit too slow for me to dodge the wall thingies
that was probably related to the fact it was at like level 34 tho.
i feel like this game would be pretty cool on a touch screen
it's pretty cool tho!

edit: actually i just played with it a bit more and realised that if i just fully extend the circle and then just sit on the right side of it i can dodge everything really easily
i'm not sure what you could do about that other than perhaps make the circle slowly retract its radius? shrug

[TristanLuigi]

thanks man, again sorry
you know how it is when you're frustrated

edit: the way it's set up now, increasing the radius slightly decreases angular speed. i could increase that effect, i guess

edit2: ayy version 0.1, added stuff

[pefu19]

it runs faaaar too loving fast for me, its unplayable, i dont even know wtf is going on

[portify]

it runs faaaar too loving fast for me, its unplayable, i dont even know wtf is going on

This is the problem:

function love.update(dt)
   frame = frame + 1;
   cooldown = cooldown - 1
   t = t + dt

With how this is written, whenever cooldown reaches 0, it spawns a wall. It's decreased by 1 every frame, which means that at a low FPS, they spawn very slowly, and at a high FPS, they spawn very quickly. To fix it, decrease cooldown by dt instead of a constant 1 and set the initial value of cooldown appropriately.

you get a level up every 500 frames.

Also this. Noo. Use the accumulative dt value (seconds) instead.

[TristanLuigi]

This is the problem:

function love.update(dt)
   frame = frame + 1;
   cooldown = cooldown - 1
   t = t + dt

With how this is written, whenever cooldown reaches 0, it spawns a wall. It's decreased by 1 every frame, which means that at a low FPS, they spawn very slowly, and at a high FPS, they spawn very quickly. To fix it, decrease cooldown by dt instead of a constant 1 and set the initial value of cooldown appropriately.

Also this. Noo. Use the accumulative dt value (seconds) instead.

I'll try it, but all the controls and walls use frames too but I might get it to work

Edit: Done, and I think the game is mostly rebalanced. It gets extremely difficult by level 20 (the cap), but I think someone better than me could probably do it OK. It'll take a while for Dropbox to sync.