Ludum Dare 38: A Small World (TARJECTORIES)

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Tarjectories by csanyk for LD48-38: A Small WorldMy latest release is called TARJECTORIES, and it’s my entry for Ludum Dare 38, A Small World.

Play and Rate TARJECTORIES at Ludum Dare

The title is a mashup of “target” and “trajectory”. It’s also an easy misspelling of “trajectory”.

You control a little gun turret on a little world, shooting little projectiles at little targets. Use the planet’s spin, and your shot power and gun elevation to put shells on the target.

Destroy all targets on the planet to advance to the next level.

You will need to use your judgment and instincts to know how much power to give the shot, and what angle to fire at. Most targets can only be hit by indirect fire, relying on the trajectory of the shot as its path curves due to gravity. Here’s an early work-in-progress screen capture:

TARJECTORIES - Early work-in-progress

Controls

Adjust your turret’s gun elevation by the left/right arrow keys, or A and D keys.

Adjust gun power by using up/down arrow keys, or W and S keys.

Fire using the Space bar or Enter keys.

Scoring

  • Direct hit: If you hit a target directly with the shot, you will score a base amount of 1000 points. This is doubled for each consecutive hit you make: 2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, 32000, etc.
  • Indirect hit: If you hit the ground near a target, the explosion from your shot may destroy the target anyway. But you will lose your consecutive hit score multiplier, since when your shot hit the ground, technically that was a miss. This will score you 1000 points, and count as your first hit on your next consecutive hit multiplier.
  • Bonus timer: There is a timer in each level, and if you manage to destroy all the targets before it expires, you’ll get bonus points.
  • Perfection bonus: If you mange to hit all the targets in a level without missing (all direct hits), you will earn a perfection bonus. The base perfection bonus is 10000 points * the number of hits scored in the level, raised to an exponent equal to the number of Planets in the level. This is how you get the truly astronomical scores. If you get a perfect bonus on a multi-planet level, you deserve it.

Winning and Losing

The only way to lose in TARJECTORIES is to accidentally shoot yourself. This can happen if your shot orbits your planet and comes back around to hit you, or if your planet is rotating fast enough that it puts you in the path of your shot as it falls back to the ground. Don’t do that.

To win, you must complete every level of the game. You can play again; the game will be re-randomized on your subsequent re-plays.

Download TARJECTORIES

TARJECTORIES is currently able to run on Windows.

The source code is also available for you to download, if you wish.

TARJECTORIES was built using GameMaker Studio 1.4, Bfxr, and Audacity. It took about 22.5 hours of development time for me to built. Everything was built from scratch, by me.

Version History

1.0.0.0

Initial release

Bug reports:

  1. One user has reported a bug whereby two worlds appear on level 1. Unable to replicate. There should be no way for more than one world to be created on level 1, and even if there were, the oPlanet object has collision detection with other oPlanets, and re-positions them in the event of a collision until they are no longer in collision.
  2. FATAL ERROR in
    action number 1
    of Step Event0
    for object oGround_explosion:Push :: Execution Error – Variable Get -2.t_angle(100033, -2147483648)
    at gml_Object_oGround_explosion_StepNormalEvent_1 (line 11) – ex.t_angle = other.t_angle;
  3. Stats tracker fails to count a miss when a shot destroys itself due to timeout.
1.0.1.3 Bug fixes:

  1. Stats tracker fails to count a miss when a shot destroys itself due to timeout. FIXED.
  2. oGround_explosion error referencing non-existent other in Step Event when a collision is detected with a target. Replaced other with the id of the target instance.
1.0.2.4 Numerous tweaks, mostly to the level_timer, minor bug fixes, and polish.
1.0.3.5

“GE” edition released. Feature complete.
1.0.4.8 Fixes the graphical bug some users were reporting where on the first level it looks like there’s two worlds overlapping each other. The bug was the result of using surface and draw functions in the Create event, rather than in the Draw event where they belong. I guess it affects certain users who have certain video cards, because I was not able to replicate the problem on my machine, but a user who did experience the bug confirmed that it was fixed by this release. Final build for Compo entry.

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