Sadly, you can’t vote on LD competition entries unless you are yourself an LD entrant (for the competition or the Jam), probably to stop hordes of adoring fans of popular developers skewing the votes.

Enemies originally did aggro when you shot them, it stopped working somewhere along the line and I didn’t prioritise fixing it because the game wasn’t too easy without it.

However, it’s probably the same bug that causes the bots to camp your corpse after the difficulty spike, and that isn’t intended. My hope was that around the time you’re getting bored of killing maxed out bots, there’s a sudden ‘event’ that you probably won’t survive, then they’ll wander off and you’ll come back, rekit yourself and kill them all. Once you do, there’s a lame sort of you-win message, but right now whether it’s possible is largely luck.

Guns! Multiple barrels are actually about rate of fire rather than damage, a mechanic that would make a lot more sense if they fired in serial rather than parallel. Didn’t have time to make that look right though, so let’s pretend the other types of plasma are faster to fire but weaker, so you need two or three of them.

I didn’t want weapons that do different amounts of damage because I wanted shields to have simple clear rules: they stop all shots, but always break doing it. If you’re inside somene’s shields, of course, things get a bit less clear. I might make shields shunt you back a bit if you try to go through them, that would feel pretty natural and make well-protected bots harder to scan.

The fire-when-dead bug is a big one, and I’ll fix it. It also causes the RateOfFire crash I think. The blind enemies is strange – I know how it happens, but I don’t know why my quick fix isn’t working – they’re supposed to check they have a vision cone every second and give themselves one if they don’t. I wouldn’t mind it, but they’re the worst come the difficulty spike – they can camp you and your bot doesn’t know not to come back to life, because it can’t tell it’s being seen.

Thanks again for all the great feedback. Please do vote on it in the Ludum Dare compo if you can be bothered – positive or negative. You need to make an account but that’s all I think.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=3103

I know the bugs will bother you, but if it weren’t for the blog, I would not have guessed this took only two days.

The controls bothered me a bit, but the difficulty of controlling the bot made me want to go back more than the simplicity of WASD for movement would have.

Kudos!

Also obviously this thing’s going to be absolutely full of bugs, but for the record I have encountered:

1. A situation where I could fire while dead, killing the enemy who was camping me (due to dying inside the shield of an enemy, maybe?)
2. Shields that deplete in weird order if host is fired upon from within them. Would being able to actually bypass a few shots by moving point-blank be fun?
3. Enemies with a vision cone of zero. A bit funny, not game-breaking, but I suspect unintentional.

Here’s the report I got:
http://pastebin.com/6ni20f9j

It’s a fun little game to play while pretending to be working. Like a better Solitaire.

Although the ominous moment? The learning cliff?

Yeah, no idea what to do there other than

1) die

2) Hope you respawn.