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A jam submission

RUNNER/GRIDLOCKView game page

Drift, dodge, and steal your way through an abstract future city
Submitted by Drew Harry — 4 hours, 10 minutes before the deadline
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RUNNER/GRIDLOCK's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Innovation#154.2504.250
Polish#683.0003.000
Overall#703.1673.167
Fun#1142.2502.250

Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Successful or Incomplete?

Success

Did development of the game take place during the 7DRL Challenge week?

Yes

Is your game a roguelike?

Yes

Turn-based

No

Meta-Progression

No

Roguelike Elements
Procedural city, tile-based, perma-death, simulation

Screenshots

Yes

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit)

What I liked: Fun concept, the basic idea of a racing game roguelike and your choice of flavour for it is a cool and daring combination. The art is fantastic, massive kudos to your collaborator. You've put a lot of thought into the mechanics and how to keep things moving and interesting for the player. There's a lot of variety in the kind of units and obstacles on the map.

What I did not like: The controls. The way momentum works and the hard corners and cluttered nature of levels makes for a very frustrating combination. Neither playing nor the learning curve are fun for me, though I imagine people with more experience playing racing games might take to it a bit better. Boomer enemies are very difficult to avoid. In general, it's very hard to get anywhere without crashing. Another more minor criticism is that I had trouble visually parsing the map, specifically what tiles block movement/make you crash and which you can path through. The map looks quite busy and I think more consistent visual colour coding would help legibility.

Still, very cool concept. I would be very interested in playing a version of this that's more of a precision racer (a Snake game-like, if you will), where there's acceleration and braking but turning response is instant.

Submitted(+1)

Took me while to locate where my character was, a bit weird on the movements can't explain why. Probably just a matter of taste. Enjoyed the drifting, fun idea! The Capsule art is beautiful!

Submitted

It looks really slick and the drifting is fun but I found the "turn-based with realtime ticks" a little jarring as the movement kept stopping and starting. I think it could be interesting to experiment with changing the animation style to be smoother, and may introduce a fully turn based mode. Also I'm not sure if it was just running slow on my machine of if it was running at the intended speed. Might be useful to let the player choose the game speed.

Also it seems to freeze after I die and I need to refresh the page each time.

Developer

Thanks for playing!

Performance is probably not intentional; it’s a home grown engine with some inefficiencies in the rendering core that I need to swap out. Friends don’t let friends fillText every cell every frame! Cache those images! Or make sprites like a normal person!

I’ll play some more with the animation. I recall some reason in early prototyping why I didn’t go fully smooth, but that reason may be irrelevant now. :D

Death freeze, hmm. Can’t recreate. But if you have any JS logs it might help me find it.

Submitted

Respect for rolling your own engine!

I tried again to reproduce it and I can't. I was probably pressing "R" instead of "B" to restart or something. User error on my part!

Movement is cool once you get the hang of it. Feels really great to do a turbo drift right around a building or just out of reach of a blocker or threading the needle through traffic! 

Submitted(+1)

Great idea, but have some bugs, for some reason I can't restart the level after a failure, need to restart the game. But in general looks unusual and interesting to me, and I really like vizualization.

Developer

Thanks! After a failure “b” should get you back to the title screen. But restarting games successfully has always been … a challenge for me.