Games galore : Abducer 4K

Contests 4K Game Competition - 2007
#1

Hi there…

Another Java 4K entry… ET is back! And this time, he really means business1 :slight_smile:

http://www.ahristov.com/abducer4k/screenshot-big.jpg

Full instructions here : http://www.ahristov.com/abducer4k/index.jsp

Play the game and share your captures! No two levels are the same, and flowers are always different. Share any beautiful flowers you find in your journey throughout the galaxy :slight_smile:

Due to incompatibilities and strange behaviours between OSes, I ended having to use two different sources for Linux and Windows. Linux version is a bit uglier, because the traction beam isn’t translucent but solid. For MacOS I’ve set the JNLP to use the Linux version, but I have no way of testing how it works.

Comments and ideas are appreciated :-). I don’t have much space left, but I hope if there are any bugs, there’s enough margin to fix them.

#2

Wow have to commend you on coming up with something original. Sucking flowers into space is not a genre I see often. I can tell you put a lot of work into the graphical aspects of the game, the gradients and randomized flowers are very nice.

Unfortunately the game seems a bit easy and goes a bit slower than I would like. About 10 minutes in I still had all my lives (which was like 5 or 6 guys by now) and it seemed I needed much more hits to die than I would expect. I think you should make the life go down much faster (2-4 times) but then regenerate after a level. And maybe increase the rate at which you can suck up the flowers. Something incremental would be cool, sorta like reverse gravity times 0.5. Also I think the “enemies” should shoot projectiles at a much faster rate, but then the shots should go slower. Right now it feels like it’s really hard to be able to dodge anything while using the tractorbeam. It just feels like you gotta sit there and endure it. Making the beam incremental (which would make the thing a little more powerful) and the shots more frequent but still possible to dodge would keep you on edge trying to balance between beaming and dodging. Or that’s how the theory works out in my head at least.

This has a lot of potential but it just needs to be a little more exciting. I’d like to know what anyone else thinks about the difficulty level as well… maybe wait for more comments before trying to change anything.

#3

Thanks for your ideas; I feel the same on some of the things you mention… Actually, this game started in reverse ( “I have a nice idea about making flowers, how do I make a game from this”?), and I also wanted it to be funny and to do some characterization (face expressions and so). The critters at one stage even pulled their tongues at you, but had to remove it due to size constraints :’(

I found I introduced a bug recently in the game, and that’s why probably you haven’t died :-\ : The seeds drop your health to zero, but don’t kill you. Even with health=0, no matter how many seeds hit you, you’re still alive… You have to crash into the ground with health = 0 to die. I’ll change this so that when your health drops to zero, it’s over.

#4

Hmm actually yea I did notice that. But my green meter didn’t even disappear entirely until about level 8 or so (i.e. still took quite a while).

#5

Strangley fun game! I notice though there seems to be no cap on horizontal speed - you can zip across the screen at insane speeds if you keep going in one direction!