Plasma Zone

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#1

Plasma Zone is my attempt at a game for the LD 48 game programming competition (with an hour to spare too!). Its an attempt to generate a totally random, pulsing, morphing playfield which you must dodge in (similar in many ways to traditional Japanease ‘bullet curtain’ shooters, but without anyone actually shooting at you).

802×602 82 KB

Controls and gameplay:

  • Arrows to move, space to jump.
  • Dodge bright flux which saps your health.
  • Shoot matter particles to create dark flux, which regenerates your health.
  • Zones only last a few short waves, see how many you can survive for!

Play via webstart (fullscreen) or play windowed.

Usual webstart notes and cavets apply. Should work on windows and linux platforms, tested on windows. Requires Java 1.4 or later, OpenGL 1.1 or later, and uses LWJGL and SPGL.

Anyone with spare time on their hands might want to check out some of the other entries.

#2

neat game! I hit Escape to close it, and the window disappeared, but the Java console is still open and frozen :stuck_out_tongue:

#3

Secondary goal: Make player nauseous
A bit confusing to play, but eventually got it. I don’t think I can play that game for more than 2 minutes at a time!

Works like perfectly over here. XP, Radeon 9700

Wrt the webstart console still being about - I have seen this quite often. I am led to believe that it is not specific to lwjgl games, but rather all sorts of webstart apps. Only way to avoid it is to use a System.exit(0): upon exit.

#4

Really neat for being a 48h entry. Really, really fast though!!! At least if you are supposed to be able to avoid being hit by the bad blobs. Sort of like “Super Elvis” at lightspeed. I think that a slower first leve might be really helpful, or maybe difficulty selection befor starting might be really good, if you want to develop it further.

I found that the best (?) approach was to not actually try to avoid, shoot, gather, but rather to move some to get the shots going and then just stand still.

“play windowed” link took me to a fullscreen game…

No problem with java console hanging around.

Quite nice, but I’d like to see the 96h version :wink:

#5

Ye, the windowed link is wrong…

It’s http://www.mechanicalcat.net/tech/ld48/home/OrangyTang/PlasmaZoneWindowed.jnlp

The game works but I don’t really know how to play it (I read the instructions).

#6

Pretty niffty!

I like the plasma stuff in the background, though sometimes it might be a bit much.

The difficulty is a bit high for someone with sludgelike reflexes. :slight_smile:

Great job overall. I’d like to see the 96hr version as well!

Dr. A>

#7

Great stuff, I especially like the abstract, Japanese-like style!

Bill