Pico Battle

Updated 04/07/2012 : Version 1.1 — see below for patch notes & downloads.

At long last!

Pico Battle is a game I initially made with Aliceffekt for the Prince Of Arcade event of early November 2011, which more than half a year ago. But between FEZ, Volkenessen, Diluvium and Waiting for Horus, we never took the time to actually finish it properly, until now!

In its PoA demo form, it used the same crude networking code as The Cloud Is A Lie, which requires two computers plugged in the same LAN or ideally directly by a cross-wired ethernet cable. Releasing that particular version publicly made little sense, so we decided to make a much more extensive multiplayer version.

Above, Pico Battle 2011 (albeit a terribly compressed and cropped screenshot).
And below, the version we’re releasing! :)

This game’s name might remind you of another Prince of Arcade game, this one in 2010 — Pico³. It’s the same basic idea of playing with colors, mixing and matching them, but this time in a competitive versus environment.

How To Play

Upon launching the game, you will find yourself in the Lobby, a temporary haven. You should look for an hexagon floating about the edges of your screen (right click drag to rotate around the planet) and click on it to practice against the AI. You might see circles too, they are other players and could challenge you as soon as you raise your shield.

To protect yourself against incoming attacks, find the patch of dirt marked by a black & white circle, and connect a node to it. The shield will light up, eating away at the incoming bullets with a similar hue. In the lobby, you are invisible to potential attackers as long as your shield is unpowered.

To win against your opponent, locate a patch of mushrooms and connect nodes to it — this is your cannon. It needs a minimum amount of power to be able to fire, and based on the incoming nodes, will fire bullets of various sizes and colours; easier or harder to defend against. The idea being to match the colour of incoming bullets with your shield, and to differ as much as possible from the opponent’s shield colour (which is indicated by the contour of his circular icon) with your cannon’s bullets.

Pico Battle is an entirely wordless game, and might seem offputting or hard to grasp at first. In the lobby, a robotic voice will explain the basics of the game, and take your time there to experiment with the controls and the scarce UI elements. As you get familiar with the game and its interface, you will discover strategies and enjoy it even more.

Updates

04/07/2012 — Version 1.1

  • Fixed bug where the AI wouldn’t defend itself if it is challenged too quickly
  • AI now raises a random shield before you attack with any colour
  • Fixed graphical issue on arc-link shadows
  • Escape key now quits the game if pressed in the lobby

Downloads

Windows Version – picobattle_pc.zip
Mac OS X Version – picobattle_mac.zip

The soundtrack is available on Aliceffekt’s blog entry for the game.

Diluvium – TOJam 7

Updated 15/06/2012!
See bottom of the post for updated download links.

Diluvium is a game I made with Aliceffekt, Henk Boom and Dom2D as Les Collégiennes over the course of TOJam The Sevening, a 48h game jam (though we had a ~8h headstart on that) which took place between May 11th and 13th 2012.

Gameplay

Diluvium is a versus typing tactics game.
There are two summoners on the battlefield, and you are one of them. Type animal names to summon them, and they will attack the enemy’s spawns and ultimately the enemy summoner himself. The first to kill the other one wins, as these things usually are.

You can type up to three animal names in a row, which spawns a totem of these three animals. Each animal has its own stats : speed, attack power, health and intelligence. The totem is as intelligent as its most intelligent member, and health is summed up, but movement speed is averaged.

If someone spawns a dog on the playfield, nobody can spawn another dog until it dies. No duplicate animal! Thankfully you have 284 animal names to choose from, 100 of which are illustrated differently.

The game has a half-assed single-player mode that you can access by typing “LOCAL” in the connection screen. Otherwise, the game should work fine in LAN and over the Internet, as long as you open up the server’s port 10000 (I’m not sure whether Unity networking uses TCP or UDP, so go for both). The connection screen lets you know your LAN and WAN IPs as you host the game.

Things you can also enter at the connection prompt : “MUTE” to kill the music, “IDDQD” for degreelessness mode, and one other secret code which will be revealed elsewhere on the interwebs!

For more information about the commands you can enter on the splash screen, see Aliceffekt’s wiki page on Diluvium.

Development

This was the second network multiplayer game I’ve worked on that uses actual Unity networking instead of a hacked up UDP sender/receiver pair. It’s SO MUCH EASIER TO SET UP! And it works consistently, no threading bugs and random Unity crashes. Knowing this makes me much more comfortable in attempting more network-multiplayer games in jams. The Cloud Is A Lie was a nightmare to keep synchronized, it would’ve been so much easier with the built-in stuff.

We had sort of an Montréal Indie Superstar version of Les Collégiennes this time at TOJam, with FRACT‘s Henk with me on code and Dom2D as an animal portraits factory for the whole weekend. Aliceffekt and Dom’s visual styles merged really well, and having all this extra super talented manpower allowed us to create a much more ambitious game. Henk happened to have working pathfinding classes just lying around, and his deeper knowledge of Unity intricacies meant less time spent fighting bugs and oddities. It was such a great jam! ^_^

Updates

Version 1.1 – 15/06/2012

  • Server Naming : You can now name your games and tell your friend to connect to it by name instead of IP! (IP still works, though)
  • Anonymatching : Create a server and wait for a user, or join an anonymous server randomly!
  • NAT Punchthrough : Server no longer needs to forward port 10000
  • Adaptative AI : In local mode, AI opponent spawns more/less units per second depending on wins/losses
  • Splash Redesign : Options better presented, no more accidental enter key press
  • Balancing, a handful of new animal names supported
  • Escape key quits to splash at any time during gameplay

Downloads

Diluvium v1.1 – Windows version
Diluvium v1.1 – Mac version

Enjoy!