chaotic
Author Comments
This game was made for the Ludum Dare 54 game jam, with the theme 'Limited Space' and submitted to the Compo, which only gives you 48 hours to make a game and it has to be done solo.
Overview
Paula Poppet is a top-down survival shooter in which you are confined to a very small arena to fend off a horde of 15 waves! But wait, THERE’S MORE! Your only method of attack compresses the world into bubbles that you can then fire at your enemies and go KaBOOOOOOOOOM! This catastrophic attack sends debris and tiles everywhere AND displaces ALL objects. You can even bubble and launch yourself!! Can you survive a constantly changing arena that heavily limits your movement?
The waves are randomly generated and get harder over time. You'll gain different bubble shapes and heart pickups throughout the game.
Controls
- WASD to Move
- Left Click to Bubble/Attack
- Left Shift to ????
- Escape to Pause (if fullscreen you may need to press it twice)
KNOWN ISSUES:
These could easily be fixed, but I decided it best to just upload the jam version. :)
- Score does not reset when hitting replay.
- Wave counter is a little weird.
- Enemies can sometimes hit themselves.
Huh, quite the interesting little game you got here! The main gameplay loop of picking up stuff up to throw it at enemies reminds me a lot of satisfying telekinesis-based games like Control or Psi-Ops, but the twist of having to throw your own flooring and thus risk reducing or scrambling your movement space adds a whole new interesting dimension to that gameplay. Also the game is surprisingly juicy for a game jam game: picking stuff up, slamming it down with explosive force and watching all the tiles scatter and replant themselves was very satisfying every time.
While I am quite impressed, I do feel like it is still in a somewhat rough state with a lot of systems feeling rather shallow, unbalanced, or confusing. For example, purchasing new bubbles seemed more like a hinderance than a help and I dunno why you'd even want them since it doesn't even increase your refire rate, there were some cases where I could've sworn I killed enemies but they were still fine for some reason, and it does get quite repetitive without some sort of greater goal or purpose to strive for. But hey, in my opinion, game jams should be primarily focused about exploring and experimenting with all sorts of wacky systems to see what has potential, and I felt like this had did just that and found something interesting, so I consider it a success!
Every game needs full screen
it's a bit hard to tell what's going on at times but that's just a skill issue on my end.
Destroying things with bubbles looks cool.
Credits & Info
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Frontpaged October 8, 2023
