I’ve been reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup Games. This is one of 48 Games.
Disclaimer: I’m also competing in the cup, I am not a judge!
Terramancers [Download me] [Game Website]
This is a Single Player / Multi Player “Action Reversi Game”, powered by Java and with no external libraries.
If there’s one thing the LPC has been good at is coming up with brand new game genres, and this one is pretty unique. The game is based on the board game “Reversi”, but instead of taking turns, you ‘walk around’ the map, and each individual tile is flipped over to your side.
There’s 5 types of “Terramancers”: a Princess, a Mage, an FBI Guy, a Professor and a… Girl? Each one’s flipped tiles is easy to identify: The FBI Guy turned tiles into cement, while the Mage turned tiles into lava/black rock, for instance.
The Single Player mode comes in 3 difficulties, Easy, Normal and Hard. You get to walk around the map while invisible people trees flip the tiles against you. Once the entire map is fully converted, the game ends and shows a score screen that displays who won.
I played Multiplayer against Alan twice. We set up a Wiimote so he could play on it while I grabbed the keyboard. The first time, we cleared the entire map but the game wouldn’t present a score screen, so I restarted the game. On the second game, I won. His comments were that the game was pretty weird, and didn’t understand why my tiles kept overriding his’. I tried to explain the concepts before and during the match, but it is pretty hard to understand until you play a couple of times.
I had some issues runing the game on Cinnamon, as the game wants to do full-screen, and Cinnamon places it’s bars on top, so we couldn’t actually see the top/bottom tiles of the game. The other minor issue is that the game points to “princess.png” and “professor.png”, but the actual filenames are Uppercase (“Professor.png” and “Princess.png”), so people were invisible until I actually renamed the resources to match the lowercase variant.
To close off the review: The game was interesting, it takes a bit to understand it properly, but once you get the hang of it, you’re running around the map frenetically, trying to get the most tiles. Puzzle fans will definitely want to play this game.
Thank you! Great to hear feedback about the game. Also, it’s insanely impressive that you’re reviewing all the LPC games, good work.
I was aware of the full-screen issues (that’s a problem when you’re your own tester – I always have my taskbar auto-hidden, so I didn’t notice the game doesn’t handle it well when things take up screen space), but I’m very surprised about the uppercase / lowercase thing – the game was tested on Windows, Linux and Mac with no problems… strange.
By the way, in the single player there are no “invisible people”, the opposing tiles are propagated from the trees
Thanks for the kind words!
I knew I could set Cinnamon to autohide things, but I’d rather not
The filename thing? I took it from the source code in the LPC Submission. I’m not sure if it was fixed in the repository later, but it wasn’t really a big deal (Particularly since I *am* a Java dev
)
And I didn’t know that the trees propagated the tiles! That makes a lot more sense now. I’ve updated the review to state so!