I’ve been reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup Games. This is one of 48 Games.
Disclaimer: I’m also competing in the cup, I’m not a judge!
GNU vs Zombie Rotten Tomatoes [Game Entry] [Github Repository] [Game Website]
This is a Single / Multi Player Shoot’em Up / Bullet Hell game made in C++. Compiling it was as simple as typing “make” on the “splashouille” folder, then moving the libsplashouille.so to /usr/lib/, the typing ‘make’ on the “tomatoes” folder, and executing “tomatoes”. I’ll probably package a Fedora RPM after I’m done with the reviews.
One of the lesser known art entries during the art part of the LPC was a collection of Shoot’em up Sprites. Graphically, they stood out as being different from the art style otherwise provided at the contest. One developer, however, decided to be different.
This game features a GNU, a Penguin(Tux!) and a Fox, flying in airplanes, shooting down Rotten Zombie Tomatoes. Each character has different attributes, like Life and Weight (Which affects your speed), as well as the strenght of the bullets you shoot out. This game is impossibly hard, but also very fun. It took me quite a while to get past the first few seconds of the game, and after more than a dozen tries, I only made it to the Wheat Farm.
You can also grab a buddy and play cooperative against the tomatoes, the second player is controlled with the unusual keys: RDFG as the arrows, and E to shoot. This was kind of uncomfortable, but its functional, I guess. My brother and I had a lot of fun playing (and being killed by) tomatoes. He said this game reminded him of Aerofighters, one of our favorite SNES shoot’em up games though this one was “a lot harder”.
I set up a Wii Remote using cwiid and we played using that. I found using a gamepad a lot easier than using the Arrows / Spacebar combination. For fun & kicks, I even modified the game’s source code to grant the GNU 12 HP which was about 3x as much as the default one. We made it a bit farther, but still died to hundreds of bullets flying in the air.
The game’s music is pretty good, the graphics are very shiny, the game is very challenging. I highly recommend this game.
My one wish is that we could get extra lives (Besides the hearts), so that we can continue on the game and see what lies above and beyond.
Hi, thanks for your review. Really.
I think you’re the first one to play my game !
I am happy you didn’t have too much issues with the compilation and the libconfig version (on Ubuntu, only the version 8 is available in the depot whereas splashouille works with the version 9)?
(by the way, I made 2 other games with the splashouille engine: titrus and gemgem. They are in the same github and their compilations work in the same way)
Anyway, about the graphics, I built these ‘little bit different’ tileset and sprites because I wanted to make free assets and, imo, I think a bitmap can not be really free (to make it quick: bitmap is a sampling and so, a lack of information. And this lack of information is also a loss of freedom: you cannot zoom in for example…). So I tried to make pixelated graphics from original resources built in descriptive format such as SVG or 3D (which are really free, as in freedom, in my mind).
Sorry for the keys, but as I hadn’t the time to handle the key settings, I decided to use safe keys and to avoid azerty/qwerty issue. First, I used the left and right ctrl keys for firing, but it seems pressing them in the same time creates an issue with SDL. Great job with the wii remotes btw!
Finally, it is true the game is really, really hard. It is funny because I realized that the level design was something really harder than I thought. I didn’t plan to make something so difficult. If I kept this difficulty, it’s because, in only 1 month, I hadn’t the time to make a long level so the difficulty helped me in a way (I reach the final boss 1 time).
I think I will enhance the game by adding enemies (other kinds of tomatoes!), bonus (yeah, heart bonus is really missing) and levels. I really like to make a complete shoot’em up.
Thanks again for your review (and sorry for my english).
Johann C.
I didn’t have any building issues at all, and its one of the reasons I’d like to provide a Fedora RPM.
I’ll give the other games a try after I’m done with the LPC games, I did like this one a lot though, and so did my brother. Yeah, the game was very hard, but it was enjoyable to get whooped by tomatoes. We kept pushing and dodging to see just how far we’d get. It really brought back old memories!