If inputs don't work / the game feels laggy / the circle graphic isn't synced up with the background music, reload the page and try again.

Protect the Space Plants

Oh no! Your spaceship, transporting rare alien plants, has been attacked! You have way too little oxygen on board for a fight - maybe those plants can help.

Play the plants music using A, S, D and F. Play notes on the beat (indicated by the outlined circles graphic and the background music) to gain O2. Don't spam notes or the plants will get stressed! 

Click on a move once you have enough O2 and then click Roll. This will roll a die to determine your multiplier. Stay alive and kill Bite Coin to win the game!

About the Game

This game was made for GMTK Game Jam 2022. It was my first time participating in a game jam, so I scoped small. I modified music I had made earlier this year for use as the main in-game music - listen to the original here.

I won't work on this game further after the jam, but I may take some of the core concepts for use in another game in future.

Credits

• Space Plant art by BerylDaTreeFrog
• Visual and audio assets used from www.kenney.nl
• Sound effects used from fesliyanstudios.com.

Postmortem: Common Comments

(and what I've learnt from them)

• "I didn't understand what to do"

This is understandable as my instructions were relatively unclear. I just wrote text prompts all over the screen and expected people to read them all in time and understand how everything worked. Oops! I'll make a more interactive tutorial for next time.

• "Something about the music was out of sync"

There's a couple of issues here, with different causes.

1. I was lazy with checking if an input was on-beat. It didn't always work during my testing. Also, playing notes double time gains points much more quickly and I'm not 100% sure why. Am I registering several notes on the same beat?
2. Chromium seems to hate my game. Both Chrome and Edge manage to lag my game in such a way sometimes that the outlined circles aren't in time with the background music. I'm sure this happens on Firefox (my test browser) too on different systems. The underlying issue? I did the quickest thing and made that an animation. Regardless of what the music is doing, the circle graphic's animation will keep playing at roughly the correct BPM. 

The issue with both of these things was that I did a just-about-works implementation. I hadn't done a rhythm-base game before this. Probably best to know what you're doing before starting a game jam game...

Ah well. At least I know for next time. Declutter the UI, write clearer instructions, stay more on theme, and use gameplay mechanics I actually know how to code.