Zelda-like game, but with tentacles (Feedback requested)

[clofresh]

Hey guys,

First time posting a game I've been working on. Basically the vision is this:

Your land has been taken over by this massive kudzu-like tentacle-y monster like something out of HP Lovecraft, and you and 3 other survivors need to reclaim your land from its menace. You're not trained warriors but good with a stick and a knife and maybe if the 4 of you team up, you can figure out how to beat this monster back to where ever it came from.

I currently have a single player proof of concept using simple shapes to represent the player, the tentacles and some hapless critters that got in the way. You can move with WSAD and attack by holding space or left clicking. It also supports an xbox 360 controller. Hitting a tentacle enough times will eventually kill a segment of it, and killing all the segments will kill the tentacle.

I'd like the attack hit to be more satisfying somehow. I'm using love.physics for all the shapes and I was thinking of triggering some sort of explosion on contact to make the hit feel more solid, but wasn't sure how to do that. What do you guys think?

[Eamonn]

Hi. The game's awesome! The 'you died' screen is awesome. Overall it's really nice. Maybe add support for the arrow keys too?

[Davidobot]

Awesome!

[a7s1h1]

All I see, running the game, is a white screen((

[Zeliarden]

suggestions:

Make the tentacles segments circles instead of rectangular
When you when you kill a segment, detatch the joint and make the segment "dead" instead of just removing it
Use ParticleSystem for blood

[BulbaMander]

This is really cool. If you dedicated some time to this to make it polished and what not, I can see myself playing this alot. I played it for maybe 10 min trying to kill the tentacles and the gameover screen is like tf2 its really cool. My suggestions are better art, faster swing that doesnt stop if you let go of the mouse button, and art. All of which I expect is coming eventually anyway so keep up the good work.

[adnzzzzZ]

I'd like the attack hit to be more satisfying somehow. I'm using love.physics for all the shapes and I was thinking of triggering some sort of explosion on contact to make the hit feel more solid, but wasn't sure how to do that.

You can use beholder to do that. beholder.observe('EXPLOSION', function(...) things that make an explosion happen, like spawning particles and such ... end) and then on your collisionEnter or collisionExit callbacks just do beholder.trigger('EXPLOSION', ...).

[Robin]

beholder.observe('EXPLOSION',

But cool guys don't look at explosions!

[Darky]

Is that normal ?
(nothing happen)

[clofresh]

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Darky, a7s1h1: Can you tell me what OS version and Love version you're using? Also, could you run love from command line (see http://www.love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started) and tell me what it says in the console?

BulbaMander: Definitely wanna get in better art. I'm working with a dude and who's gonna do the tentacles in watercolor, hopefully it's gonna turn out well.

I've updated the game to lower the densities of the tentacles so that hits are more impactful. I also move the attack from space to k, and added a left swing as j. Also, blood particle effects (thanks for the suggestion Zeliarden)!