Sabot Age
Sabot Age
This is my submission to the 188th Trijam. The theme was "sabotage". What was submitted (i.e. this game without the improvements I made after the end of the jam) took 4h15 to code and draw/reuse the textures.
Introduction
Sick of being treated as nothing but mere footwear, the sabots revolted. Overnight they grew their size a hundredfold and built large factories to reproduce and assemble an army of a scale never seen before. In only a few days, masters turned into slaves and slaves into masters. The reign of the Sabot has begun.
These are dark times for humanity, but there is hope, for you have discovered the power of teleportation, only hours before your laboratory was overrun. This discovery is the key to save humanity from an existence of servitude. Unfortunately, you haven't had much time to improve this technology, and therefore it has one major flaw: You can't control where it teleports you. You must use it taking that flaw into account.
Your plan is the following:
- Sabotage all enemy factories. The fewer factories there are, the lower the productive capacity of the sabots.
- Do not get caught by the sabots. If you are stepped on, all is lost.
- Make use of the poor sight and coordination of the sabots by making them walk into each other or into the mortal remains of their comrades. They will die immediately and burst into flames (for some reason).
- If you find yourself in a dangerous situation, use the teleporter, but beware: You may very well teleport yourself into the roaring flames of a fallen sabot or under the deadly sole of a living one.
You will either free humanity from enslavement or be stepped on until you are nothing more than a bloody heap of bones, muscles and connective tissue.
Good luck.
Controls
N: k or 8 or w
NW: y or 7 or q
W: h or 4 or a
SW: b or 1 or z
S: j or 2 or s or x
SE: n or 3 or c
E: l or 6 or d
NE: u or 9 or e
Alternatively the mouse can be used to move. left click to move in that direction and right click or double tap to teleport.
Teleport: T
How to play
Destroy all factories to get to the next level. Currently there's no level indicator, or highscore tracker (since this was done for a TriJam and I ran out of time), but the current level is equal to the amount of factories at the start of the level.
If you step into a fire or a sabot steps into you or if you teleport into either of those, you lose and go back to level one (1 factory), if you destroy all factories, you advance one level (game gets reset and spawns one more factory than the amount of factories there were before).
The sabots will avoid the factories, but they won't avoid the fires or other sabots, if such a collision occurs, they will be turned into fire themselves.
New sabots spawn on the red floor. The amount of sabots spawned is equal to the amount of factories in the game.
Assets
The texture of the sabots is derived from this CC-BY-SA 2.0 picture by annemarie vanloenen: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lithuanian_clogs.jpg
All the remaining textures were made by me.
I used the following sounds:
- JK Clogs on Concrete - https://freesound.org/people/cmusounddesign/sounds/85110/ by cmusounddesign, CC-BY 3.0
- psycho screams 2 - https://freesound.org/people/FreqMan/sounds/42848/ by FreqMan, CC-BY 4.0
- Scream, female x2 - https://freesound.org/people/peridactyloptrix/sounds/208893/ by peridactlyoptrix, CC-0
- Multiple Female Screams - https://freesound.org/people/megmcduffee/sounds/393488/ by megmcduffee, CC-0
- Girl_Screams_Raw_File_wav_v1 - https://freesound.org/people/Volonda/sounds/439517/ by Volonda, CC-0
- scream_and_death - https://freesound.org/people/PatoPurific/sounds/84351/ by PatoPurific, CC-0
- Blood Gush and Squelch - https://freesound.org/people/sillygrizzlies/sounds/635042/ by sillygrizzlies, CC-0
Download
Development log
- Trijam submissionOct 05, 2022
- Improvements I made after submittingOct 05, 2022
Comments
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I like the idea, and the design is attractive. I'm a bit confused by the difficulty, since I had 4-5 sabots chasing me down on the first level by the time I was able to get to the factory, and I thought there was just supposed to be one on the first level. The controls are very interesting; I'm not sure if they make more sense on a non QWERTY keyboard, but on my keyboard they are pretty unintuitive, and the numberpad navigation keys didn't seem to work. Overall it was a challenging and interesting experience
Thanks! :D
They spawn every 5 seconds. The amount that spawns depends on the amount of factories remaining (1 sabot per still standing factory) (so on the first level you get 1 sabot every 5 seconds), so to avoid getting overwhelmed you are supposed to sabotage them as quickly as possible.
Yeah, sorry about the controls, I didn't have a numpad to test it on. Maybe if you toggle num lock it works? The hjklyubn keys I took from Cataclysm DDA (vi keys + some additional ones for diagonal movement). The qweadz[x/s]c keys are supposed to be more intuitive on a keyboard as that set of keys more closely resembles the shape of a numpad. I'm thinking about adding the option to navigate by the relative position of the mouse to the player, which is what Gnome Robots does. I also should add the option for players to set their own keys bindings (which is something still have to implement in any game I've ever made XD).
It was quite fun but a little bit to luck-based. If the factories spawn close to you, gg, if they don't well gg anyways. Also controls were a bit quirky, I'd prefer WASD + QEZC but maybe thats just me...
Thanks for the feedback. :D
Yeah, I just took the controls from Cataclysm DDA, but that is a turn based game, but here one must be quick so it's problematic if the controls are weird. I already made a commit to allow wqazxcde movement, because I thought that might be more intuitive for people without numpads (I will probably upload the new version, since it was a really quick and easy thing to do, so it shouldn't affect my trijam time too much).
> It was quite fun but a little bit to luck-based
You have 5 seconds before the sabots spawn. If you are far away from factories you can use the teleporter to quickly try to get to a more advantageous position (there's no cooldown and there's no risk involved, because there are no fires or sabots yet). That's the strategy I use.
I also intentionally made the player faster than the sabots so that the player may outrun them and lure them into each other or into the fires. The game (without taking into account teleportation) becomes easier the higher the fire to sabot ratio is, because the sabots only try to avoid the factories, so if there is a wave of sabots coming from one direction, you only need to stand behind a fire to fully destroy them. I managed to complete level 7 with that strategy.
Some versions of the Chase game (1984) (which is what this game was inspired in) also have so called safe teleports that you can use a limited amount of times that put the player somewhere where there is no fire or enemy. Maybe I might some day add something like that.
Edit:
Uploaded the updated version with the improved controls, which took 1 to 2 minutes.
Ok, I just found a major bug that was making the game many times harder. The probabilities are completely off, because every time you were teleporting the game would teleport you 20 more times and if in any of them you die, you die. So with every teleport, it is 20 times more likely that you are teleported into a fire or into a sabot. XD I won't upload the fix for that until after the jam is over, because despite that bug it is still playable and because it took quite a bit of time to find that bug (and to notice it ("Why did I land into that single fire in all of that terrain?! What are the odds? This is happening way too often...")).