Bombgoggles

Some forgotten conflict has left countless hidden bombs underneath the surface. As well as, strangely enough, other powerups and useful things.

We created robots to crawl over the dangerous mud and find these things.

Then, humans being humans, they turned it into a competitive sport!

What do I do?

Bombgoggles is a local multiplayer party game (for 1-4 players). You are a robot that has three sensors: the closer they get to an object, the more such a sensor fills up.

Using this, you can figure out where the hidden elements are. And then grab the ones you want, or make a bomb explode and kill your friends, or flee when you notice someone else might be about to trigger one.

All while your battery keeps draining and you must recharge it at your beacon in time.

The only controls you need are movement (shown in-game when you log in a player).

Only your first round shows a simple tutorial image.  Any other elements, some randomly generated, are neatly explained by the gravestones placed into the world itself.

The game is a bit different between single player and multiplayer. In single player, you play against a bot and try to gather enough treasures to win before accidentally killing yourself through bombs. In multiplayer, it's more about attacking the other players.

Anything Else?

This is my submission for the Mini Jam 164. The theme was Destruction and the limitation Constant Escalation.

Destruction, of course, comes from the bombs, the destructable terrain and destroying the other players.

Constant Escalation is a bit more subtle. Everything in the game ramps up over time, to get the level to a climax and make sure it ends within a few minutes.  The game is a dance between quiet moments where everyone reads their sensors to find something, and sudden escalation into sudden bombs and more. Because holes in terrain also kill you, the game keeps escalating into more complex and more deadly situations.

The source code is available on GitHub: Bombgoggles.

Because I barely had any time to put into this game, I built a general skeleton/template (menu->game->gameover loop) a few hours before the jam started, and used AI for the background music. Everything else was made by me and completely within the jam's timeframe.

I think this idea is quite promising and I couldn't do it justice with such little time. There's a good chance it will get an update whenever I do my next "improve my best jam games" update.