Ezcort Mission
Looks like your loyal hound, Rover, has picked up the scent of another survivor in this zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Keep him safe and make sure he doesn't stray too far while you escort him on the trail for more clues... Original, right?
We've included a bunch of references to other gaming clichés, so listen out for them! Let us know which is your favorite and how many you catch while playing
Please enjoy our entry to Game Off 2022, this year's theme was: Cliché.
⚠️ 🙈 Warning: This game involves shooting zombies, so it contains animated violence and gore and is NOT appropriate for all ages.
🌐 Web version: Firefox seems to show better performance than Chrome for this game, if you have stuttering audio please use the download version instead because it is more performant than running in the browser.
🙏 If the game freezes in the browser, this is a bug! Before refreshing the page please open the browser console and copy/screenshot the red coloured Javascript error log and send it to us so that we can find and fix the issue!
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Post-deadline game update 2022-12-02: almost all the comments on the game mentioned the player getting stuck in the dog and can't get out, then having to close the game and restart. This was a game breaking bug caused by a typo in the collision logic so today we have pushed a fix for this ed58b04 and two related fixes:
- 7543d3c If the player character gets stuck in a wall/dog e.g. due to buggy rotation, move it outside
- ee4afc2 You can now press X to restart at the last checkpoint, so that if there are more bugs, you can restart from there instead of having to start the whole game again
Publishing this here for openness and transparency because this change was made the day after the deadline passed and we want to keep our participation in the game jam fair to everyone else.
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The team:
- Rowan Lindeque — graphics and design
- Tristan Le Roux — voice over and testing
- Siôn Le Roux — programming
- Péter Kertész — programming
This game was written in Go using the Ebitengine library. Map designed using ldTK and sprite animations using Aseprite. Music by Marika Schanz.
Get the source code on GitHub and look at the development progress, how we got here day-by-day: Twitter devlog.
Some highlights from the development process:
| Day 2: | Day 17: | Day 30: |
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Watch a 15 minute playthrough of the game by one of its developers:
Download
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Comments
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Cool game, but sometimes the red thing from the boss starts to rotate around you fast so you can't shoot it.
Thank you for making the game!
I found out about it when you were posting the in-progress tweets. I think Hajime retwitted them and they ended up in my feed. :) But I digress.
I recorded my playthrough: https://youtu.be/awF7LN5cFIM
Let my copy some of the feedback here as well.
What I like:
I enjoy this control scheme. I can even do some sidewalking (not to be confused with widewalking) with my dog!
The shooting mechanics felt nice.
It feels good to defeat zombies in this game. The sound and graphic effects contribute to that feeling.
The graphics are simple, but fitting. Same with the music.
Voice acting is great! It does make this game feel more complete.
I would say that you nailed this cliche theme perfectly well. Although the companion could be more annoying. :D
The game has checkpoints. Although there are some issues around them, it’s still better than going through everything again from the very beginning.
This game is written in Go, with Ebitengine! I highly approve that. :)
Even though the game level is relatively big, the wasm performance was quite good.
Thank you for not throwing too many ghosts (?) at the player. xD
Some random thoughts:
Walking backwards looks too slow to be useful. Perhaps the same speed as with strafing (or 10% slower) would make it more useful in some situations.
I’m not a fan of crosshair (a cursor) disappearing from time to time (like when you reload). :( I don’t think that this mechanic serves any good. I doesn’t make the game harder or more realistic, it just makes you lose your cursor. Since this game disables the system cursor (?), I get really disoriented because of that.
If you respawn, it could be really rough to survive. Enemies attack you way too aggressively. The spawning point should be relatively safe in my opinion.
A few technical issues I had with the game:
The game hang after 100% progression while running in the browser. I don’t know if that’s a stable behavior or no. I only played it until that moment once using the wasm build. I managed to complete the game with a native Linux build.
I had to recompile the game from the sources though. The version uploaded to the itch io page requires a newer version of glibc. So this is the message I get:
My glibc version is 2.31
Stuck in dog.
The stuck in dog bug was caused by a typo in our collision logic. It is fixed now, please try playing it again now! 😊
Awesome sound and a lot of fun!
Thanks! Really glad you had fun.
You really knocked it out of the park with this one! Great atmosphere, great sound design, mixing great gameplay with the voice-overs... really on point with the humor! Awesome stuff, keep it up!
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you liked it, very motivating comment, thanks again.