PulseEXE
A downloadable game for Windows and Linux
Made by me (Boxy), SuddenlyEva (https://suddenlyeva.itch.io) and lots of help from cdrch (https://cdrch.itch.io) with the theory behind the procedural generation.
Controls : WASD/Arrow Keys to move. Player and enemies auto-shoot by moving.
Blast your way through procedurally generated asteroids filled with enemies and try find the wormhole to send you to the next one!
Download
Install instructions
After downloading unzip PulseEXE.exe and then if on windows double click on PulseEXE.exe or if on linux run PulseEXE.exe with 'mono ./PulseEXE.exe'
Comments
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Very cool! I had no problems running it on my Win10 Home. But is there any kind of health indicator for the player ship? I have no idea of how to gauge it or when I'm about to die. I feel like animated graphics and more goals in the procedural design (floors, shops... the usual in RLs) could really take this up to the next level as a solid product.
Aaaaah I'm glad that pulse runs for you, got a bit worried after hearing there were some issues for some people
To answer your question about heath, Yes!! The way to guage the player's health is the smoke trail, it gets more and more smoky the lower the player's health. One of the things we wanted was minimal UI so we decided to go this route for showing HP. You're not the only person to comment on not being able to tell what the player's HP is though so we will most likely look at solving the problem
I completely agree with your feedback. Animations would really help bring the game to life and the proc-gen is definitely lacking, for a few reasons though it was a little impractical to do that during the jam
We didn't have an artist for the jam so animations would have been fairly time consuming, time which needed to be spent on the rest of the game. Similar reason for the lack of depth to the proc-gen, I'd almost never done proc-gen before so just getting what we currently have implemented took a lot of time and effort (I think I spent a little under half the jam entirely on proc-gen)
I'm glad you feel that this can be a solid product, after the jam we talked a bit and decided that we wanted to keep working on pulse (I'm typing this out while Eva is doing dev work)
Thank you for the feedback, it means a lot that you spent the time to write it
That all makes sense. Maybe the smoke could be made a lot more obvious as I don't think I even noticed it. A red, glaring alarm on your ship when you're a point away from destruction would definitely catch my attention, for example. Anyways, in case you haven't heard of this title already, I am very slightly reminded of it being like a larger-scale version of: https://store.steampowered.com/app/624690/NEXT_JUMP_Shmup_Tactics/
I haven't actually played the game, but it just came to mind. Anyways, based on its negative reviews, remember that unique graphics do not a good game make! Gameplay is always first. I'd rather play something solid in ASCII than vice-versa. Best wishes to your continued work.
Hello,
looks promising, but unfortunately I'm unable to run the game. Double click doesn't work nor running from the terminal. No error message, no stacktrace, nothing. I'm on Windows 10 64-bit.
Could you please help me with that issue?
Hey, sorry for the long response time, been chilling since jam ended. I'm not sure exactly what OS you have so I'll give some windows specific advice.
If the game isn't starting it could be because you don't have .NET Framework 4.7.2 installed. You'll have to get it from here (the runtime download) The game could also be getting blocked by an antivirus so you may want to try checking if that's happening.
I do have dotnet framework installed, I do use C# myself :) ...also, I needed to fixed typo - what I meant was "I'm on Windows..." :)
I checked on AV already, tried to run with AV disabled - nothing changes. That's probably much more specific issue - maybe compatibility with specific Win update?
The project uses a slightly dated version of .NET framework so you might have a newer version.
During development when we'd run builds windows would pop up asking us to confirm we want to run the program because it might be dangerous. Did you get anything like that when you tried to run the exe?
The requirements for running the game seem to be a 4.x .NET Framework (we used 4.7.2) and OpenAL 1.1 which should be bundled with the game. I would give installing OpenAL 1.1 a shot and see if it helps.
OK, let's try. I'll keep you posted. Thanks :)