mlepage/karmbat

Atari Combat with karma: your enemy mirrors your every move. Created for Global Game Jam 2015.

Karmbat Game

Karmbat is a simple game I created in 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2015.

Overview

The GGJ15 theme was "What Do We Do Now" and I had a challenging time coming up with a workable idea. Eventually I thought of using the diversifier "This Is How It Feels" to illustrate what it's like for your actions to affect yourself, by using the mechanic of having your input affect your enemies as well as your own avatar.

I considered some kind of top-down scrolling shooter where enemies move when you shoot and shoot when you move, or something like that. I thought a bit about Braid's mechanic where moving in space directly affects the position of enemies by controlling time.

Finally I settled upon a simple version of Atari Combat's tank game where the enemy mirrors your every move. With a symmetrical arena, if you are shooting the enemy, then by definition it is also shooting you. So what do you do now? One moving block will allow you to break the symmetry...

Play Online

You can play Karmbat online in your browser using the Unity Web Player here.

How to Play

Your tank is blue; the enemy's tank is red. Effectively, you control both tanks: left stick moves, right stick shoots. You can also use keys ESDF and IJKL.

Shots bounce off the arena's walls a few times, and only hit the enemy.

Your goal is to shoot the enemy without being shot yourself. Good luck.

Known Issues

The red tank's turret glitches. This does not affect shots. This started occurring sometime during development and I did not have time to fix it.

Occasionally shots escape the arena; the game detects this and destroys them.

Source Code

The source code is available on github.

License

Karmbat is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

InControl is a third-party library with its own license, see README-InControl.md for details.

Technology Notes

The game was made in Unity using the C# programming language. The art was made with Pixelmator. The audio was made with Bfxr and Audacity. Input is controlled with the free version of InControl.

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