You're the driver of a semi-automatic roof repairing cart and you're undoing the damage caused by the meteorites. The roof of each house can only take so much damage before the entire house is destroyed.
Controls:
LEFT, RIGHT: Drive left and right.
UP, DOWN: Extend or retract the arm of the vehicle, holding the the repair rig.
Z: Use the repair rig on the roof. Make sure you're properly aligned with it (or get a perk which will do that for you)
X: Install an auto-repair unit (ARU) if you have some.
Scoring:
+25 points to undo the damage caused by one meteorite strike.
Level up after every 200 points scored. A randomly chosen house will grow in size upon leveling up. A perk shop dialog window appears.
Perks:
- Automatic alignment of the repair rig with the roof level.
- Double speed of all movements.
- Sturdier vehicle which doesn't require you to retract the arm when moving left/right.
- Toroidal topology: drive through the edge of the screen on the other side.
- Auto-repair units (ARUs) for mounting on the roofs.
Pro tips:
- ARUs won't last forever.
- Some perks without some other perks make things more difficult rather than easy.
Updates:
-
1.4 (2020)
-- Longer theme music -
1.3 (2016)
-- ARU can't be installed unless there is none on the roof or there is one with less than three hits to live - 1.2
-- theme music plays in-game
-- limiting simultaneous meteorites above each building to three
-- limiting the height of buildings to 20 floors
This was my first ever contribution to the collection of PICO-8 consoles :-)
Thanks for playing!
Sweet! Love all the improvements over the last time I played. Upgrades are perfect. Nicely done.
Thank you, morningtoast! Your comments you left in the WIP thread really helped!
Had an idea as I was playing and kinda just kept going on (once you get all perked up, you can go for a long time), is to have an armageddon countdown.
Some sort of way to let the player know that "the rain" is coming and it's a massive meteor shower. But somehow they have some warning so they can run to try and have all their buildings built up. Maybe the sky turns red or something...I dunno...just an idea that might up the challenge once your forklift is all upgraded.
Congratulations AdamJ, sweet game here! Really love it, very fun :) Just a tip: combining auto alignment and improved speed during the game is a little uncomfortable for the gameplay; sometimes I try to go to a specific building and the robot vehicle just passes it by, and goes to next one. Control becomes insensitive.
Everything else is perfect!
Thank you, Ramayaben! Actually, exploring the combinations is kinda part of the game. (Or so I was hoping.) Some of the perks do not go well together.
Spoiler:
Morningtoast, oh, an Armageddon countdown. Preparing the buildings for the final "test" which would come, say, in Level 20?
I don't get paid for roofs that get auto-repaired. The game dwindles to just keeping tabs on two or three buildings as the repair units occasionally break down and need to be replaced, and I become a service more akin to an air conditioner repairman as opposed to being a windblower myself.
A humbling and realistic look at the dwindling market for human employment slowly being replaced by more efficient machine labor. ;)
Another thing that could extend play too is spreading out the upgrade levels after so far. Right now every 200 points gets you an upgrade, but say once you reach level 10, it's every 500 points...a sliding scale.
You get fully upgraded pretty quick, shy of just buying the auto-fixers.
Or maybe the power-ups only last so long, so instead of double-speed being a one-time buy, it goes away after 3 levels...same for all the others. Lets players decide how to spent their upgrades over time.
Mirningtoast: I was actually thinking that the player would get an ARU every 200 points no matter what since s/he gets the ARU perk (I guess everyone is getting it later on) and so the dialog wouldn't need to show at all once all perks have been obtained.
Limited life of the perks is also an interesting idea!
JTE: Thank you :-)
Lovely game! I agree with the comments about sliding scale on upgrades. Very fun to be upgraded so make us work for it!
Might I suggest new types of enemies or damage that appear later in the game that can only be countered via upgrades?
Thank you! Perhaps heavier meteorites later and stronger ARUs? Certainly a thing to think about!
I like the idea of additional enemies, whether that bigger asteroids or something else. Could lend itself to another type of upgrade...like a laser or something that blasts them out of the sky. Combine that with the doomsday countdown and that could be kinda neat.
Just finding the balance of difficulty once you get into the game more is the tricky part. This is a great game with a low barrier of entry, which gets people hooked pretty quickly.
Thank you for your suggestions. I'll see what I will be able to incorporate :-)
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