Rockets and Murderbots
Please run in fullscreen for the best WebGL experience
Rocket jump and grappling hook around the city, then find and play the survival and racing minigames!
Made in 48 hours for Kenney Jam 2024, where we were only allowed to use Kenney asset packs for graphics. This game also committed to 3 additional challenges:
- One asset pack used in total: City Kit - Commercial. Everything in this game is made of umbrellas or buildings.
- Mouse only controls: Two buttons for everything! Except for getting out of fullscreen, that's still the esc key.
- No text: My biggest regret.
I could cheat by placing a tutorial in this description, since this is not part of the game. And I will, because having to record myself monologuing a tutorial was terrible and nobody should be forced to hear that just to play the game.
Controls
Left mouse button = kaboom
Right mouse button = yoink
You can propel yourself by shooting rockets at your non-existant legs. You can also use your grappling hook to connect yourself with geometry or others. Press and hold the right mouse button to fire the grapple. If you release it before it connects to a wall, nothing will happen. Once connected, if you keep holding the right mouse button down, it will attempt to pull you in. Once you release the button for the first time, it will try to maintain the current distance as an outer limit.
While connected, you can fire another grapple. It will remove the first grapple once the second grapple connects to something new. Alternatively, you can blow up your existing grapple to free yourself. Or get hurt by an enemy, that works too. Otherwise, you'll stay connected.
Fun gameplay features
On the island are various umbrellas. Move into them to start a minigame - Red for horde survival, where every 30 seconds a new horde spawns to mess you up. Green for racing, where you have to parkour a route in the fastest time possible. There are currently 4 speedraces available, in various difficulties.
If you die or jump in the water, you'll respawn at the start. Any minigames in progress will be aborted immediately. The umbrella clock will remain frozen until a new minigame starts, for when you want to make a screenshot of your speedrun bragging rights :D
This game is janky to the max. Have fun!
Assets used
All visuals are based off of the City Kit - Commercial pack. The city, robots, rockets, particles, arrows, health bars, clock, etc etc use those as their source. I have modified the umbrella mesh in blender so it would function in particle systems, and I have modified the colors of most things. Some custom shaders are used, only to adjust colors during runtime. No proc gen was used and no pre-existing textures were used.
Animations are done badly manually.
Sound effects are from various sound packs, as sounds were exempt from the one-pack challenge rule. I have combined and/or made adjustments to some of them.
Music was composed and created by myself, with one track being heavily inspired by an old track from a 90s shooter.
No text, so no fonts are used. Except if you count the cover image, which uses Kenney Rocket (purely because of the name)
Final thoughts
Early on, I committed to the three challenges. I'm happy with the end result, but I do think it hurt the game's quality overall. The robots could be more varied if other models could be used, with actual animations. The city could also be a lot better with more building variety, roads and props.
I do like the mouse only mechanics, which adds a nice twist to otherwise just running and gunning. But I do wish I had another button to release the grapple tether manually :D
I'll never go textless again. So many things would be so much better if only I could have used text. Speedrun timer, race announcements, horde announcements, etc etc. And it would allow me to make menus and not have to do the god awful tutorial speech at the game start :')
All in all, I'm quite happy with the end result. It feels like a prototype that's worth expanding, especially without those restrictions.
Thanks for playing!
Status | Released |
Platforms | HTML5 |
Author | Frib |
Genre | Shooter, Action, Racing |
Tags | 3D, Explosions, Singleplayer, Speedrun |
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