Catalyst
WASD or Arrow Keys to move, Mouse to aim & shoot, M to mute.
Push one enemy into another to combine them.
Learn the recipes & Follow your instinct.
Made for the Thinky Games are for Everyone jam, in which the goal was to reach an audience not already into thinky games. What's my strategy? Trickery, of course! My core idea was to disguise a thinky game as a shmup to trick people into playing (and having fun, hopefully). The plan was for the action part to be more ambitious, a shmup standing on its own, but that got too overwhelming when combined with learning the thinky part. Still, I hope you have fun playing my shmup interpretation of Null Hypothesis!
Here are the full rules. For A, B in {Cyan, Magenta, Yellow}:
A + B <=> AB + Spike
A + AA <=> BC + Inverter
A + BC <=> AA + Inverter
Made using sounds by Ogrebane, music from Guitare Improvisation, textures from Poly Haven, and the Shaku framework.
Comments
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Cool take on Null Hypothesis! Reminds me a little of Thoth. I liked and hated how hard it was to hit the shots needed to experiment and undo mistakes.
Interesting idea. I thought of Null Hypothesis when playing, so it makes sense that it was an inspiration!
The action game structure is interesting. I like the idea of being able to get "good" at a "puzzle" game. Thinking on the fly about which angles and paths are the quickest/best to make the combinations I want, adds that layer on top.
In its current form though, I'm not a big fan of the action. I get frustrated when I get stunned multiple times in a row, when the two objects I want to combine fly far away from each other, when things just don't seem to line up, when I combine the wrong things, etc. But I can see what you were going for, maybe an easier difficulty is what I would want.
very fun and love the visuals! I love the idea of combining elements together, some of my favorite games follow that as the main gameplay loop and it works so well!