Send in the Bots

Remember Star Wars Pit Droids?

Man, that was a fun game.

Well, anyway, this is Send in the Bots, made for VimJam 4.

In this cellular automata game, guide lines of bots from their spawners to the end goal by placing arrows on the grid. Get all the bots to the goal to unlock the next level. Things get dicey when you need to cross or merge multiple lines, but with a little timing, your bots should all come out intact.

CONTROLS

Drag and drop arrows with your mouse. Right-click to turn an arrow 90 degrees. Use WASD or arrow keys to move the camera. Click the buttons at the bottom of the screen to play, fast forward, pause, reset, or quit a level.

Fullscreen is strongly recommended.

ABOUT THE JAM SUBMISSION

Focus - Checkpoints

I borrowed from my inspiration's progression system by unlocking each level when you reach the previous level's target score. It's simple, but it gets the job done of saving your progress.

More cheekily, the underlying code involves a lot of checking at image points on each bot to see if any other bots are overlapping.

Theme - Cross Paths

The real fun of this core game loop comes when you have to safely direct 2 or more lines of bots whose paths cross or combine.

Time Crunch

I didn't have a lot of time to make this game because I was moving into a new house this week, but I've been meaning to make a "Pit Droids" clone for years, and it's perfect for this year's theme, so I just had to put something together.

CREDIT

All assets were created by me during the jam.

The core mechanics are reverse-engineered from playing Lucas Learning's Star Wars Pit Droids (1999).