Nanoblob

By:
Molly Patterson
Francesco Lee
Shon Naidu
Jeffrey Dick

Nanoblob is a game where the player character is a synthetic life form with a unique metabolism. The core objective is to consume smaller prey to grow in size while avoiding larger predators.

Controls:

Left click to move to a location, or drag the mouse cursor around while holding down left click, and the blob will follow the direction of your cursor.

Abilities:

• Shooting an enemy (via pressing right click) will split it into two smaller enemies (one lever smaller to be exact). Has a reload speed of one shot every three seconds. This ability shoots in the direction of your mouse cursor.
• Boosting (via pressing space) will increase the current player speed by a multiplier of three for duration of 1.5 seconds. The ability itself can be used once every five seconds.
• Using boost first, then using the shoot ability will cause the projectile to move faster (three times faster) than normal.

Enemies:

Generally, enemies of the same colour as the player can be eaten, although this is not the case for enemies that are quite obviously larger than the player. Enemies smaller than the player can also be eaten (that is, after all, the basic premise of the game).

Levels:

Enemies scale up according to both the level and the player’s size. Level 1 is a tutorial level for the player to learn basic controls. Level 2 is where there is a slight amount of challenge that the player has to overcome in order to get to the next level. Level 3 will require the player to constantly use their abilities in order to get enough food to advance. Level 4 and 5 are for the dedicated players who are intent on getting a very high score (both are beatable, but becomes increasingly harder as the player levels up).

Known issues:

• Sometimes, the enemies will spawn in such a fashion that it is impossible for the player to live in levels 4 or 5. This is because the negative feedback is quite strong due to the scaling of enemies to the player’s level, and enemy spawn locations are random.
• Prey microbes do not really run away from the player, and instead they will jerk around, as if they do not know what to do when trapped in between the player and another larger predator.
• No victory screen for beating level 5 exists in game, this is mostly due to the fact that nobody has play tested it long enough to actually beat the fifth level.
• If you full screen the game and then press escape on your keyboard, the game will exit full screen instead of pausing as it should do.

Game is playable in browsers with WebGL support.

If you have any trouble, feel free to contact Lech Szymanski.