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Crab Planet

Play online now (flash)

download source code (flash builder/flixel)

7 Comments

  1. mcc wrote:

    Hmm… this one’s interesting. I *think* I understand what the visuals mean but I’m not sure whether I have a good sense of what to do about them. Since the main thing any stimulus seems to communicate is “you are fucked” it seems hard to formulate a strategy based on what the game tells you. After a bit I got kinda a sense of how to move but I wasn’t sure if I was doing appreciably better than either random play or a “dash for the exit” AI.

    I really, REALLY liked the music in this.

    Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at 3:24 am | Permalink
  2. Stephen Baldwin wrote:

    I had no idea what to make of the rules until I noticed the ‘brog’ caption. After playing that, some of the underlying principles became clearer, but I still can’t figure out the crab movements in relation to me or the ‘highlighters’. I haven’t played all of your games, but this is the most difficult to figure out of the ones I know.

    Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 12:02 am | Permalink
  3. Jack Vale wrote:

    Aha! after messing around with trying to stay in the trails of “sand” you will realize they are supposed to *spoiler alert* signal that there was a crab somewhere in the highlighted area. You only see the actual crab when he is right next to you.

    Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 5:22 am | Permalink
  4. Stephen Baldwin wrote:

    @ Jack. I kinda figured that, but I couldn’t figure out how to use that to actually avoid losing HP.

    Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 12:54 am | Permalink
  5. Jack Vale wrote:

    So I found a method that allowed me to make it to level 7; any move you make when you are in a sandy area could be fatal, so unless you feel probability is on your side or have an idea where your assailant might be based on the location of previous crabs you have encountered your best bet is NOT to move and let them come to you. This means that you want to hug the walls so you can run into them instead of walking forward. This is especially useful when avoiding the big crabs since they often follow you.

    This will get you to at least level 4 every time, however because you don’t always spawn next to a wall you may run into a crab right away, or you may hit a small crab who was in a position diagonally that you could not have predicted. The only better method I could think of was creating a grid program mimicking this one that generates crab location probability based on where you last saw them.

    The odds would be a little bit more fair if the player always spawned next to a brick, as I found my main two sources of death to be running into a big crab on spawn, and running smack into a big crab while trying to escape another big crab. This game was fun to try and figure out and I got invested in keeping the player alive whenever I could get past level 5. Also loved how you did the music.

    Monday, April 30, 2012 at 5:59 pm | Permalink
  6. Jobotslash wrote:

    Urg, Ugh, Crab Battle! Fun stuff, I really enjoyed the music.

    Friday, August 10, 2012 at 6:05 am | Permalink
  7. Eric S wrote:

    Minesweeper! :^)

    Wednesday, September 12, 2012 at 6:48 am | Permalink