Pynkanids Eat the Galaxy

Ludum Dare 56 entry. Theme: TIny Creatures

Take control of the pink hive mind and eat the galaxy. As a tiny yet formidable creature, your mission is to roam planets and devour biomass to grow your numbers. Consume everything in the system and move on to the next.

Gameplay

Crash into planets to kick off your invasion and munch on all the biomass you can find. Just watch out for those angry humans in their spaceships—they’ll try to defend their worlds. You can send your offspring their way or dash through for a tasty snack. Use black holes to travel to the next system and continue the feast.

Controls

Left Mouse Button - Hold to charge, release to dash.

Right Mouse Button - Hold to aim, release to shoot minion.

Space - restart current level.

Escape - exit. There is no pause!

When in start and end menus, numeric keys (1-5) warp you directly to that level.

Development

Developed solo with help from ChatGPT and a collection of free and paid assets from Humble Bundles and giveaways, soundtrack generated by Suno.ai.

Tips

• Do a fly-by near the ships to get their attention and make them follow you. Then pick them off.
• Disengage from a planet if you’re getting shot at.
• If you’re low on minions, try hit and run tactics.
• Ships spawn over time, so hurry up!
• The sun will kill you instantly. Be wary of it’s gravitational pull.
• Gravity is your friend - let it take you on a ride and you’ll never get hit.
• Consumed planets don’t have biomass meters attached.

Known Bugs

• Sometimes the minion count bugs out and shows a different value to the actual state.
• Occasionally the last minion can’t be used for shooting.
• If two planets spawn collided, while raiding one you might get ejected far into space while the camera is still looking at the planet.
• Enemies clip into each other (making them easy to shoot down as a group)
• Build 1.0 had wrong executable name. Fixed in 1.1.

Good luck and have fun! Let me know what you think.