Patient Zero

You are an experimental medical nanobot technology! Enter the patient's bloodstream and hunt down the virus before it is too late.

Made with Godot 4 for GMTK Game Jam 2024 (and updated post jam). Source code available on GitHub.

Controls

Mouse: Click and drag to push, wheel to zoom.
Touch: Swipe to push, pinch to zoom.
Game controller (not recommended): Thumbstick + A (or bumper) to push, triggers to zoom. (Warning: Triggers do not work on web. See Known Issues.)

Hit Esc or the lower-left corner to open the menu.

Tips

A few tips on how to play here (you might want to go in blind - the game does its best to guide you, but if you can't proceed, read this).

• The mouse control is a bit finnicky. It works when you drag across the bots you want to move - the faster you drag, the more force is applied.
• After you get 20 bots, the combat phase kicks in. Combat between bots and viruses works based on how many "friends" you have nearby. A big group of bots will kill viruses, but a few isolated bots will get killed. Therefore at the start, you'll want to try and keep all your bots clumped together as much as possible.
• At the start, use the mouse very gently and "herd" stray bots back into the pack, to keep them all together. Once you have enough bots in a pack together, they will tend to stick together and move as a group.
• Once you have several dozen bots, you can start splitting up into several smaller groups. Do this by quickly waving the mouse across half the pack to split it off. With more groups, you can control more of the map.
• There is an ending sequence to the game once you eliminate all the viruses, and it's quite possible to beat the game within a few minutes if you follow the right strategy. Good luck!

Known issues

• Web version: on game controller, the triggers (zoom) does not work on web. This is a bug in Godot which has been fixed upstream (should be included in the next release of the engine).
• Touch and game controller cannot scroll the credits.
• Ideally on mobile the game would run in portrait mode, but the text ends up being too small, so it is locked to landscape.

Updates

August 29, 2024 - performance and mobile

Post-jam major update

• Fixed major performance issue when you get around 100 or more bots. The game should now play reasonably smoothly all the way through.
• Fixed possibility of objects leaving the body and being stuck outside (they now get deleted if that happens).
• Web: Now works on mobile devices (tested on Android).
• Added support for touch input and game controllers. Input prompts now change based on input method.
• Added an in-game menu for ease of restarting or entering fullscreen, with credits.

August 21, 2024 - game jam

Initial release for GMTK Game Jam 2024.

Credits

Game design and implementation by Matt Giuca. Copyright © 2024 Matt Giuca.

Music

• "Mechanolith" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
• "One of Them" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
• "Spacial Harvest" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Images

• "Front view of a human heart" by Blausen Medical Communications, Inc.
  Licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
• "Golgotha Effects Textures: lavafull" by Crack.com
  Licensed under Creative Commons: CC0 1.0
  https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
  https://opengameart.org/node/7734
• "Hamburger icon" by Timothy Miller
  Public Domain
  https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/134216/hamburger_lines_menu_icon
• "Input Prompts" by Kenney
  Licensed under Creative Commons: CC0 1.0
  https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
  https://kenney.nl/assets/input-prompts
• "Organ Systems of the Human Body"
  from "Human Biology" by Sarah Malmquist and Kristina Prescott
  Licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
  https://open.lib.umn.edu/humanbiology
• "Red blood cells in various stages and angles" by Sarbasst Braian
  Licensed under Creative Commons: CC0 1.0
  https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• "Viruses - Common Cold" by Bart Kelsey
  Licensed under Creative Commons: CC0 1.0
  https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
  https://opengameart.org/content/viruses-cold-flu-chicken-pox

Fonts

• "Play"
  Copyright (c) 2011, Jonas Hecksher, Playtypes, e-types AS (lasse@e-types.com),
  with Reserved Font Name 'Play', 'Playtype', 'Playtype Sans'.
  This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
  https://openfontlicense.org