We set out with an ambitious plan to make a single-level metroidvania game set on a small planetoid. I was writing the game basically from scratch in Processing with a bit of a leg up using my QEngine game template. We were not able to finish much of a game by the jam deadline as planned, but we've got art, animation, music, sound, collision, player movement, and gunfire implemented. So this is to show you what we were able to accomplish in around 68 hours of work with one artist and one programmer. You can still play this as a traversal game - try to navigate the maze to get to the core of the planet!
Controls: Move: Arrow keys Shoot: x Jump: z
You may need to click the window after the game has loaded before input will be accepted.
Credits: Art, Level Design - Daniel Adams Programming, Sound Design - Eliot Lash Music - Optomon
I believe that Daniel made the animations in Flash. He was trying out Spriter before, but he said it doesn't yet support tweening.
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HobotiX23 Apr 2012, 22:20
Thanks! Yeah, I wanted to use Spriter, but they havent implemented motion tweening yet. This essentially makes it no better then photoshop in animating. So I just stuck with Flash.
So interesting experience. I'm wondering if the game was supposed to appear in about a 50x50 pixel block? I had a good fun trying to play at that size though, and bug or no it fit the theme quite well :)
Feel like I should point out here that you can double-jump. I was tuck for a bit till I realised that.
Felt kinda weird having that fast-paced music but no tension in the gameplay... If there'd just been some kind of countdown or loss state, it would have added so much.
Great graphics and audio, though. The backgrounds and the character animation is some of the best I've seen.
Excellent music and nice looking visuals, idea of platformer inside one planetoid also looks nice. Too bad you hadn't had enough time to create a game out of it. Are you going to work more in this? As a tech demo it looks very interesting (and that's coming from someone who hates platformers with a passion :).
For starters, this is absolutely gorgeous. The graphics and sound were stellar.
I had problems getting this game to run. It takes me a couple tries to actually get into this game on my Mac (running Snow Leopard), when I try to open it it usually hangs for a long time at the title screen. Sometimes it starts playing music on top of the title screen after this, but doesn't let me progress; if it freezes in this way, when I quit, I get a brief glimpse of the game before the window disappears. Once I ran, I had problems with framerate and sound stutter.
Once I got into this, I was impressed with the promise of the engine. Moving around the planetoid was really cool, it looked good, it felt good. The one mechanics issue I remember is, the double jump felt extraneous. There rarely seemed to be times you needed to use it and it felt awkward to use.
It was really cool to get down to the "heart", fire bullets, and try to outrun your own bullets.
In my notes I wrote "head through one jump". I think this means I managed to get my head partially embedded in the ceiling one time? Your guess is as good as mine.
Of course I kinda wished there was more happening-- more events and objects to serve as landmarks and help me know where I am, more of a "game" there. I eventually made it down to the center out of curiosity but there's of course not much incentive to play on with this just sort of an engine demo as it is. However it's a *really good* engine demo. I can imagine all sorts of great stuff you could lay onto this template or great situations if there had been enemies, doors, challenges etc on top of this same map. I would really love to play a "final" version of this if you come back to it.
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Felt kinda weird having that fast-paced music but no tension in the gameplay... If there'd just been some kind of countdown or loss state, it would have added so much.
Great graphics and audio, though. The backgrounds and the character animation is some of the best I've seen.
For starters, this is absolutely gorgeous. The graphics and sound were stellar.
I had problems getting this game to run. It takes me a couple tries to actually get into this game on my Mac (running Snow Leopard), when I try to open it it usually hangs for a long time at the title screen. Sometimes it starts playing music on top of the title screen after this, but doesn't let me progress; if it freezes in this way, when I quit, I get a brief glimpse of the game before the window disappears. Once I ran, I had problems with framerate and sound stutter.
Once I got into this, I was impressed with the promise of the engine. Moving around the planetoid was really cool, it looked good, it felt good. The one mechanics issue I remember is, the double jump felt extraneous. There rarely seemed to be times you needed to use it and it felt awkward to use.
It was really cool to get down to the "heart", fire bullets, and try to outrun your own bullets.
In my notes I wrote "head through one jump". I think this means I managed to get my head partially embedded in the ceiling one time? Your guess is as good as mine.
Of course I kinda wished there was more happening-- more events and objects to serve as landmarks and help me know where I am, more of a "game" there. I eventually made it down to the center out of curiosity but there's of course not much incentive to play on with this just sort of an engine demo as it is. However it's a *really good* engine demo. I can imagine all sorts of great stuff you could lay onto this template or great situations if there had been enemies, doors, challenges etc on top of this same map. I would really love to play a "final" version of this if you come back to it.