Fantastic Franklin

by stealth

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.27

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.02

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.77

Theme★★★★★★★★★★2.70

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.67

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.83

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.03

Coolness★★★★★★★★★★88%

Story:

World Reknowned Archaeologist Franklin is once again gutting the earth itself in

search of knowledge, when he spots a strange egg among a pile of fossilised remains.

Could this actually be the last surviving member of a species long-thought to be lost?

A find of of this magnitude demands further study. Luckily, the Fantastic Franklin is

on-hand to haul in this treasure for proper analysis, because it's to be expected that

in terms of opportunities to restore a species from extinction, you only get one

Controls:

Move around - Arrow Keys

Jump - S Key

Pick Up / Throw - A Key

Use Pickaxe - D Key (Hold Up Arrow to dig up, down Arrow to dig down, or nothing to dig forward)

Climb A Ladder - Up/Down Arrow Keys

Jump From Ladder - S Key to jump straight up, Left/Right Arrow Key to jump Left/Right

Items, Obstacles, and traps:

Egg - Getting this to the exit is the objective. Push against it to roll it around, or jump on top and pick it up to carry it.

It can safely fall by the height of one block. Don't break it!

Dirt - Blocks of dirt can be destroyed by using the pickaxe

Rock - These can be pushed, carried, and stacked. They will fall if there is nothing below them, and they can crush both Franklin and the egg!

Ladder - Franklin can climb ladders, but not while carrying something

Lava - Lava will kill Franklin or destroy the egg. It has no effect on rocks

Exit Shaft - Roll the egg through here!

Notes:

This premise became too ambitious for a 72 hour game jam. Originally planned were

more obstacles like oil, a time limit, scoring with bonus pickups, several types of

enemies, music, and multiple levels. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to

implement anything beyond what is seen in this build. This game will be expanded in

the future to include these features and possibly more

Unfortunately, there was no time to clean up and thoroughly comment the code

Fantastic Franklin uses the E02 Multiplatform 2D Game Engine: http://www.headcannon.com/E02

License:

The scripts and data for this game are provided unprotected for the Ludum Dare event

and as example usage of the E02 Game Engine. This information may be used for research

and education, and may be used in part as the basis of a unique E02 game

Graphic assets, gameplay mechanics, characters, and scenario remain property of

Headcannon and may not be used without express written permission

Comments26

arcticleaf17 Dec 2013, 09:51

awesome, i like it :D

Daveloper17 Dec 2013, 19:39

Fun little side scrolling action, nice sprite working and good game feel (good animation and sound mixture).

I did find the initial puzzles to be a bit tricky, but that could be my ludum dare exhaustion. ;)

gene-z17 Dec 2013, 21:33

Cool game,, but i would like to see again with better sounds,,, keep good working...

Threef19 Dec 2013, 12:37

Graphics, puzzles and feel are nice, but what about theme?

blackmagic19 Dec 2013, 12:38

Nice entry though the objective could benefit a bit of hinting :)

raisedmedia19 Dec 2013, 12:50

Love it. Definitely would like to see this fleshed out more.

TheWhiteLlama19 Dec 2013, 12:59

Yay :D Cool mario-like game. Controls a little bit difficult in the first place, but after playing the first 5 minutes it was really quite nice!

chiguireitor19 Dec 2013, 13:14

Ultra hard game :-) The collisions boxes are a tad too large btw.

Azzar19 Dec 2013, 13:23

Just wow. The visuals are great and I really dig the gameplay
It might not fit the theme exactly, but it's still great.

SimianLogic19 Dec 2013, 14:08

Awesome little platformer. Kind of like Spelunky meets Sokoban. I think there's a glitch on the lava collider -- if I picked up a rock and threw it while standing on a rock on the lava, it was instadeath. Otherwise, delightful little puzzle.

TheMaster9919 Dec 2013, 14:37

Excellent game. I like it! Would love to see a post-jam version.

kewry19 Dec 2013, 15:46

Would love to see more of this!

Nelien19 Dec 2013, 15:57

Love the style and look! Nice little sounds and animations, well polished! The puzzle seems incredibly hard though, couldn't even get close to finishing it :/.

Cake&Code19 Dec 2013, 16:14

Hmm, doesn't seem to run properly on my computer. It looks like I can see the game screen twice in an already small window, with black and white rectangles beneath those. Am I seeing the double buffering simultaneously? Haha.

In any case, here are my system specs: OSX 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) running on a MacBook Pro with retina.

jsjwooowooo19 Dec 2013, 17:04

Very fun, but tough!

Diptoman19 Dec 2013, 17:35

Very nice, some music would've made it much better though. The theme usage is kind of far fetched as well.

OrangeeZ19 Dec 2013, 18:46

Nicely done, found key mapping somewhat confusing though. But the art style is real nice and reminds me of some Megadrive titles!

Tomski20 Dec 2013, 04:20

Great graphics!

angelk20 Dec 2013, 04:44

Really great graphics, the puzzles and sounds can use some more time to flesh out. I keep coming back for the nice pixel art :)

VikingJonathan20 Dec 2013, 04:46

Cool game, the puzzle was pretty good, but I had some problems with dying from throwing the rocks and whatnot that made it a bit annoying to complete.

tobbez20 Dec 2013, 11:10

There is a bug that really make the game unneccessary annoying and that is when you die when throwing a rock, this seem to happen if you don't have a perfectly clear path for the rock to travel or if you picked it up over lava. Also there seemed to be some issues with rocks falling down if they were not completly visible but it didn't affect gameplay much and was more an interesting thing that happened. Another thing that is odd is why can't you push a rock over rocks in lava?

Cool idea, nice graphics but many many bugs.

drkrunk20 Dec 2013, 14:36

This was a neat little thing, I think some music would have livened it up. I also had the same problem with dying from throwing the rocks.

Several21 Dec 2013, 03:17

A bit mean, letting you jump only 1-block high, killing you if you don't immediately run the opposite direction after throwing a rock, having no repair-dirt action, finding lava pop into visibility only as you are plummeting toward it, and always having to restart from the beginning, all as you get a feel for the controls.

Love the nose, though. Very happy it became the start screen.

I'm also fond of the license. This kind of thoughtfulness is pretty great.

Moosefly22 Dec 2013, 14:20

Not really my kind of game, but the graphics were great and it worked pretty well. Even managed to kill myself by dropping a rock on top of myself.

occash22 Dec 2013, 14:51

Awesome!Good job! Very nice graphics! That the window is such small..! Maybe it should be better to make it bigger?)

Denis Chakarov29 Dec 2013, 11:49

Nice concept and graphics! Really liked the parallax backgrounds.