Pacman's Dream
Welcome to one of Pacman's adventure in his own dream land, while kept alive, as a legend it is, in the collective consciousness.
Unfortunate I didn't implement any in game instructions, so I kindly ask you to read the instructions so you can try to minimally explore the Pacman's Dream.
Thank you all in advance and I would love to know your thoughts and interpretations on it.
INSTRUCTIONS:
This is a symbolical short game that explores the dreaming world of a digital game kept alive by the collective consciousness.
Objective:
- To keep alive and gain experience.
Rules:
- Walking through the Red enemies will make you lose health;
- Collect the Orange leafs to gain health and a dash bubble;
- Dashing trough the Red enemies to gain experience.
Mechanic:
- Movement is continuous and player changes direction based on the arrows;
- You can change the arrow direction when it is Yellow by swiping the left mouse button clicked (or one finger) to the desired direction;
- You can dash by swiinge with right mouse button clicked (or two fingers).
Log:
- too big for mobile
- Quality seems pretty bad in the WebGL build.
- [postmortem] Small adjustments to make the game playable: Reduced the amount of arrows and changed some corridors
- [postmortem] Fixed not detecting arrow in front when another object was between the player and the arrow
- [postmortem] Fixed life going over the maximum
Comments:
spoilers ###
- It's possible to beat the game- Om in the middle turn Red indicating experience
- Yellow bubles indicate possibility of using dash
- Pinkish background indicates life
- There are seven levels/difficulties
Postmortem:
Had some great learning in this Jam, not only about managing time, but also managing ideas. I decided to pivot from the initial idea in the middle of the Jam and had nothing in mind. But well, it’s a Jam, have fun, so I kept going until something playable came up. In the end, Pacman’s Dream is the result of keeping the Jam alive and coding without a clear goal. Even though I’m not really happy with it, I’m thankful at least have something to share that has some meaningful symbols.
Comments19
Every one of them is a great tip and I'll try my best to incorporate them later.
For the jam time it was what happened to be ^^
With a bit more polish and a fresh coat of paint this could be a pritty fun little arcadey maze game. good job.
The graphics are nice and the dashing animation is well done.
The biggest problem is that I don't know what to do. I read your text eventually but still found it a bit confusing. I eventually was able to gain one bell ring and a 1 appeared on the left. Then the screen started turning red from the bottom up. I am lost as to what all this means. The mechanics are very unclear and that usually hurts gameplay.
The controls are strange, I figured out at the end that you swipe right to dash, I was just clicking. You should have made that clear in your text.
Overall a good start for a game but it feels unfinished to me. Which is of course totally fine, it's LD and you don't have that much time :-)
Keep up the good work, I am excited to see what you will be able to do in your next LD! :-)
Not a bad little game, quite enjoyable but definitely some extra in game explanation of what's going on would help but I managed to piece together most of what I needed to in order to play.