Monster Maze

Was exciting and fun, the "pressure" you feel, when running out of oil was definitely real.
Had fun trapping the Critters when going around the corner :rat: :sunglasses:

one thing we would have loved to do was pathing for the monsters, so yes, without that you can trap them fairly easily. We were trying to balance the speed of the enemies and player for that sake. Pathing would indeed be something I would like to try next time!

Congrats on completing the jam, and thanks for sharing your game!

You got the spacing between torch refills juuuuuuust right, really started to feel the creepy crawly walls closing in, especially by the last couple turns of the maze. It might've been cool if the baddies had a little bit more complexity to their behavior — some sort of midway between what they're doing and full-on pathfinding, like maybe a random jitter in their movement or a back-off-and-charge loop.

Also, fun to see a jam game in Crystal — you don't see that every day — I'm on a mac so I needed to compile it, but that was pretty straightforward since you included an easy makefile.

The two mazes are interesting explorations on the difference between wide corridors and tiny ones.

Not sure I'm a fan of maze games on the whole, but the lighting mechanic (the 'fog of war' aspect) was really neat! If the lamp oil refills weren't so sparsely spread apart, I think it might be a little more fair.

The enemies closing in definitely gives a creepy vibe once I realized what was going on. It's a nice touch

@bearcage thanks, yeah that's good feedback, would have liked to do something like that with either pathfinding, or jittering/back off etc.

The Mac zipped `.app` didn't work for you? I hadn't tested on a Mac without crystal installed, but it should instal the SFML libs. I will do some testing on this before next jam to make sure the Mac app works without any installation/compiling. Thanks for the info!

@davidsheadgames thanks, yeah it was fun doing the fog of war/visiblity aspect. It's not really fog of war like in RTS's since you could see the enemies in the fog, so it was purely for visual effect, but that's what i based it off of.

You have an effective game design! Losing light while exploring, and wanting to search for oil but not run into critters, were all different axes of competing challenges. It was very satisfying to play!

I really liked the retro style of the title menu. I would love to see a version of the game art that follows the same retro pixel style!

I thought these little guys were my friends until they weren't :d

Nice and straight forward gamedesign :) Funny moment when your tiny companions start to demolish you once the light goes out xD

Why this games hould be so scary, ha-ha-ha. Those goddamn creatures...

Fun game! I managed to escape maze 1 within 2 tries haha.

Well done!

the betrayal from those pesky little critters

Interesting idea, it was fun to play!

Well done, keep going !
dont hesitate to rate my game tho x)

OMG!