The Crown Jewels Job by Will Edwards
We wanted to make something that our young kids could play, so the game is deliberately tame and safe, even if the theme is that the baddie is a goodie somehow...
WARNING: includes goats
A few features and lots of polish did not make the deadline. We had to turn off spiders because they could float up the vertical shafts and go in the sky, and the guards are rather simple. Oh for an extra day!
Its a 2D platform game WITHOUT TILES. Please take a look at our level editor and try and see how the engine works. Most of the artwork are true 3D meshes, with a bit of parallax scrolling for the backgrounds. All the floors and walls are defined using free-form lines. We built the whole engine from scratch for this LD, and despite the glitches we're super pleased and relieved to have got such a big project mostly working in the time limit!
We are particularly pleased with the level editor - you can play with that too, although we've disabled 'save to server' mode. We developed the game with a built-in git repo on the server, so everyone could add artwork and levels and so on without having to email everything to a central integrator person and wait for contributions to be uploaded.
The background music uses the old-fashioned audio API, but the sound effects - for jumping, collecting coins, getting hurt etc - use the new HTML5 audio API, which your browser may not support.
Team:
Mr War (Wombatica) - gorgeous art, level design
Will - coding
Virgo - generously helped e.g. added the guard patrol logic
background music is "Sneaky Snitch", free by Kevin MacLeod
WARNING: includes goats
A few features and lots of polish did not make the deadline. We had to turn off spiders because they could float up the vertical shafts and go in the sky, and the guards are rather simple. Oh for an extra day!
Its a 2D platform game WITHOUT TILES. Please take a look at our level editor and try and see how the engine works. Most of the artwork are true 3D meshes, with a bit of parallax scrolling for the backgrounds. All the floors and walls are defined using free-form lines. We built the whole engine from scratch for this LD, and despite the glitches we're super pleased and relieved to have got such a big project mostly working in the time limit!
We are particularly pleased with the level editor - you can play with that too, although we've disabled 'save to server' mode. We developed the game with a built-in git repo on the server, so everyone could add artwork and levels and so on without having to email everything to a central integrator person and wait for contributions to be uploaded.
The background music uses the old-fashioned audio API, but the sound effects - for jumping, collecting coins, getting hurt etc - use the new HTML5 audio API, which your browser may not support.
Team:
Mr War (Wombatica) - gorgeous art, level design
Will - coding
Virgo - generously helped e.g. added the guard patrol logic
background music is "Sneaky Snitch", free by Kevin MacLeod
Ratings
| Coolness | 89% | 2 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.00 | 163 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.22 | 97 |
| Fun(Jam) | 2.34 | 259 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.35 | 137 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.28 | 207 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 1.92 | 311 |
| Mood(Jam) | 2.72 | 192 |
| Theme(Jam) | 2.88 | 238 |
My only real gripe was that sometimes it wasn't clear which walls were passable (e.g. at the top of the towers).
Really impressive for the time taken.
Like the music and graphics.
You could work a little bit on the control though :)
One thing that would have been nice was more contrast between foreground elements (characters, pickups), passable items, and impassable items.
It does sometimes feel unresponsive when I press keys however, and sometimes it feels like it's still processing my last command long after I stop pressing a button.
By the way, I perfectly understand the desire to keep the theme light. I struggled with the theme myself because I had a flood of inspiration but as I played out all the ideas they just felt darker than I wanted to explore.
PS. Reclusive Frog; love your game man. Have to vote via Will's account tho per Jam rules.
My only complaint is that sometimes the platforms don't stand out enough from the background (color too similar) and it's hard to spot them.
Post-compo work is to get the physics and collisions working properly and to use light-dark hints or other visual ways of making it clear which areas are passable and which aren't. Well done.
Zenmumbler, I forgot to mention it in the graphics autopsy but the light-dark hints is something we realised too late. We didn't put the level together until the last couple of hours and due to sloppy modelling it wasn't easy to add highlights to the Scenery layer. I did add some doorways to the In-Front layer but that's drawn in front of the player so doesn't work everywhere - eg the battlements.
We've learned a lot. If we do another platform game next time it'll be a ton better with loads more graphics because I can front-run the engine next time as I now know roughly what bits I'll need.
The style is pretty unique, I liked it. And the music was great too.