A patient is in immediate need of a heart transplant. You are on your way to deliver the organ, but the city is stuck in a traffic jam! The destination hospital is only a few blocks away. It's a matter of life and death, keep the heart and the patient alive. Can you make it? :runner:

The game is available for Windows and Linux, and can be played online too if you have a web browser that supports WebAssembly (Firefox, for example): https://exigo.itch.io/heart-transfer

Theme

The theme this year was quite nice :slight_smile: I already had a couple of ideas for it before the final round voting was done, and also got some more ideas during the morning after seeing the chosen theme. Can't really say the final implementation reflects the idea that much though :laughing: Also a bit boringly I went for a 2D platformer (didn't realize early enough that my previous jam game was actually a platform too).

About coming up with an idea, I've begun writing down all the wild ideas that come from looking at the theme candidates during the voting rounds. For some reason, that's when plenty of ideas pop up, but when the jam starts, your head just feels totally blank. It's so much easier to get started when you already have some ideas to pick up from, and you can even combine several ideas. And the lists serve as good reference for later use too.

Implementation

The game was made with Godot 3.2.1 (https://godotengine.org), which I've been using for many of my jam and hobby game dev projects lately. As a new thing I finally decided to learn how to use the revamped tile map and tile set system. Especially the autotiles are a pleasure to work with. Here's a tile set used in the game and the bitmask set for it in Godot:

And here's how it works in tile map:

Graphics were created with GIMP and GraphicsGale. The pixel art style was decided on already before the jam started in order to minimize the work required on assets, so I figured I should grab some tool dedicated towards pixel graphics. I already had on older version of GraphicsGale installed, but I'd never really used it for anything. It has pretty good features like layers and onion skinning, and after a bit of getting used to it I was able to carve out some sprites and background graphics. However, as more time went by, it started to become evident that the tool was just too immature to my taste and getting things done with it was just too slow. The features work in very strange way (for instance, erasing and transparency) and there were bugs too. So I eventually went back to GIMP which I'm very familiar with. GIMP is reasonably good for pixel graphics too, once customized properly.

Unfortunately there's no music or even sounds again in the game. I was about to create some music with LMMS, but didn't have the time for it. I created a short tune with Beepbox.co which is a very simple online music "tracker" (I highly recommend it for game jams!), but the song was so annoying I turned it off for good :laughing:

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I hope you enjoyed the game!