What a jam! We definitely bit off a bit more than we could chew for this one although I am still happy with the result and learned a lot. The final result is a groundhog-day/stanley parable/witness crossover with a few mysteries/puzzles. If you have not played Seeker yet, you can play it here. This post contains some minor spoilers.

The initial goal was to create a game where the level appears very simple at first but the player is set back to the start immediately after finishing only to realize that they learned just enough to find the first secret. For the final game I am pretty happy with how this turned out where there is a blue tinted grass that means a block is a button or trigger of some sort. The first time you play the level it is almost impossible to avoid stepping on the trigger to reveal the first door while moving to the right. After this the player may look to the left and realize they could have gone left all along to find the same trigger mechanism that opens a new part of the map. There are several other mechanics ranging from the common platformer features (breakable blocks) to custom controls (mouse movement/clicking affecting various things) to things that seem like aesthetics becoming key mechanics.

These first few levels were all made on paper and planned from the beginning but it took almost 48 hours of the jam to get to the point where the engine was polished enough and had enough mechanics to start adding new puzzles and the last 3 or 4 endings were all added in the last hour so it got a bit hacky at that point! So far for every game jam, I have made the engine from scratch in javascript which has led to a lot of unique mechanics but this is the first jam where I felt that the game would have been much easier in game maker or unity. It ended up being a lot of work to make a proper platforming engine from scratch and we did not end up getting to do the custom shaders and fancy effects that we initially envisioned.

After finishing the first 3 carefully made guided endings, the player now has enough knowledge to find 4 more challenging endings with a bit of exploring. There are a total of 10 puzzles with 12 endings although the lines between the puzzles start to blur at the end. For a game-jam this is definitely a huge design challenge and balancing is incredibly difficult since we are already spoiled on the secrets which are important to gameplay. I think it ended up a bit on the easy side for the first few endings in order to cater more to the game-jam audience and accessibility with the last 2 being a lot harder and the middle feeling well balanced. Overall I am really happy with how this turned out and I think while it isn't very extendable in it's current form, it proves that the concept is workable and I really want to make another game like this in the future.

Code

Game

LD Entry

Here are a few screeenshots, although since the entire point of the game is that the mechanics are not obvious until you play, it is hard to tell what is going on in a still screenshot: