You know things are going good when you’re spending more time in your level editor than the codebase because it. just. works.

That’s a beautiful thing. The base mechanics of the game are pretty much finished. It was a little tricky to get it right because I’d never done anything with interconnecting maps and portals before. By leaving it very generic and letting the data from the level editor speak to the engine, it became almost academic.

Now it looks like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I just might get this finished and packaged up before the Jam ends. No matter what though I came out of this with a good game engine that I didn’t have only 2 days prior.

Now here’s some more screenshots. I finally locked in an objective based on my own interpretation of the theme. Connected Worlds, almost immediately to me, went in reverse and I thought: okay, so two worlds are already connected. How do I disconnect them?

With bombs of course. The objective is to go through all of the portals to the other side, get a bomb, plug it into the computer port for that portal, and get back through before it blows.

Somebody set us up the bomb!

Plug the bomb into the computer port that controls that portal.

Get out of there!

At this point it’s a straightforward platform puzzler (platzler? pluzzler?) You could play it as-is and probably even have some fun. I’d like to add some enemies that can provide further obstacles and a reason you have a health meter, along with ammo crates.

Mixing multiple tilesets from different sources seems to be working well so far. I had to scale up and sprite the bomb and the computer port though (they’re both animated).

And I still don’t have a name for it yet. Any ideas? I’m open to suggestions.