A game where you delve into the depths of dangerous caves to find and retrieve precious gold, armed only with the ability to pick things up.
LUDUM DARE PAGE
BEHIND THE SCENES
This game was built on some platformer code I've been working on before. I want to make a full Pico-8 engine and this was a useful test case to see where my engine design would fall short (and fall short it did)! The code more than doubled in size to accommodate collisions, the level traversal and the picking up mechanic. The engine itself is very “gameobject” oriented, but I found that this style is unnecessary and might be more optimal with shared components and some kind of inheritence.
In the end, it was a struggle against the physics bugs, and a fight against the engine to implement features that made the game fun. I wanted to get more out of the “you can only pick things up” mechanic, such as a box that dropped a bomb every time you jumped on it, the permanent whip upgrade and the magnet (although gold isn't magnetic). The bounce box was the only special item that made it into the game. In the end, it would have been incredibly hard to create unique opportunities for each item. The bounce box is made redundant by stacking the normal boxes (or corpses).
I like that dying a lot makes it (sometimes) easier. If you want a ridiculous challenge, try beating the game with 0 deaths!
I didn't really have enough time to playtest level 4, so it's a bit too hard and unfair in my opinion. I wanted to get around 6 levels in but I ran out of time. I probably should have cut it at 3 levels to make it more achievable and fun. If you beat the game, I commend you!