As always, our 5th Global Game Jam entry was another "never done before" kind of game so we again didn't get much sleep but it was a blast anyway. Like the last year we went with the Unity to save some precious time and because we feel confident using it in almost all situations.
We were fortunate enough that a talented artist with a unbelievable pixel art skills joined our team so even before the theme was announced we decided to make good use of that by making a 2D game. We also wanted to make some rougelike game if possible with some cool effects and perfect screenshake. Theme for this year was by the way a vague one again - a simple phrase: "What do we do now?". Luckily we decided very quickly to make a simple platformer (pixel art!) with a twist where you will be using cards (more pixel art!) providing you with various curses (cool effects!) to make the gameplay more difficult (rougelike!). As always we got 4 programmers (btw all of us were the members of the original Hyperbolic Magnetism team at the first Game Jam Prague) which may seem as too many but in the end it was just perfect because we were able to divide the work accordingly. Unfortunately we didn't finished all planned features before the deadline but all art was done in time which was great for the final presentation. Too bad that there wasn't much time to balance the difficulty because that really hurt the real experience when others tried to play the game afterwards.
Fast forward a week or so after the event we now got all major problems fixed, many things were thoroughly tweaked, missing features are completed (but some like music/SFX were removed, thought) and the game is finally fun to play yet still challenging with our intended high difficulty. Please try it and tell us what you think!
Jan Ilavsky (@split82) – code
Vladimir Hrincar (@LokimanSK) – code
Peter Hrincar (@hrincarp) – code
Pavol Rusnak (@pavolrusnak) – code