My original concept for this game was to make a metroidvania type game with at least one normal enemy(a bat; every cavern game needs a bat) and one boss. The end result was much different than the original concept but things seemed to work out in the end even after dropping a few elements.

The game

What went right

• The language chosen(haXe)
  Learning to use haXe and using haXe for the game worked well. The language is very similar to actionscript 3 so there weren’t many times where I had to search for documentation while programming the game. This made porting my as3 framework much easier.
• Dealing with game assets
  I had an asset loader written in perl so that would run before the game built. Any asset that I wanted to add could just be placed in an image and sound folder and used in haXe with all the needed classes set up. This saved a lot of time and let me see how things looked in game instantly without having to change any code or playing around in FlashDevelop.
• The removal of original game concepts
  At roughly six hours before the end of the compo, I only had the player art and code done. If I tried to add an enemy and a boss, I would probably have gotten stuck on the art portion and would have had a game with just a player walking around. Adding the relics made the game a little less empty with some sort of objective to reach while keeping the implementation time low.

What went wrong

• Collision detection
  Implementing collision detection took almost a day to get somewhat right. Additionally, I never added the collision for ramps so walking on those tiles may have seemed a little odd. Jumping into a tile from the bottom sometimes warped the player to the left or right edges of a tile.
• Music
  There was actually music in the game. If you turn your volume up enough you might just be able to hear it. The music was originally much louder than it was now but it was repetitive so I turned it down so that no one would notice it.
• Art
  I only had one set of tiles done and no background tiles in the game. If you look closely at the player, he never alternates the foot that steps forward when walking.

• Game length
  The game was very short. Originally, it was only about collecting three relics and the player would win. Even after adding in the secret path, the game still felt like it should have had some more things in it.

How the relics came to be

• The double jump relic was planned for in the original metroidvania concept.
• The ability to look backwards was made due to not having backwards implementation done yet. I originally decided to just have the player moonwalk backwards due to time constraints before I changed my concept.
• The sight beyond sight relic was really just enabling the user to see the debugging hitboxes on the player. The white rectangle represents the player hitbox, the yellow boxes represents the tiles checked and their hitboxes, and the red represents colliding tiles.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how the game turned out. I was planning on moving from as3 to haXe on newer projects and this compo gave me a crash course on it.

First time entering an LD and I’m finally done! Strengthen your wall of doom and see how much of the city you can destroy.

There are a few glitches but none that would be game breaking and also there’s no sound. If the game doesn’t run you may need to use flash player 10.

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