This was my first Game jam and well, it was tough. I was carefull to sleep at least 8h per night to keep maximum efficiency but still… Quite painful to have a 48 hours exam ! But hey I love making games.

About the collector: Started from scratch with Multimedia Fusion 2.
Took the first hour to find the concept. Came up with ” an evil wizard creates his own tiny world by turning creatures into tiny beings and putting them in his terrarium”. I pretty much kept it except that originally I wanted to make it possible to really add everything in your tiny world. That you’d have to shrink even trees, mountains and stuff to make your little zoo more comfortable. Didnt have time for that sadly.

Reused base code for the platform engine et got movements, spells and physics in a few hours. I quickly realized my game was quite ambitious ( the map allows for 4 times the size, but map design took way longer than I thought ).

I had no set design for the whole world, instead I improvised as I went along. Adding more monster types and maps as long as I had time.
The last 2 hours went in making all the sound effects ( with the great sfxr ) and some terrible musics.

In the end we have:
- 8 regular monsters to find and capture ( 1 is kind of a mini boss )
- 2 unique boss monster that are quite tough to subdue. ( they can respawn if you just kill them instead of capturing )
- 5 Experience level, gained through fighting or capturing monsters. Which allows to capture stronger monsters.
- a starvation system of your tiny creatures. They need to be fed with food you find on the way.
- 2 spells: fireball (to destroy or weaken ennemies) and shrink ( to capture weakened ennemies)
- a hi score based on your total number of monsters captured when you died ( or retired, if you captured the last boss) to add some replay value.

Go to hell !

Because there’s only so much content you can create I tried to improve the game’s life by having the player “maintain” his stuff. Therefore you need to check on monsters you caught to avoid them dying. You need to come back in parts of the dungeons at later time once you leveled up, because you can now capture creatures you could not before, ect…
I also made an intricate dungeon with a bunch of tunnels crossing each other and even though its small its messy enough to get people lost.
Lastly to add a bit of surprise I added, late in development, some random encounters to force the player to stay alert. I didnt have time to push that as much as I wanted but its there and sometimes you might get surprised if you’re careless.

I’m rather happy with the result though I wish I had been able to make the world more pretty. Not many animations for the monsters but it was the price to have 10 different types of creature. Havent had time to add that when you have more monsters they eat your stored food faster, would have been interesting and turned the game into a real race in the end.
I am afraid the game is a bit hard in some fights and that its maybe missing some RPG elements to make it more immersive and fun.

Phew, I’m glad its over. Looking forward for the critics and hear or hi-scores !
As a bonus spoiler, here’s a world map of the game: http://ftarabout.com/misc/worldmap_thecollector.jpg

unable to submit my game: keep being signed off and even after being able to post my game once there’s no download link available on its profile… Help appreciated