Hungry Harry's Climb by PBG
Poor Harry! He was taking a nap when the ice broke from under him! Help him climb out of the caves, and make sure he gets enough mushrooms to eat before he starves!
The caves here are randomly generated, so the game is different every time you play!
To play: Arrow keys - move Z - jump Down - dig a hole Up - climb most surfaces
I can't believe I finished this in time. It is pretty bare bones, but I am happy with it. I wish I had the time to add in enemies, but there you go.
Congrats to everyone who finished LD39!
-PBG
--PROTIP 1: EAT TONS OF MUSHROOMS! Seriously, hoard them, especially on level 1. Harry will get jump and speed bonuses for filling his blue bar, and these make later levels much easier.
--PROTIP 2: If you get a really hard level 1... just start over! The game is procedurally generated, and there is a wide swing in difficulty.
-edit 1: Thanks to @benjamin for this suggestion. To try and point out that you CAN in fact beat a level, I added a blinking arrow when you get near the exit. I also gave Harry some stuff to say so that it is clear that this is a game and not just an engine demo.
Lastly, I am trying to address the difficulty. I altered the RNG so that more mushrooms will appear on tough maps. Also, I added a super jump for when you need to jump far - this uses up food though.
--edit 2: After reading the official rules for Ludum Dare, I removed the super-jump that I just added. My level generator was generating jups that were too far to make without any powerups, so i thought it would be clever to have a super-jump to make them. However, this is too much of a new feature, so i removed it. I DID fix my generator, so that jumps that look too far should now have a ladder - this was originally intended but the ladder did not actually extend farther than the hole it was coming from, making the jump impossible. I kept some of the text in, since this clarifies that the game CAN be beaten.
| HTML5 (web) | https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=42933&tid=29735 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/hungry-harrys-climb |
Ratings
| Overall | 49th | 3.947⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 61th | 3.807⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 285th | 3.2⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 364th | 3.456⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 83th | 3.965⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 156th | 3.351⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 205th | 2.773⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 121th | 3.481⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 62🗨️ |
Also,what's the purpose for digging?
@khorm pico8 is a very minimalist development environment utilizing Lua (same language as the LOVE engine). In my opinion it is the fastest way to put a game together, although it has some harsh limits (128*128 resolution, 32kb storage). It's worth checking out https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
@rngsilvercraft Yea, I agree it is maybe too difficult right now. My original vision involved you gaining more powers as you eat mushrooms, so the harder levels would be better balanced. Also, there was originally going to be buried treasure, hence the dig command. Digging is still a bit useful for getting to areas you couldn't otherwise, but I agree it is not super useful
By the way, when I press jump twice, I get the jump sound twice, even though this game does not have double jump -- you might want to look into that.
I don't think that the game need enemies, but a clock for speedrunning would be cool.
Thanks for the great game!
Good work!
The art was pretty cute overall, reminded me of the old ZX Spectrum-era in its own way. Good work, keep it up!
The game is awesome man, congrats!
Love the physics and how you can walk over walls :D
Have to ask though, are the levels randomly generated? I ask because the first level took me maybe around 5-10 minutes to beat, but then the next two took maybe 2 minutes for both. Not sure if that's just me getting a hang of the game, or if I got lucky (the third level basically had two climbable walls that led me straight through the entire thing)?
Great game, nice work! :)
The game was cute, the graphics are totally consistent as retro style which is cool. The only bug (which doesn't matter because it's just a look) I encounter is the sprite displays the wrong direction when you climb in the other direction. To reproduce, stand near to a wall, facing the other direction then hold the up arrow (image below). Regardless of that, the game still stood up for me. Great work :)
@loadsofmana you broke it! The map memory of pico8 is wider than it is tall, so the play space in the game actaully loops around to give the illusion of being tall. Additionally, numbers in pico-8 are 16 bit, and once they hit a positicve or negative limit, they just loop around. If you dig out of the level, you will eventually fall so far that your y variable loops to the top of the level, triggering the win condition. I knew I should have made the level border indestructible :)
Thanks to everyone who has played! I am pretty happy with the base of this game, and I intend to take some time and finish it up into a fell-featured rogue-lite-platformer
Anyway, Hungry Harry's Climb is really nice. It has a cool atmosphere and a very nice control scheme. With so many controls and variations of terrain they can encounter, you could have messed that up so many ways, I feel... but this was well done. Most of the time the character did what I expected, but of course there were those times where I made one small mistake and slipped and fell way down. I took many falls early trying to experiment to learn the rules, which of course meant I was destined to starve until I could mentally plan correctly by knowing the rules.
I'm afraid I'm not very good at this game though, I never even beat level 1. I would climb and eventually not find a way up, and then I'd have an accident and fall trying to search. So even though the game is really good it created a disheartening feeling of no accomplishment when I kept failing.
But a very cool entry here - complex control scheme well-handled, great graphics and sound creating a nice atmosphere, and some interesting procgen terrain, all tied up with the theme nicely. Well done!
A very solid entry.
BTW, it seems that the game is infinite, right?
When testing this game, I personally found that the fun part, for me, was trying to find a viable path up, and then executing on it by using several of harry's moves in combination, such as hanging from the ceiling and then jumping to a climbable background. However, I think this is too much to ask of a new player on level 1 - the first level should just focus on exploring harry's moveset.
@risingoat Yes! even though there is a "You won!" screen, the game actually continues to generate playable levels forever. Practically, I don't think I've made it past level 6 - your rate of hunger loss increases by 30% every time you advance a level, and at a certain point it is extremely hard to eat enough mushrooms to compensate.
@pablodap thanks for the awesome visual. I never got around to playing with this, but I imagined Harry growing more extremities as he climbs and gains powers (maybe horns to break ceilings, a tongue to grab things far away), as well as getting more 'vascular' as he gets faster and faster. Cute, but gross is what i want.
Great work !
So bad there is no music!!!
Really great! Very good job!
Awesome game
The graphics and sound are OK but the gameplay is really unclear to me.
I've patched this out now, so it should be more playable.
Now that the gifs on the page have loaded I can also see what to do, this will make it clearer and I will give your game another try tomorrow, thanks :-)
The sounds are cute as are the graphics, very likable little guy.
The controls feel a bit unpolished, I am not able to jump while on a ladder, that was strange as I expected it to work. The letter Z is not where you think it is on some European keyboards :-)
Good job, keep up the good work!
[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEKsM8vugRs) .
Man! You did all of that on the Pico8? Awesome job, really liked the climbing mechanism, graphics and sound were great. The only thing I noticed was that I was constantly holding the up key, not sure if there is a way around that maybe auto climb IDK not a big deal. I had fun climbing around eating shrooms.
if you haven't already please give my game a try [Zombie Power Station](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/zombie-power-station) HTML5 Thanks
One of bests of this Ludum Dare!
I discovered a bug:
You would have died immediately at the bgeinning of the next level anyway, since I do not restore any hunger back upon starting a level. Good notes for when I clean this up.
@gonutz My vision for this game is that it is a rogue-lite, meaning (to me) that there is perma-death and random level generation. I plan to keep the game short (can be beaten in 10 minutes-ish), but I also plan to keep the 1-kill game over condition. I DO think level 1 needs to be easier, which is my primary concern right now.
All in all, this is a really well-executed and polished entry, congrats! :)