GREED by mmason


After dying while exploring an ancient ruin in pursuit of fabulous riches you awake in a strange place seemingly devoid of colour. Where are you? and what are you doing there? are you dead? It doesn't much matter, there are coins, fabulous coins everywhere in this place.
- Move - WASD / Arrows / XBox Controller (maybe others, untested)
- Jump - Space / (A)
- Run - LShift / (X)
I tried to give the game a retro feel, almost all static images are drawn in 1 by 2 pixel size (to save memory of course) sprites are only given 4 frames per animation with one exception. I tried to keep the music simple (because I'm no composer)
The jump button also advances dialog
| Source Code | https://github.com/MatthewRobertMason/LudumDare44 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://mmason.itch.io/greed |
| Windows | https://mmason.itch.io/greed |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/greed |
Ratings
| Given | 21🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
Also would be nice to have some feedback on death (like short animation or still) not just instant restart, because sometimes its hard to know what happened
I wonder if the jump is a little too slow, which makes it a little draggy.
Nice game!
I made it to the end! The grim reaper gave me a bunch of coins, I don't know why.
great graphics!
nice music!
I must admit, I have an embarrassing amount of time figuring out how to progress the dialogue box, a text to press space could work. The character also feels heavy in my opinion but it doesn't negate the controls of the game
But overall, graphics, music, atmosphere, and feel, you nailed it. Congrats!
But I lost like 5min for checking, how to skip the textbox :bed:
I really liked the gritty lo-fi aesthetic, and I felt like the art, the music, and even the physics came together into a cohesive experience.
I don't think the controls here are trying to compete with super mario bros and that sort of thing. It feels more like the guy from Pitfall went to the underworld. In that regard, I felt like the preposterous horizontal air movement was fine, where in a more "normal" platformer game it would be a problem. The section where you have to run without jumping over that wide spike pit showed me you were self-aware about this, and then I was totally OK with it.
I agree with @repine that the font broke some of that cohesive thing, I don't think you needed anything fancy there, just a more old-school font. Maybe this one for example: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Press+Start+2P
The plants were a cool mystery that left me wondering and experimenting, but not quite figuring it out (until the game pretty much told me directly at least).
Another element I found intriguing was the treatment of blind jumps. Usually these are a huge no-no in platformers, but here they were used in a more deliberate-feeling and interesting way. The game initially signaled the safety of blind jumps by the chains of lamps or the presence of coins. Later, it started to remove these little indicators that things were safe, and it left me feeling uneasy in a good way that fit with the overall vibe.
I don't know if I'm over-reading what you were up to there, but it doesn't really matter - I think I was pulled into the general vibe you were laying down here, and I dug it.
Nice work.
@lone-wolf you can glitch a little on blocks I think due to the mess of colliders I'm using. I wanted to try giving them different friction values so you slide on walls and stick to the ground.
@kovakomes I've learned from past LDS that people are unlikely to read every game page, you really need to introduce them and fair enough. the game should be fairly self contained.
@dennis-jeong you're correct about the controls, is that not how most people do it? do you have a game I could play that implements that to feel the difference?
@pkenney I'm really happy that someone played the whole thing through both ways. you're mostly not overthinking, a number of those things were intentional while a few weren't and are just happy coincidences
@superpokeunicorn you're correct about the theme, there's a little more going on with them but not too much. I intentionally kept things a bit simple this time to make sure I could get them done.