Find Gold! by Isogash
Delve in the depths of dangerous caves to find and retrieve precious gold, armed only with the ability to pick things up and a pick-up truck! The deeper you go, the tougher the climb. Made in 48 hours using Pico-8. (Actually more like 36.) Play on itch.io!
CONTROLS
Z/Up - Jump
X - Grab/Throw
Left/Right - Move
Down - Stay low during jump
BEHIND THE SCENES
This game was built on some platformer code I've been working on before. I want to make a full Pico-8 engine and this was a useful test case to see where my engine design would fall short (and fall short it did)! The code more than doubled in size to accommodate collisions, the level traversal and the picking up mechanic. The engine itself is very "gameobject" oriented, but I found that this style is unnecessary and might be more optimal with shared components and some kind of inheritence.
In the end, it was a struggle against the physics bugs, and a fight against the engine to implement features that made the game fun. I wanted to get more out of the "you can only pick things up" mechanic, such as a box that dropped a bomb every time you jumped on it, the permanent whip upgrade and the magnet (although gold isn't magnetic). The bounce box was the only special item that made it into the game. In the end, it would have been incredibly hard to create unique opportunities for each item. The bounce box is made redundant by stacking the normal boxes (or corpses).
I like that dying a lot makes it (sometimes) easier. If you want a ridiculous challenge, try beating the game with 0 deaths!
I didn't really have enough time to playtest level 4, so it's a bit too hard and unfair in my opinion. I wanted to get around 6 levels in but I ran out of time. I probably should have cut it at 3 levels to make it more achievable and fun. If you beat the game, I commend you!
Changelog
Version 4:
- Fixed a crash when enemies fell into lava.
Version 3:
- Made death sound quieter due to complaints.
Version 2:
- Fixed a bug where boxes were respawning inside levels they didn't belong to.
- Removed an unfair enemy.
| HTML5 (web) | http://funrom.co.uk |
| Windows | http://funrom.co.uk/findgold_win.zip |
| macOS | http://funrom.co.uk/findgold_mac.zip |
| Linux | http://funrom.co.uk/findgold_linux.zip |
| Source code | http://funrom.co.uk/findgold.p8 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30376 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://isogash.itch.io/find-gold |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/find-gold |
Ratings
| Overall | 40th | 4.018⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 83th | 3.857⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 225th | 3.411⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 541th | 2.929⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 120th | 3.893⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 66th | 3.759⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 186th | 3.2⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 118th | 3.574⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
Feel free to try and give feedback on my [stream](https://twitch.tv/isogash).
I have a few of my own past corpses seemingly permanently attached to the front of my truck from when I was trying to land the gold on the arrow (and in true Darwinian fashion after multiple deaths eventually worked out the arrow meant 'press down here').
all together a good game.
Very well designed. I didn't manage to get all of the gold but I had fun trying!
How does it fit the theme? I don't really know. There was meant to be a story reason that having more gold was bad but it got cut. In general, it seems people feel like the buildup of corpses is as much a curse as a blessing, so I guess that's kinda within the theme.
* Bug: when you push two gold blocks together they stay one in other
"Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold."
:laughing:
Bad stuff:
- Death by squishing feels rather unfair when in a tight space, and doesn't contribute very much to the game
- Bags 16 & 17 are impossible to reach without taking damage
- Don't like the music very much
Good stuff:
- Physics are quite solid
- Graphics look nice
- Gameplay flows very nicely
- Basically everything but the above points
Death by squishing also used to occur from corpses, rather than only doing a hit of damage. I left the boxes and gold squishing because in playtests it felt better as a "rage" game, especially with the super fast respawns. It's meant to be at least a little bit frustrating, but I definitely think some of the tight spaces ended up unfun. I think with some rethinking and better level design it wouldn't feel unfair any more.
It's definitely possible to get bags 16 and 17 without taking damage by carefully controlling the height of your jumps but it's *way* too hard. The spike block hitbox needs to be slightly smaller than the visual to feel less punishing, which is something I knew but would have been very hard to implement cleanly with my physics solution (which is limited to tile borders).
I also liked the music. The BGM can be repetitive but it's still enjoyable. The pixel art was nice as well.
Overall,good job! I don't know how hard Pico-8 is but you should be proud of accomplishing this much.
The art is well polished, the controls are smooth and the game is fun (although it gets a little repetitive at some point).
The 8-bit music is minimalistic but doesn't get annoying.
The sound effects are well tweaked, they also don't get annoying also you hear them a lot.
The physics also seem rock solid (the only glitch I was able to find: with proper timing, you can jump while grabbing the object you were standing on. I don't think this was intended, although it's definitely practical :-) )
With such game mechanics, I also feared that it would be easy to get stuck ... but I actually never did.
Great job!
Loved it!
Congrats on the entry man!
It got worse and worse over time, as I would start to cut corners a lot.