What a wild ride. LD49 is complete for my compo entry False Angel. I had a lot of fun making this game, and I think it turned out pretty neat. It was definitely an ambitious goal to cram basically three different ideas together, but I was able to get it done with a little spot of polish on the visuals and everything is strung together fairly nicely.

"Unstable" was not my first pick for the theme, so maybe all the ideas together are to compensate for designs that aren't super fitting. Or maybe the three parts are all equally thematic, adding to the overall "instability" of it. I'll do a full postmortem later on after the rating period is over, but I wanted to share a bit about the theming and inspiration.

The game is in NES resolution with a limited color palette, mostly inspired by Kid Icarus. I wanted to start with a platformer, using vertical scrolling like Kid Icarus does in most of its stages. The vertical scrolling section is going for the theme with breaking platform blocks. Easy enough, but not an exciting implementation of the theme.

The second part of the game has the angel riding some kind of air bike flying contraption. This is the element of the game I feel most nails the theme: The controls and the thematic concept of flying a winged bike contraption are both finicky, unreliable, and unstable. I feel like with more polish and some more interesting gameplay events this could have been the whole design. I am really happy with how the controls feel here, and I hope players find fun in the wonky control scheme.

The last part of the game is pretty abstractly tied to the theme, but the boss character is supposed to represent Daedalus, which is why he has a hammer attack. I'm not all that hip with Greek myth so I suppose it's more of a nod to Hades than anything. Thematically going for something like an "unstable relationship", though really it was an excuse to put a climactic moment in the game.

The finale brings it all together with the protagonist flying too close to the sun. My animation and pixel art skills are mediocre, but the animation here really pops. Really happy with it as a cute ending.

Turnip Terrace is complete! This game was simultaneously easier and harder to make than I thought. I've employed some (admittedly very basic) programming tricks in GameMaker for this one that I have not done before. Despite it being a simple arcade game, the little management bits in here function unlike any of my other games, and I am glad to have learned something new on this one.

I ran into very few hitches in programming the game, but the art was a bit challenging to nail. I'm pretty proud of the result, but nailing cute characters and designs is quite tough.

Since upgrading to Windows 11, I hadn't had much of an issue, but in the lead up to finalizing my project everything was a bother or a problem with file management and inexplicable slowness. If it's not one thing, it's another.

If you give it a try, take a look at the tutorial. Hopefully the descriptions of the items make some sense. It was a bit of a rush at the end to get things polished up, so I see lots of room for improvement. Better time management on my part could have given me more time for polish.