Entry for GB Compo 2023

Discord verification: grimmrobe

In this first person dungeon crawler, you are an extra-terrestrial lifeform who needs to fight your way back to your ship and escape Earth! Recently broken out of containment by an unlikely fan, you have to battle through waves of security, police, and military forces as you explore forests, caves, and secret government facilities.

No music...  and not what I imagined but it's cool! In playing it now I am also realizing there are some game-breaking bugs. I THINK it's beatable???

Update: cleaned up a few bugs such as HP/MP display, the infinite money chests, limit on shield boosts, certain shortcut sprites not working, and more. Also doubled the xp gained from battles, something I intended for release but forgot in the last minutes!

SFX by Tronimal, with additional SFX by me.

A Little Post-Crunch Post-Mortem

Life is complex and busy and struggle. For the first 2.5 months of the jam, I chipped away at learning the ins-and-outs of GB Studio, learning more C, and planning out and building the first person "plugin". Most of that time I was stressed from life and my disability and wasn't motivated.

The last two weeks became more intense on the creative front, and then almost all of the game (art, logic, planning) came together in the last 3 days.

I'm bad at asking for help so the music (left for last like in so many game projects...) didn't get done.

It was fun and I'm glad I created this, even if it's broken. 

While it won't be eligable for the jam, I'll be cleaning up some of the most glaring bugs (enjoy your infinite $$$ for now!) and adding some purchased music in the next couple of days.

The narrative I had planned, as simple as it is, will also get implemented soon. There were 2 additional characters that were VERY CLOSE to being done but were not ready for the game and so they were cut in almost literally the last minute of the jam.

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, feel free to take a look at the code or even open up the project in GB Studio to tinker.

Note: The flares don't work correctly in the cave areas! So here's the maps. As long as you can keep track of your direction (attacks from behind will spin you around!) they can be navigated here.


Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Abducted_jam.gb 256 kB
Abducted v1.01 256 kB

Comments

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The pseudo-3d visual is amazing. 

Thanks for playing!

You actually created your own first-person plugin just for this jam?! That's just amazing. And I was wondering how you got the controls so smooth. That makes a lot of sense now. While the game is fun, I think the plugin is the real star of the show here. You should consider selling it on itch :)

Thanks for your comment!

Yeah, I have the plugin open sourced as well but it does take a bit of messing around to get it working. My plan is to tidy up the plugin (and also make it a real plugin since right now it just overwrites the point and click scene) to make it more user friendly. I tried to do that as I went but I ended up hacking things up trying to get the game finished.

The smoothness comes from building the background/view from all the pieces off-screen and then doing a big copy from that "buffer" into the VRAM's on-screen space. An even better way would be to draw off-screen and then move the whole background like a swap for an instant update, but I didn't manage to get that working in the GB Studio context during the jam.

(+1)

That's such a smart way of handling things. I'm sure the plugin will become a staple for GB Studio game development once fully released :)