Last week I participated in a 48 hour game jam, called Spooky 2D Jam 2024 hosted by Theo and Chloe

The theme was Alone, but obviously it had to be Spooky and 2D

Hurry up, show me the game

You can play it below, or click here to see it on the site.

The design process

The Idea

I wrote a few notes, and make some drawings

Theme is alone

Idea of a setting is a place that is usually busy, where you wouldn't be alone, and it’s a mall

At a high level, it can be a maze (wider than it is deep) with a key at the farthest corner, and an exit at the farthest corner to that

Original thoughts centred around a maze, and spotlights

Tiles

Then I landed on a top-dowwn view, and figured I'd use the same tiling logic as I do in the other game I'm working on (I should make a post about that).

This meant I could draw less tile combinations, which gave me time to draw 2 viewions of each for some variation

Maze

I've implemented maze algorithms before, but this didn't stop me from doing it all again. You can see the code in GitHub here. It's a more basic version of the one explained in this post, since I didn't need loops (or have time to implement them). The maze was 12 * 3, so its not too hard to navigate.

Spotlight mode

To make the game more than just a maze, I added a spotlight mode when you enter any shop. There's a random item in each shop, and you're looking for the key which is required before you can use the exit.

It might be a bit jarring to move from keyboard controls to mouse controls, but I think it was worth it to add variety.

Style

I like the hand drawn style of RobotDuck games, from the days of flash games. They're hard to find, but here's a video of a spooky one Vampire Bot - Robotduck (Full playthrough). I decided to draw all the tiles and sprites by hand in Paint.net, and mostly in black and white.

I made interactive items colourful, and added some black-and-white decoration (and cute little spiders)

Score

I did okay. Given I had other things on that weekend, I probably spent 5 or 6 hours on it across the 2 days.

I think that's pretty good, 15th for gameplay (out of 62) isn't bad. The audio was very basic, and the visuals weren't particularly detailed or gruesome.

Congratulations to the winners listed here

Source Code

As mentioned before, all the source code is up on the GitHub page the tag submitted-version is the version I submitted