I WON?!

So proud and grateful to have won the 5th place prize for the contest!
I really wasn’t expecting it after trying out the other excellent entries, but I’m so glad that the idea shone through and resonated with the facepunch team.

Thanks again to;
Robin Lawrence for the incredible logo
Jordan Brown & Emmy Leadley for their VO and audio engineering, which really helped to sell the concept (and thanks x2 for helping optimise at the end when everything fell apart)
Andrew Murdoch & James Morwood for playtesting!

The jam is over!

Those last few hours were awful, we playtested last night and one of the Demons was getting 0.5fps. 0.5!!! Thankfully Jordan & Emmy were willing to help troubleshoot and optimise while I got some much needed sleep.

I’m really proud of what I’ve made though, hopefully other people will like it too! I wanted to get more of a tutorial implemented but I was so short on time, so I worry it’ll be very confusing in both singleplayer and multiplayer..

Play here!

Sorry about the music! There’s so little time left and I am rushing everything.

Found this great pack of low poly enemies, so I’ve added them to the project. I don’t have time to figure out the s&box animation system though, so I’m just lerping the bones a bit and abusing the root transform for some basic effects.

We did our first playtest last night with the Demons and the camera was called out as a major issue - because it constantly swung so wildly you couldn’t really see what you were doing. Now when you’ve held an object it constrains the camera a lot more, but if you drop it you can look around more freely to search for things to grab. This means the enemy you are swinging at is always on the screen, which is a big improvement!

Suddenly there’s an art style! I played around a lot with various post process effects. The pixelation shader feels a bit lazy but I don’t really have time to do anything more complex right now, and I think making everything dark has given it a nice dungeon effect. Also added a bunch of sounds to polish things up.

Shields! This has been fizzing in my head since I came up with this idea, so I’m very glad to pull the brain worm out and put it to work… And it’s so fun! So validating to play around with a feature that was just a vague concept a few days ago. I need to improve the UI for this, but it shows off the basic idea (s&box uses Razor for its UI and making everything in HTML is not something I am good at). Also added player health! No death yet, though.

Added some physics tossing so I could try this fun “puzzle” (that seems like a strong word for this, but a slight complexity for the players to overcome) Also added falling to support this.

Had to take a few days off to deal with family stuff. Back at it now! Added gates, levers, & pressure plates this morning. Also basic combat!

Starting to think I need a style to tie this together better though.

Today I added basic enemy pathing and behaviour! Look at this amazing slime model!

This afternoon I actually implemented the grid restricted movement (so the player can’t walk through walls) and added stairs! The code for this is so jank, but I’m just going as fast as I can right now.

I also added a torch type swingable, which will be found on walls and will deal fire damage.. Once that’s implemented.