Spooktober 2021 devlog - Sacrifice at Hollow Castle

Sacrifice at Hollow Castle » Devlog

3 years ago by todorrobot (@todorrobot)

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My ideas spend a long time simmering on the back burners. I'll get some tiny nugget of inspiration, jot it down in my sketchbook and there it will sit until space clears on the stove top and I can direct some attention to it. Sometimes, that takes a while, and other times the opportunity to employ that tiny nugget will present itself and the inspiration will lunge forward on the stove knocking all the other dishes to the side. In this case, the nugget was a large book of royalty-free stock illustrations I picked up at a yard sale for $4 and the opportunity was the Spooktober 2021 jam with the theme: Sacrifice.

The book was FULL of black and white line art illustrations of classical architecture and art and culture and science and I spent a while going through and leaving post-it notes on the parts that I thought would be useful for some future games I had in mind.

just a few of the scans from the book of stock ar

Then I found the Spooktober Jam and knew I had my chance to make a proof-of-concept. From the start, I envisioned very simple blocky sprites in the style of old Atari games set over top of a black and white overlay (sort of like the old Magnavox or Vectrex systems). With my core set of images bookmarked, I began to concoct a simple overworld where the different locations would make sense flowing into each other.

the first overworld layout

first map

second map

third map

I photographed the images straight from the book using my phone and then sent them to myself for processing in Photoshop. I scaled them down to size and ran them through a series of filters and effects to reduce them to 4-6 shades of grey. I imported them into Flowlab and began laying out the transitions from one screen to the next. I made a translucent overlay of purple/pink to give the backgrounds a little more depth and give some better indication of where it was OK to walk.

With the overworld in place, I got with my game-making partner in crime, @tinkersmith, who has gotten adept at sorting through my myriad of ideas and turning my spaghetti wire code into functional games. We came up with some ideas for simple challenges that could be located throughout the overworld to give the game some purpose and reward. The mini games were heavily inspired by the old Swordquest series, which is one of the most-generally misunderstood and opaque collection of games Atari ever released. They offered very little insight as to what should be done to accomplish any progress and also came with an accompanying comic book required to solve riddles (or to understand at all what was going on). The final result of Sacrifice at Hollow Castle was only slightly less opaque.

Unfortunately, as always, I over-scoped a bit and had to scramble at the end. I ran out of time before I could implement the context clues that explained where to find and what to do with the inventory items you gain from completing the challenges. And the inventory checks that make sure you have the item necessary to complete a challenge aren't in place (except for the rope. you HAVE to get the rope to get to the end).

the missing inventory clues

@baconcat008 was kind enough to knock out a rocking overworld soundtrack that I think gives a nice ethereal mysterious edge to wandering around. There were supposed to be some overworld ghosties that would follow you around from screen to screen, but they got cut too.

The end boss suffered the most from the one-week dev period. It barely has any brains and can be destroyed by spamming the fire button (with a blade that you don't need to have collected - oops!) but overall the game was playable and beatable, which is the base requirement for a game jam. Tink and I will hopefully go back and tighten up a few loose ends and make it more stable once the judging is over, but for now it's time for us to get back to our bigger project "Corporate Goblins" (coming soon!)

Stay tuned for updates. I've attached a walkthrough video so you can see how to beat it (but give it a couple tries on your own first and let me know where/if you got stuck/confused so we can clear it up. Thanks for playing!