Can You Pet The Cat?

Deep breathe...

Hey! Welcome! Thank you for checking out my SA Game Jam 2024 submission! Unfortunately, it's in a bit of a sorry state. I vastly underestimated how much time some of this would take, and got completely tangled up in trying to rush out way too much at the last moment. Please excuse the mess. As a result ... both carrots and healing potions will poison you. That's definitely not what healing potions are supposed to do. Just... imagine it's a Witcher's healing potion, 'kay?

My idea for this jam was to have a game where the risk was on whether you would want to descend deeper into the dungeon or not. The deeper you go, the rarer the better the rewards, but the greater the risk - and since you don't know when your next opportunity to exit is going to come... do you really want to gamble away your life?

At least, that was the idea. The execution... leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't have enough time to implement proper hazards, enemies or combat - nor the robust event system I envisioned for a variety of narrative spins. The framework is there, though, so I'm hoping to get that out as a post jam update for the funsies. 

I learnt an absolute ton from this, though. Firstly, I am absolutely not ready for procedural generation. I originally wanted to feature that, but got completely overwhelmed and ended up hacking together some alternative systems instead. I discovered the immense usefulness of singletons in Godot. I'm also thoroughly impressed with Dialogic 2. I've wanted to take a stab at making my own visual novel for ages now so I'll definitely be utilizing that in a future project.

Thank you for the absolutely incredible game jam, Free Lives!

Tools used:

• Godot https://godotengine.org/
  
• Dialogic 2 https://github.com/dialogic-godot/dialogic
  
• Menu Font: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Tiny5
  
• Aseprite https://www.aseprite.org/

All gameplay logic (aside from the dialog system) writing and artwork was done by me. Godot and Dialogic 2's dialog system is credit to both of those amazing teams and contributors.

PostJamFix1:

Balance change - item spawn rate increased.

Bugfix - carrots will no longer poison you.
Bugfix - health potions no longer poison you.
Bugfix - it is now possible to starve to death.
Bugfix - status conditions clear correctly on new runs
Bugfix - eating now removes the starving status
Bugfix - fixed player being able to move while using items