It's Not Gambling... I Promise!

How to play

Arrows and WASD both work for movement

Space and J both work for jump, hold it for a slightly higher jump. 

In the crane, jump works as activate which starts the crane movement and pressing it again drops the crane. 

The goal is to find the coin, take it to the crane machine, get the key, and leave the level. 

Gamepad support exists with the Dpad working for movement and the face buttons (all 4) working as jump. 

Submission for MiniJam 142: Fortune

In this game you play a small alien working your way through an odd maze. You have to play a crane game to obtain a key to enter the next stage of the maze. At the end of it you'll find riches and freedom(?). My fastest time was 132 seconds, comment if you could get it faster. 

The limitation set was "Only one chance" which I primarily represented by having a single coin per stage with which to play the crane game. Originally I was going to have it be a full game over that sends you back to the main menu, but for a quick gamejam game I thought that was excessive.

I had a lot less time than I had expected, proabably 20-30 "active" hours I was unable to work on the project. And it's the first time I've done a project in Godot (or anything in a long time). Definitely hampered my progress.

The title is a joke because crane machines are just gambling. Yes there's an aspect of skill, but skill aside the machines are configured like slot machines, intended to only pay out after enough failed attempts. You can usually find the service manuals for the machines and look up how they're set if you ever want to just lose faith in humanity. 

Controls

WASD, Arrow Keys, or Gamepad Dpad to move

Space, J, or any Gamepad face button to jump/activate.

Devlog

I started the project the moment the limitation was announced. I decided to try and tackle this with a bit more structure than I usually do, so I dropped Leantime.io on my server and started from a project management angle

I started by laying out requirements for a minimum viable product. Then I put together a long list of tasks to meet those requirements starting with deciding on the game's genre and hook, then gathering assets, and after that I would begin actual development.

MVP for the game had these requirements

1. A functioning platformer
2. A functioning crane game
3. 5 stages
4. A main menu
5. A win screen

That's all. I wanted to keep scope very low since I had a feeling I wouldn't get to work on it as much as I'd like during the jam timeframe. 

I hit MVP halfway through the last day of the jam. I started adding small tweaks to clean things up, but couldn't get far becasue I had other things I had to get done. But I'm relatively happy with the state it's in given the limited time and knowledge I had.

What got cut?

Ideas that didn't make the cut

• Movement options included in the crane game. The key would be bundled with things like dash shoes or hand claws that gave you air dashes and wall jumps. Not hard thigns to implement but would balloon the level design needs and require a bit of balancing. I just didn't have time.
• Increasing complexity in crane game. I was going to start out with what we have in the game now, a simple empty crane with a single key. Then I was going to have thigns like a platform above the key that doens't let you grab it directly, you would hit jump whle the crane was going down to rotate the crane, then jump again to send it in that direction. This was going to be entirely too much effort for what time I had. It was on the list of improvements if I got the game done a day earlier.
• New Game+. If I was able to add stages and movement options, new game+ was going to let you restart with all of the skills you unlocked along the way. Who doesn't like an overpowered run? This idea alone makes me want to work on this game post-jam to add stages and movement options. 
• Cliff diving. One of the ideas for this was that the coin would buy you entry inside of a giant crane machine. The player would rappel down to grab the key isntead of using a crane. It would let you use the aforementioned movement options to make the crane more interesting. But at the end of the day this was just going to double the level designs needed and would make it just another platforming stage instead of a crane game. 

Lessons Learned

If I could go back in time and restart this process (and actually have the full time) I wouldn't do too much different. I'm pretty happy with the direction this whole process took. The only thing I'd really do differently is plan better, but I was using about 3 tutorials to quickly crash course my way into Godot so planning would have been difficult. Things would have been better if I had taken time to organize the project better, map out relationships between nodes better, and setup the auto-tiler. 

Credits

The sound effects are things I made in bfxr and some Humble Bundles I had lying around. 

Music is from the Audio Odyssey bundle https://www.humblebundle.com/software/audio-odyssey-bundle-software?hmb_source=&...

The vast majority of the visuals are from Kenny assets, specifically his pixel platformer pack and the industrial expansion. 

The crane itself I made from scratch. The crane machine is a modified lever switch from the Kenny pack. The locked door is also a modified door from that same pack.