A couple months back I made this game, Pearl of Eden for Metroidvania Month 31 X Magical Girl Gamejam 13.
A whole metroidvania in a month! Thankfully the last week coincided with spring break for me, so I was able to no-life development. Pretty much everything besides a handful of libraries was custom built during the month. It's got some rough edges owing to the short timeframe, but I did make a whole game and ship it in a month.
I think the game is about an hour long for a casual player, 100% is probably 2 hours to scour every corner for secrets, and an any% speedrun is probably about 5-7 minutes.
It was a lot of firsts! My first time making a full game in Löve2D, my first time writing a non-chipmusic soundtrack, first time trying to do pixelart characters, first game jam!
The game follows Jellica, the heir to the Atlantean throne as she attempts to collect the Pearl of Eden from a decaying military base. Once she completes this ritual, she can finally become queen.
One of the themes of the jam was rust, so a decaying seabase seemed like a fun setting. I've always loved games with that sort of urbex/decay theme, with Portal 2 and Infra both landing in my top 5 games of all time, so this doubled as an excuse to pull from those inspirations.
The palette started with the AAP-128 palette, which then got shredded as I added in subtle color differences to try and sell the grime and decay of this seabase. All the art was done in Aseprite, aside from the title screen which was done in Pixaki on my ipad. I had a ton of fun animating the walk/run/crawl cycle. My main project Thwimbly uses mostly procedural animations, so getting to actually draw these cycles was a ton of fun. I wish I had had more time to animate the enemies, but alas.
The physics is inspired by Celeste, with the combat taking more after Hollow Knight (which I was replaying during the month this jam took place). I opted to avoid the downward pogo slash to try and force the players to get all of the core movement abilities, but I did have some players say it felt odd to be left out.
The game map was laid out in Obsidian, and I manually connected every distinct zone via code. (-_-)-p That took way too long and was liable for the player to either spawn out of bounds or for the game to crash if I wasn't being very careful. Next time I'll be trying to set up something more automated.
But, the world map was designed to allow the player to approach the abilities in any order, and even skip certain abilities such as the run and the sword.
Another game jam theme was Pearl, so I opted for each ability to be a pearl that slotted into an earring worn by Jellica. The player can see which upgrades they have and see a little tooltip in the pause menu.
The save points are legally-distinct benches, which Jellica promptly goes to sleep on when standing in front of. my hollow knight replay definitely influenced this, but I think it ended up kind of funny and cute. The "benches" are clams, which also ties into the pearl theme.
The music was mostly written within the last three days of the jam. Each zone has a distinct song, plus a title theme, for a total of eight songs. They're all at the same BPM and key signature to allow me to seamlesly fade between them as the player transitions between worlds.
I had originally wanted a post-rock soundtrack written on guitar, but opted for the lofi-hiphop/atmospheric pianos and synths instead to save time. I've been making music in this style for over six years now, so sticking with what I have experience with really helped me get it done in time.
After the jam concluded, I tried to polish up a handful of things, including adding a death animation, improving collision, and adding drop-in multiplayer with up to 4 friends (or enemies)!
I'm not aware of any metroidvanias besides Guacamelee that support multiplayer, so I was really excited to add this. The healthbars had to be rescaled to fit nicely onscreen, but I figured mixels were worth actually being able to see the top left quadrant.
At some point once I finish my main gamedev project Thwimbly, I would like to come back to this idea and make a more polished experience based around this idea. I would have loved to add bosses, health upgrades, more combat abilities, etc. but ran out of time. I think that for what it is, a small metroidvania that can be taken on in a lunchbreak, it was successful.
The soundtrack is available for free on Bandcamp at https://lenticularianrecs.bandcamp.com/album/pearl-of-eden-ost
Download the game for free on windows/macos/linux at https://dropsonde.itch.io/pearltower