"For souls that have lost their way, like a cat going astray."
Going Astray is a platformer metroidvania-esc game about a cute small cat with the goal of saving souls. It is one of the submissions for the,'A Game By Its Cover 2023' Game Jam, where one famicase cartridge was chosen from ,'My Famicase Exhibition' to be the main inspiration / theme for the creation. The chosen cart for this game is, 'Going Astray' by PhantomZ2.
Left Arrow / Right Arrow - Move
Up Arrow - Interact W/ items in game
Down Arrow - Respawn to last checkpoint
C / Z / N - Toggle Running
X / V / M - Jump (While Running)
Let's see what jams are starting... What? The AGBIC Jam already started!?!?!?!??!????
I wanted to join the ABGIC jam last year, but because of the timing and the lack of my knowledge on game design, I skipped it. I really, really liked the idea of picking a cartridge and basing your game (or anything else) around it. There were many cartridges that caught my eye, and there a lot of cat themed carts as well. From all of them, I found the Going Astray Cart the most interesting because of its aesthetic and its vagueness.
Brain-storming what this game was took me 3 - 4 days. Some of my ideas were: A deck-building game about battling ghosts to go to heaven, a puzzler that included one-way movement as in The Witness, and a different puzzler that made the game redirect souls to their checkpoints. At the end, I chose the platformer metroidvania-like game idea because 1: I wanted to make a platformer, and 2: I hadn't made a metroidvania game before.
I usually put aesthetic high up in game jam games, and games in general. Even though the saying, 'Never judge a book (or I guess a game in this case) by its cover.' might be true, but let's be honest, the majority of us are attracted to, well, attractive games. After all, the jam is called, 'A Game By Its Cover Game Jam'. At the end, I think that the aesthetic of this game turned out alright.
The Sprites & Art, and the game map was the hardest to figure out what to do with. Well, you see, Pico-8 (The engine that I used) allows a 128 x 128 space for art, which is not a lot, but manageable. However, because of the constraints of the engine, you can either have a bigger space to add art on, but not be able to used half of the map, or have a smaller space for art, but use the map to its full capability. Since the game is a platformer, and needs to at least have more than 16 levels (specially for adventure games like this one), I had to limit my sprite space. The only problem was that the cat, because of being larger than the average Pico sprite, took a lot of the already small space, and I only had tiny amounts of space to draw the environment. I even thought of procedurally animating the cat's tail, however, I am not advanced enough to do that. Not only that, the code would definitely be more spaghetti than it already is.
Game - Me: d3v?
Cart Design - PhantomZ2 Link for famicase design
Dialogue System - oli414
Initial Release