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[mtorc1]

Setting

Hello everyone,

I would like to show you my latest side project. It's Grave of the Pumpkin, a game where you play a little pumpkin that tries to escape the deep catacombs of a church. Unfortunately, pumpkins don't have legs. Thus, it can roll, but it cannot stop by himself. The only way to stop is to roll against a wall. But be careful: there are numerous traps lurking in the vaults and if you want to collect all the coins and relics, you sometimes have to risk your (pumpkin) life. You control the game with the arrow keys or WASD.

The game was developed as part of the Halloween game jam of the German hobby gamedev community ZFX. I know, Halloween was two weeks ago but I would like to present my game anyway . It is based on the popular mobile game "Tomb of the Mask".


Technics

It was written from scratch using just TypeScript and WebGL2. So no game engine was used - a fact that is hard to overlook considering the rudimentary graphic features (models just use plain diffuse maps with one directional light. No normal mapping, no ambient occlusion, no shadows. Simple particle effects are the most "fancy" feature I implemented). Anyway the renderer supports view frustum culling and a simple animation system (used in the main menu). The map geometry is created on-the-fly from a text-based "tilemap".


Assets

I made almost all assets by myself except of the sounds and music. However, I am quite satisfied with the quality of my models and textures (I confess: the pumpkin model is very simple but it was the first one I ever made). Since it was part of a game jam, I didn't have time to do much polishing. Some more graphic effects and/or better 3d models or map decorations would be nice.


Playtesting

Although the game is not perfect in any way, I think it's already fun to play. I am still considering continuing development albeit Grave of the Pumpkin was primarily designed as a part of the ZFX game jam. Thus, I am very curious about your thoughts.

You can playtest it online in your browser here: https://gotp.mtorc1.org or Itch.io (There are some known issues with Safari I couldn't fix yet. It works in Chrome and Firefox, though)

Thank you very much for playtesting. Stay healthy!

[jbarrios]

Hi mtorc1,

I played your game.  What a simple concept, but it works very well.

Good things:
- It was very easy to learn the basics
- Good pacing.  Just when I was getting bored you introduced a new mechanic
- The music is very fitting
- Some of the puzzles were pretty challenging
- I love that I could choose to skip difficult crosses if I wanted to.  It gives your game a built in difficulty select.

Things that could use some work:
- I don't know if there is enough gameplay to carry a full game.  The 9 levels were the perfect length though.

I enjoyed it.  Nice job!

[mobilelast]

Lovely little game. I especially liked the music and the mood it gave (this opinion comes from a person who usually turns off the music while playing). There are nice features such as the water (?) blocks that become solid after touch. They were cleverly used in the last level. Their functionality wasn’t clear right away, and it is a good sign when game mechanics can be learned by experimenting rather than explaining.

Couple of suggestions:
- Larger visible area, zoom-functionality or predictive camera movement would be nice. As the player cannot see far ahead, solving puzzles may end up being more guessing/remembering than thinking.
- Spikes are hard to see from walls facing away from the player. Those might need an indicator or something.
- The “next level” -button should probably be above “retry”. I think that people mostly want to proceed, but at least I accidentally retried couple of times.

I like small puzzle games like this. With a good concept it is easy to add new functionalities for greater challenge: portals, pressure plates for opening doors, momentary invulnerability etc. And as the concept already works, the rest is only about creativity and polishing.

I’m already waiting for new levels.

[rachoac]

My son and I playtested this game!

* We really liked the graphical style, and simple yet intuitive gameplay
* Appreciated the simple intro level and gradual introduction of new gameplay mechanics
* The music and sound effects were spot on

If I was to improve something, the only obvious thing was that we kept pressing the "Retry" button after actually winning the level. I think the Next Level menu item should be first followed by the Retry.

Are you planning to release a native mobile version of this game? I would totally pay a couple of dollars to play it on my phone!

[mtorc1]

Dear all,

I am very sorry for the late response to all your kind comments. First of all, thank you very much. I am really glad that the feedback is predominantly positive :-)

Things that could use some work:
- I don't know if there is enough gameplay to carry a full game.  The 9 levels were the perfect length though.

I agree with you here. With more levels, further game mechanics / elements would be necessary. At the beginning, I planned to add enemy unity (like ghosts patrolling on the map, etc). "mobilelast" also made some very good suggestions.

There are nice features such as the water (?) blocks that become solid after touch. They were cleverly used in the last level. Their functionality wasn’t clear right away, and it is a good sign when game mechanics can be learned by experimenting rather than explaining.

Thank you very much.

Couple of suggestions:
- Larger visible area, zoom-functionality or predictive camera movement would be nice. As the player cannot see far ahead, solving puzzles may end up being more guessing/remembering than thinking.

There are some points right now where the limited field-of-view is making the game quite hard (in a bad way). So yes... this is a point. I could imagine the camera to zoom out when you enter a new "area" of the map.

- Spikes are hard to see from walls facing away from the player. Those might need an indicator or something.

Yes, definitely. Indicators would be nice. Maybe a symbol over the respective tile

My son and I playtested this game!

I am very happy, you guys had fun. This was probably the best compliment I received so far.

If I was to improve something, the only obvious thing was that we kept pressing the "Retry" button after actually winning the level. I think the Next Level menu item should be first followed by the Retry.

Are you planning to release a native mobile version of this game? I would totally pay a couple of dollars to play it on my phone!

A few people mentioned the retry-nextlevel-thing. I had never noticed this myself, so thank you for the advice.
I think this game is well suitable for mobile. As I said, I developed it from scratch in TypeScript - so basically it is a website. There are some framework allowing you to pack an html-based application into a mobile app. Maybe I will have a look.


I have still not decided whether I should continue developing GOTP or proceed to my next project. However, I am very grateful for all the nice and interesting feedback. This helps me a lot.