Freefall

The nefarious master thief Gnarly Twirlstash has stolen the ancient treasure from the world museum and escaped on his getaway jet.  Little did he know, you stowed away to recover the treasure and arrest him.  But upon discovering you, he jettisoned the treasure to give him a chance to escape capture.

Thinking fast, you jump after the treasure, gliding and diving through the air to recover it before it is lost forever to the depths of the sea.

Created in 10 days for GBJAM 14 (Theme: Old Gold).  Written in C and Raylib.

Controls

• Left/Right arrow - Move
• Down arrow - Dive
• Z+X - Hold to release parachute
• Enter - Pause and navigation.  During gameplay, pause to bring up controls.
• Q - Skip intro story

Tips

• Diving is essential to collecting all the treasure.
• Coins fall at different speeds, relative to the player.  When a coin falls slower than the player, it goes up, for example.  You can roughly tell how fast a coin moves by its spin.
• The meter across the bottom of the screen tells you where upcoming coins are going to appear, and their relative speed to the player.  Far away coins are small dots, near coins are large circles.  Dark dots are falling slower than the player, pale dots are falling faster.
• Remember to release your chute before hitting the water.  It takes a couple seconds to release.  If the Altitude meter on the right fills completely, you will lose all the treasure and be doomed to the bottom of the ocean.
• There's a special ending if you collect all 125 coins.

Author's note

I wanted to create something that pushed the limits of the palette restrictions of the jam (only 4 colors onscreen at a time).  Immediately the idea of a character falling through the air in front of a setting sun came to me... so I worked backward from that image.

There's no music in this jam entry (but there are some basic sound effects).  Ran out of time and the little bit of learning the necessary tools I tried to do during the jam was not productive.

At its core, this game is a basic physics simulation.  The player character handles like you'd imagine a skydiver might.  The controls are floaty, and momentum plays a large role in gameplay.  Objects fall at different terminal velocities based on their surface area and friction.  For example, the coins are all actually falling through space at different speeds, based on how fast they are spinning (more spin = more friction = slower falling).  Similarly, the player moves differently when diving vs not.  Diving allows for higher velocities in every direction, but is more difficult to change direction. All of this has an important, albeit subtle, effect on 100%-ing the game, which I hope you take the time to do.   Enjoy!

Assets

Font: Romulus - included with Raylib (ref)

Otherwise, all imagery, sound effects, code was created by me (Onocentaur) for the jam using the tools listed.  No AI.

Tools

• Raylib - C framework for game development (www.raylib.com)
• Pixaki for iPad - pixel art app for creating image assets (https://pixaki.com)
• bfxr - for creating sound effects (https://www.bfxr.net)