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A jam submission

Elevator 13View game page

Submitted by MakeGameMusic — 13 hours, 50 minutes before the deadline
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Elevator 13's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Secondary Theme Interpretation#183.8773.938
Quirkiness#503.5083.562
Overall#533.4263.479
Soundtrack/SFX#543.4473.500
Gameplay#563.2623.312
Gameboy Soul#953.3233.375
Graphics#1043.1393.188

Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game meet GBJam's theme?
This game is all about the luck you have in each run of this 13 floor game, and you'll probably have bad luck most of the time. Look at the top right of each new level to find out what negative status gets applied to you. Reach floor 13 to find out who is dishing out all this bad luck. I encourage you to try and play the game as intended but I have included a hidden cheat code at the bottom of the itch.io page if you just want to see the content.
In terms of the Gameboyness of this game, I have tried my best to keep to what I think could be realistically achieved on original hardware and the music is written with proper Gameboy sounds keeping to its 4 channel limitation. I think the PCM channel is technically 4 bit for audio, but the voice samples are 8 bit as 4 bit won't even load in the engine. Thanks for this Jam, its been fun!

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Comments

Submitted

You Escaped Elevator 13. Total Time: 382

I enjoyed myself a lot! It's janky, but very competent, with a lot of good level design instincts and a charming adventurous spirit. It reminds me of old Flash platformers, in a good way!

I think it would have been wiser to not include the darkness and CRT filters. Also, the elevator sprite is both off-color and has a lot of noise in it, for some reason. If you plan to participate in color-limited game jams in the future, it would also be good to learn how to render single-color bitmap text, since the text contains many different colors (especially with anti-aliasing) that are off-palette.

This might be an inexplicable error on my end, but the audio seems to be mixed quite loudly; the audio regularly clips above -0 dB. Also, holding the continue button on the elevator screen causes the sound to stack on itself, becoming very loud.

I'm going to say something that will probably baffle you; it baffled me when I first figured it out. The "music streaming specific" events in GDevelop play the music using streaming behavior. As in, like a literal streaming service, which means I can pause the music with my headphone music controls, a behavior you probably don't intend to be possible. I'm not sure why it's set up like that, but it's why I just play music using the sound events and then make sure to unload music as needed.

All-in-all, great work! Congratulations on the submission!

Developer(+1)

You beat my score! Haha well done.

Thank you for all your input, yeah there are a lot of quirks I don't quite understand about GDevelop having come from Contruct 2 many many years ago. I like the engine though and think the $40 a year is much more reasonable than Construct 3's. I am certainly better prepared for the next game jam, clearly need to learn how to do an art style though!

Really useful stuff Clark, all the best.

Submitted(+1)

Nice concept and game! Your concept is pretty similar to the one we went with in our jam game, and I think you executed on it well. I didn't make it too far in most of my runs, but I appreciated the attention to detail here. I struggled a bit with the camera placement; especially on levels where dark was applied and I couldn't see floor hazards as I was navigating. Unrelated, being able to jump over the enemies and walk above the level in the first stage reminded me of SMB1 which was cool! Thanks for making and sharing your game.

Submitted

Cool game all around!

Submitted(+1)

Really well done. Art and gameplay was well crafted. Only issue I has was with some jump controls, but I think that was likely my own lack of skill showing haha! Fun game and the theme definitelys shows through.

Submitted(+1)

Cool concept and a fun game! I very much liked the Unlucky-feature. Also think it's great that you immediately have a clear goal when entering the game. It's in the title even

Submitted(+1)

I really enjoyed the game. The random disadvantages were a great feature; when I replayed the levels, I had to approach them differently each time because the disadvantage was always different. I also liked the feedback you get when you kill enemies; it's very satisfying. Congratulations on a job well done!

Developer

Legend, thank you!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Overall pretty fun! Some things weren't very clear or communicated on the first run. While not super important due to the genre, it was frustrating needing to restart or have a disadvantage because I wasn't understanding what was happening.


  • Not a fan of how much "unavoidable" damage there was - as in you needed to know the level already.  This was partially due to how the camera worked, there were a number of blind jumps that ended up on saws/fireballs.  
  • I got slippy on the tower level and by the time I was able to get the smiley and remove it, the timer was gone instakilling me.
  • It would be great if the camera was ahead of the player instead of behind so you can see where you're going.
  • I suspect it was a level gimmick, but it was unclear that "unable to stop" (stage 5 I believe?) was part of the mechanics and not a bug. 
Developer(+1)

Great feedback, than you. It was the first game I had made in 13 years so I was a bit rusty. I would have definitely have liked to have moved the debuff selection to the elevator screen before each level to make it clearer what was going on, but of course, I boxed myself in to a coding corner by the time I realised this. And yeah, maybe you are right and I should have just used a static camera too I think I just got used to it but the catch up was never quite right. 

Submitted(+1)

I like how the game starts to switch up levels, trapped, vertical, hover etc. That was pretty cool.

Developer

Cheers man! I think you might be the person who got the furthest so far if you reached the hover level. Nice one. 

Submitted(+1)

Oh wow, a very solid jump and run, and the theme is nicely implemented. Great game!

Developer

Appreciated, thank you!

Submitted(+1)

I thought this was a fun and interesting idea. I was absolute trash at the game, but that's a skill issue on my end. The random debuffs were fun and fit the theme well. I feel like you had fun making this and it made it more fun for me to play because of it. Great work!

Developer

Haha, yes, it was fun for my first game in 13 years! Thank you so much :)

Submitted(+1)

Really interesting premise! To be honest I gave up around the 5th level I think (the trapped room one), because redoing all the levels felt a bit too repetitiv, especially since the 2nd one already gave me quite a challenge xD

Honestly though, I could see myself coming back to it just to try and beat it when I feel ready! The idea of a platformer with random debuffs forced me to approach the levels differently with each debuff. Maybe paradoxically, I wished the game was less nice on this mechanic! Having a bonus allowing it to be removed made it more like a gimmick than a real mechanic that changed the way I played!

But still, great concept and great game, the game really feels like you had fun xD
Thank you for the game!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for your kind words! It's always hard trying to balance difficulty, maybe I'll make a hardcore, no debuff removal mode for after the Jam. Good advice!

Submitted(+1)

Nice premise, a shooter platformer where you are occasionally cursed with a debuff to complete the level with.  A good way to add an element of luck that doesn't take away player agency too much.  The art is a bit all over the place, seems like you haven't stuck to a 4 color palette, but I don't mind the aesthetic.  The sound effects and platforming work, shooting enemies feels good, and the platforming controls are effective enough.  I didn't play all the way through, but I enjoyed the 6 levels I played.  Great job!

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you! Yes, I'd really have liked to have had an artist with me, a friend was supposed to help but life got in the way. I do only have 4 colours in Asesprite, it's probably the Super Gameboy style CRT filter having an effect on the image.