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A jam submission

minitroidView game page

A small 64x64 game inspired by Metroid
Submitted by tducasse (@tducasse), Mauricet (@Mauricet34) — 9 hours, 13 minutes before the deadline
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minitroid's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Visuals#763.9613.961
Gameplay#1093.4123.412
Overall#1403.5293.529
Audio#1672.9802.980
Authenticity (use of resolution restriction)#2123.7653.765

Ranked from 51 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Did you work in a team?
We were 2 people:
- tducasse, code, music, sound effects
- mauricet, pixel art and animations

Was the resolution a challenge?
The amount of details that we can put in a 64x64px screen is very limited, so we had to adjust both the level design and the pixel art to make everything fit!

What did you learn?
I tried a framework I didn't know before, Love2d, and it was a lot of fun! The only bad point was the web export, since itch.io doesn't really support SharedArrayBuffers, I had to export using an older version, and it's not 100% bug-free...

Also, it was our first collaboration together, and I'm really happy with the result! I'll definitely try to do more collaborations in the future 😀

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Comments

Viewing comments 23 to 4 of 23 · Next page · Last page
Submitted

I love metroidvania games! This controls quite smoothly, and you gave me some time to get used to the controls before fighting monsters.

It would have liked to aim the gun upwards to hit enemies, like in Metroid.

I also would have liked to see something more original. It's one thing to be inspired by a game in a specific genre and another to copy it. I think you would have gained more experience in game design had you decided to take elements from Metroid but ultimately make your own thing.

Developer(+1)

I took this as an opportunity to learn a new framework (love2d), build my own LDtk parsing library, and work outside the “main” path…. I was more interested in the technical learnings than the game design for this jam 🙂

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+2)

You totally nailed the metroid look and feel! I loved jumping around this subterranean planet. It’s a pretty big map for such a short jam – maybe too big?? (Side note: this game made me think about how much of the real 2D metroid games are based around tunnels, rather than large open rooms.) Props for composing your own music on top of everything else, even if it’s a little, uh, “chill beats to shoot metroids to”. Nice work!

Developer (1 edit)

“chill beats to shoot metroids to” 🤣

thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

So sad it's not a totally 64x64 pixels game because I would really like to see if it could work with the constraints of the jam.

Developer

are you talking about the fact that while the canvas is 64x64, the movement is smoothed so it accidentally involves subpixels?

Submitted

I don't see the canvas being 64 by 64. All the sprites are looking low rez but the game itself seems to be rendered in high rez, The canvas seems to be 640 by 640 when not in fullscreen

Here's a before and after of what it's looking like right now, and what it could look like if it was using a 64x64 resolution

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

mmm I’m sorry I don’t really get what you mean! maybe something is wrong with the way I do it?

Two things I do:

  • my drawing canvas’ width and height are 64px
  • the window’s width and height are both 640px

So effectively, I scale everthing up by 10.

The counterpart of this, and something I realised after the submission deadline, is that my camera is not aligned with the pixels, which means that while the size of the screen looks like 64x64, there are subpixels at the edges of the camera, like here:

Is that what you’re talking about?

Another issue is the fact that I’ve not aligned the movement to the grid either, effectively creating subpixels there as well, like here:

Sorry for over explaining, it’s my first time participating in the low rez jam, so I just want to make sure I understand for next time 🙂

Submitted(+1)

Oh okay,

so basically, you are not rendering at 64 by 64 since if I scale it back down at a real 64x64 pixel resolution and scale it back up I get a different result. It's particularly obvious when looking at moving things, you can see that instead of being rendered on a 64x64 grid, things can actually use the full high rez of the screen.

I don't know what you mean by "my drawing canvas’ width and height are 64px" maybe they are only logical pixels and it's not actually rendered on a 64x64 canvas.

The best way to have a 64 by 64 game is to actually draw on an actual 64 by 64 texture/canvas/display and to upscale that with no special upscaling filter, I tried to do this on a recording it should look like that (without the compression artifacts from the video recording of course):


Another way is to actually make sure that all sprites are just the right size and at just the right position by rounding the positions before rendering for instance, this solution is pointlessly more CPU  intensive and not recommended, but sometimes depending on the technology you use, you might not have the choice.

I saw you were using love2D, I'm sure someone already tackled this issue and made a starter kit for lowrezjam or something.

I'm not sure if it's working or not but I saw this one for instance: https://github.com/tcfunk/lowrezjam-starterkit-love2d and this video too

Hope it helps :)
Developer

thanks a lot! I think I understand what my mistake was. On a high dpi screen, the library I use for resizing the screen was making pixels bleed for some reason, and I moved to not using their default canvas instead. Now looking at what they’ve done in this Love lowrez template, I get it now!

Thanks for taking the time!

Submitted

No problem, thanks for joining lowrezjam! I hope we'll see you for next editions :)

Submitted(+2)

as a 2D metroid game fan I really like this game. but the enemy skree is very unfair in my opinion.

Developer(+1)

I 100% agreed when I started play testing, which is why I put a grid tile under every skree, so that you can avoid them whenever you see one!

but yeah, I didn’t have enough time to make other people play it and watch where things were too hard/easy.

Submitted(+2)

Lovely gameplay and impressive work for a 2 week jam. I liked everything excepts those bats. Please nerf those bats 😅

Submitted(+2)

Really solid entry! Ambitious idea and well executed.  I liked the art and the music was better than what I typically hear from bosco ceoil stuff. The gameplay was great, but I ended up having to play with the keyboard which is a bummer because I feel like this game is begging to played with a gamepad.  In both the web and download build pressing an unmapped button crashed it for me and I couldn't figure out what z meant because I am on an xbox controller.  Those issues might be on my machine and definitely didn't affect my review.  Just thought I'd let you know because the game is solid and it would be worth the time to get the gamepad functionality running a little better after the jam.  Either way had a lot of fun with it on the keyboard.  Good job!

Developer

Thanks for playing and thanks for letting me know about the crash, I’ll definitely have a look once the jam is over 😀

Submitted(+2)

Great execution. The audio effects was great, when the web version liked to work at least, the music could have been a bit slower or longer before it looped. Sprite work was perfect. The only bad thing I could point out is that the sprites fall out of the 64x64 grid.

Submitted(+1)

Loved the art on this one.  Enemies coming at you hard and fast from offscreen is definitely a no-no.  This is a great start though, with a ton of polish, this could become a great little tribute game.  Good job!

Submitted(+1)

Wow people really out here porting whole Nintendo games for this jam huh.  Really well done.  The controls did feel a bit slippery and the hit registering felt a little unfair but besides that it was pretty fun.  Though for some reason the jump and shoot sound effects completely stopped after I got the ball power up.  Besides that really good game!

Developer

yeah the web version is really buggy at times… Sorry about that! The windows export works way better!

Submitted(+2)

Super cute version of Metroid! The platforming feels a touch floaty but the gameplay and aesthetics match the source material really well. I was taken aback when the Fusion death animation played, that's a nice "modern Metroid" touch.

Submitted(+3)

Nice job with this! I ran into some audio issues with the web version, so I switched to the downloadable version (as a fellow love2d dev, I feel your pain with respect to web exports).

I ran into the same issue as another player where I'd get oneshot by some enemies (it looked like they're meant to deal 1 damage and reposition you, but sometimes they'd reposition you too close to the enemy, which resulted in me getting hit multiple times in a row). Some checkpoints would have helped a lot as well.

It's a little disorienting to get teleported away when you get hit. I think adding invincibility frames to the player when they get hit would be a good way to handle taking damage and would also remove the need to teleport the player away when they get hit.

All that said, this was a solid metroid clone! The art fits really well and the environments look great on the low resolution canvas. I'm also always impressed when people manage to put together metroidvania-style levels for a jam. Good work!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Such a strange experience.

A janky Metroid-clone with funny-ass elevator-music. I love it and hate it at the same time! (The song is still playing in my head)

A checkpoint or health-items would be nice. I never could get to the red room without losing almost all my health to the bats.

After multiple tries I managed to get the Morph ball but couldn’t get past the Metroid with only one health.

I don’t know if it’s because of my browser, but I could sometimes see the collision-box of the character, and the backgrounds were missing at some segments.

Developer

Oh, sorry about the bugs on the web version! As I mentioned in the description, the web version is a bit broken, but the windows version works better!

As for the Metroid at the bottom, did you go back left after getting the morph ball, to get the missiles? They allow you to kill them!

Submitted(+2)

Fantastic! Really smooth and easy to see what's going on given the limitations, deserving of a high score.

Submitted(+2)

This game is absolutely adorable, and the mini metroid theme is SPOT on! 

I had a big issue with getting one shot by enemies though, even at full health. If I was standing on the tile a falling enemy dropped on, occasionally it would be an instakill

Developer(+1)

that’s definitely a bug, I didn’t fix it because I thought it added some difficulty, and my intention was to absolutely avoid them anyway. They fall if you are 10px close, so you can just slow down, or even just run, and turn back to avoid them!

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+2)

Wow, so pretty, and feels good to play too! Well done! 

Submitted(+2)

The pixel art is really  nice to look at, easy to understand.  I wish I could shoot the doors to open them up!!  Also the hitboxes were a little big with the enemies IMO (if I stood next to the tile with the drop down enemies they would hit me when it seems like they shouldnt be able to).  Nice job overall.

Submitted(+2)

Very nice! Cool to explore the world.

Submitted(+2)

The art is fantastic and it perfectly fits the 64x64 constraint. Unfortunately after a while the sounds stopped playing in my browser (only the background music was still on)!

Developer(+1)

yeah I’m sorry about that! As mentioned in the description, the web export is very buggy, but the windows version works fine, you could try that if you feel like 😀

Thanks for playing!

The art is all by Mauricet, he did a very good job at fitting as much detail as possible on such a small screen!

Submitted(+2)

Very nice job, the feel is very metroid visually… the music is maybe the thing that is not that “metroidesque”. Subpixel scrolling/movement. Missing directional shooting a lot on this one :P

Good you kept a pattern for Skree hitting points as without a visual cue they are coming it was quite hard to evade them.

I love the death animation!

Developer(+1)

I’m glad you liked the feel, that’s definitely what we were going for, totally inspired by the original NES version!

I didn’t have a lot of time to play test the whole thing, but yeah, the Skree falling without any kind of warning was definitely the first thing I noticed and “fixed” by adding the pattern. Glad you understood it!

As for the directional shooting… Mauricet actually originally made animations for it, but I prioritised other aspects of the game first, and I didn’t feel comfortable adding it and maybe breaking things in the process!

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+2)

Beautiful work!

Developer

thanks!

Viewing comments 23 to 4 of 23 · Next page · Last page