Screenshots
Halloween Dash
Technical Info
Programmer: Cody Brant
Artist: Tanner Eakin
Composer: Tanner Eakin
Release Date: October 29, 2022
Tools: Game Maker, Aseprite
Engine: Salvie's Engine (pre-Alpha)
Resolution: 160x90, largely utilizing a Game Gear color palette
Description
This Halloween, you've gotta earn your candy! Bob and weave through your angry neighbor's trash, skip and hop over the open manholes, and dash by the cats and jack-o-lanterns! Don't forget to fill up your candy bag along the way!
Controls
Keyboard:
Directional Keys - Move Player, Navigate Menus
X - Select Menu Options, Jump
Z - Hold Bag Open
Home - Pause Gameplay
Mouse - Select Menu Options
Controller (XBOX Layout):
D-Pad - Move Player, Navigate Menus
A - Select Menu Options, Jump
X - Hold Bag Open
Start - Pause Gameplay
Credits
Graphics, Music, Sound Effects: Tanner Eakin (Lowresgames)
Programming & UI Design: Cody Brant (SalveMundiProductions)
History
My friend and I decided that it had been too long since we'd worked together on an actual game project. He had been working on a larger project, and I had been working on my game engine. After talking and looking for a Halloween game jam we wanted to join, we decided to do our own self-imposed game jam since we couldn't find one that fit our constraints and seemed interesting.
We gave ourselves 1 week starting Friday, October 21 2022. We quickly settled on an endless runner, as we wanted a game that felt arcade-like and could provide lots of entertainment on a relatively short budget of development time. Utilizing my unfinished game engine as a base, I started work that weekend and had the majority of the game finished by that Sunday, although polish and menu design would eat into all my free time over the next week. I'm particularly proud of the lighting engine. Though subtle, you can actually see the player, cats, and candy casting shadows in the light emitted by the houses' windows, the street lamps, and the passing jack-o-lanterns.
Tanner also committed to several hours-long pixel art sessions during that weekend and the week leading to release. Early on I suggested we have some unique "monster" neighbors while Tanner worked on the neighbor and house artwork, and after creating the graphics, he bit-crunched a recording of himself which became Dracula's laugh. The musical motif was written early on, but went through several revisions. At one point I suggested to Tanner we utilize some of those revisions as different versions of the song as the difficulty increased, and he then wrote a couple additional tracks which made it to the final game. He also did all of the SFX, utilizing 8-bit musical instruments to simulate things like cats meowing, the player falling, and items dropping on the ground.
Changelogs
November 8, 2022 (v1.1.1 / Android v1.1.0)
- Fixed some serious game-crashing bugs on the Android port that were caused by sloppy coding (though not sloppy enough to affect the initial HTML5 or Windows releases)
- Fixed some lighting bugs that caused the player's shadow not to update sometimes
- Modified placement and size of touchscreen buttons on Android port after doing some play-testing
- Updated the Android port's icons and splash screens
November 3, 2022 (v1.1.0)
- Fixed an issue where a menu button could be clicked using the mouse button without having your mouse hovered over it.
- Added more options for HTML5 ports of the game to attempt to exit gracefully when the exit button is clicked - game will now attempt to navigate back to the game home page (either itchio or game jolt), or if the game is running in an iframe, go back to the iframe's ancestor origin. If this fails, an attempt will be made to go back to the previous page in the history. Finally, if all other attempts to exit fail, an alert will be shown telling the user it is safe to close the window or tab.