Big Bot's Crossword Adventure

Journey through a surreal crossword puzzle factory that is haunted by hungry ASCII characters and plagued with insidious traps in this physics-based, "text-based", 3D action word game where you must assemble all the crosswords to restore the factory to working condition.

(I slacked off during the jam and only made one level of the game so far.)

Made in 24 hours for #RemakeJam, a game jam where you remake your first game with the skills/tools that you have now. More info: RemakeJam

This game is a mashup of the first games I made (with ASCII-based graphics in the 1980's) and the first commercial game I made. Not that it makes for good game design, but pays homage to pieces from my different early games:

• My earliest games (2nd grade?) were just simple question/answer text-based games, sometimes with multiple choice. I still have the same problem of figuring out what to call a game. My first ever game was called "QWERTY", and it's sequel was "ASDF". The third game was "DEST".
• I soon learned how to use ASCII characters, and move them around the screen. I used the stranger extended ASCII characters as different monsters. For example, a Ç looks like a creature with a big mouth, while "¥" looks like a dragon to me. Thus was born the Monster Warriors trilogy of games, turn based games where you buy a team of monsters and fight against the other player's team of monsters, using D&D stats and rules. The first version was ASCII based. Later versions were vector based, and then pixel based. Unfortunately, the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks are long lost.
• I originally wanted to remake "RoomRomp" for this jam. It was an ASCII-based graphical roguelike game where you collect loot, fight monsters, and descend to deeper levels. It was one of my first games using QBasic, which was a huge improvement over GWBasic.
• The robot character is a remake of BlockBot from my first commercial game, Bigbot Smash, available on IOS, from 2011. Back then I didn't know 3D modeling, so I created all the meshes in-game programmatically via Cocos3D and OpenGL. Ouch!

Attributions:

• Music: "Day 50" by Mark Sparling (@MarkyMark665). Creative Commons by Attribution.
• Sound Effects: www.universalsoundfx.com (royalty free)
• Tools: Unity, Blender, Substance Painter, Gimp, Audacity