Embervania

Embervania is a tiny, tiny metroidvania – originally produced for TINS 2022. This is the post-jam version with extra content. Or at least it will be soon.

Help Ember (a very sleepy rat) get her and her friends out of the sewers, into which they've been chucked by some unknown entity…

• Pretty chill game – no enemies or threats
• Just exploring and rat nonsense
• It really is tiny (it'll be runnable in like 30 mins in the final version)

As per the bonus rules which were announced at the start of the competition, we had some constraints to follow here:

• Water/wet theme: it's set in a damn sewer, but to be honest this is probably our weakest implementation; it's not like the water's everywhere…
• Use subliminal messaging: You probably won't notice them right away, but there are some very dangerous and subliminal lyrics from Jerma's Rats Birthday Mixtape in the background of the intro and teleport screens.
• Use teleporters: not teleporters in the traditional sense – but certainly in the functional sense! Ember can move between levels (or sometimes between areas in the same level) by entering 'rat runs', shown as cracks in the wall.
• Use image post-processing: under the bonnet, the game uses full 32-bit colour – but for post-processing, we're using a colour reduction and dithering shader. 6 shades per channel are allowed, giving a total of 216 colours that can be displayed on screen.
• Bonus rule: we were allowed to modify or skip a rule if we used memes to explain our reasoning, but chose not to.

Embervania was one of the ideas we had going into this - and though the sewer setting wasn't planned, lots of other things (eg. the player sprite) were.