Ghostel

You find yourself trapped inside the Ghostel Inn. What is this place? How did you get here? What's with these purple walls, when was this place last decorated?

The front door is locked! You must find a way to open the door and reach your freedom. On the way you'll be collecting these strange orbs of incorporeal matter. 

You wonder what manner of beings left these spirit orbs here, but before you leave, you'll have to travel to the other side and back.

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Ghostel (Ghost-Hotel) Is a working title for this small platform/puzzle game for the VimJam. The theme was "There and Back" with a requirement for the game to contain some form of collectables. So in Ghostel you're goal is to collect as many spirit orbs as possible whilst trying to find your way out of this unusual place. 

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NOTE: 

I've since generated a WebGL build of the game, so that folks who are on windows or linux can still enjoy it too. This was built from the same version as the submitted version, nothing should be added or taken away from that experience. Once the jam is over and the uploads are unlocked I'll upload the webGL build here to Itch for more convenience. Apologies for those playing on linux or mac for not thinking about you as much when generating the build initially.
http://fatwednesday.co.uk/Jams/Ghostel/index.html

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Random Dev Thoughts / Post Mortem:

Originally the collectables were going to have more mechanical value than just a form of 'score'.  If the project see's any more life the pickups would almost certainly become some form of usable currency, be that for items, unlocks, or perhaps replacing the machines as a way to enter your incorporeal form whilst draining your spirit reserves... I guess we'll see what the future may hold for the project if I revisit it.

This is the first time I've tried to create a large single world style level for a game, so trying to layout rooms and routes that felt open whilst still ensuring players would be able to be where they needed to be was an interesting challenge. It is also a huge step forward in terms of my practicing pixel art and it was great fun trying to create assets that (for the most part) felt like they followed a consistent style.

I think if I was going to use Unity TileMaps to build levels in the future I'd likely want some more advanced custom tools to help with room creation, as swapping between multiple tilemap layers each time you want to build a room was tiresome.