The Appeasement of Cyclus

You're an inhabitant of a small village. Your village decided that Cyclus, the god of cycles, is most likely a myth, and stopped giving it the yearly sacrifice of one crisp, juicy apple. It was not pleased, and has sped up the cycle of time. In order to appease Cyclus and restore the natural cycles, you have to collect 50 apples from its celestial realm to sacrifice to it.

Made for Extra Credits Game Jam 3, with the theme "Cycles".

Controls:

• WASD/Arrow Keys to move
• P to pause
• M to mute

Gameplay:

• If you run into an enemy, you lose.
• Collect apples to score points.
• The cycling circles determine gameplay changes.
• Appease Cyclus.

Tips (Some Mechanical Spoilers, Read if You're Having Trouble):

• Enemies move slower at night. During times where the apples stay alive for a long time (mainly autumn and winter), you can wait until nightfall to claim them.
• Not all apples are reachable during summer. If you don't think you can reach it in time, just return to the middle to maximize your future chances.
• In the first year, take plenty of chances. Having a strong apple count after the first year closes is essential.
• The hitboxes are pretty generous. Watch how enemies collide if you're unsure.
• The large skeleton is pretty easy to juke, so don't worry too much about it, but make sure you don't lead it to block you from accessing an apple.
• I don't actually know if hard mode is possible, so let me know if you finish it. By the same token, don't beat yourself up if you can't beat it.
• You can do it. I believe in you.

I went with pretty much the most pedestrian interpretation of cycles, and I took a pretty unambitious scope, as I knew I was going to only have a fraction of the full game jam time to work on it.

Lessons Learned:

• I really should fine some people to work with for audio and graphics the next  jam I participate in.
• Phaser has some quirks with nearest neighbor scaling that I didn't have time to work out, so there's sometimes some artifacting around the sprites.
• Using Tiled with Phaser wasn't quite as quick and easy as I had hoped.