The Owl, The Thief and The Strawberries

You have been hired to steal information out of an ancient library. Sounds easy, except that:

• You didn't prepare. You didn't study the language of the library, and the book contents are completely unreadable for you
• You REALLY didn't prepare. The only equipment you thought to bring was your packed lunch (4 strawberries)
• there are vicious giant owls guarding the library

==How to Play=
- You will be given
-- a book title
-- a page excerpt with a missing glyph
- Look for the matching book (stand near a book to view its title)
- Open the book and look for the matching text
- Once you know what the missing glyph is, head to the shrine and submit the matching glyph.

==Controls==
A controller is recommended.

Controller:
Move left and right: dpad / thumbstick
Drop from shelf: dpad / thumbstick
Jump / Accept: A
Attack / Cancel: B or X
Open and Close Book / Open and Close Shrine: Y
Pause: Start

Keyboard:
Move left and right: LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys
Drop from shelf: DOWN arrow key
Jump / Accept: Z
Attack / Cancel: X
Open and Close Book / Open and Close Shrine : C
Pause: Escape

==Strategy / Tips==

• Be careful that you don't leave any of your strawberries behind!
• Owls move around from time to time, but can also be disturbed by throwing a strawberry at them
• An owl will back off if it's chasing you when it gets hit by a strawberry
• If an owl is about to try to target the player, there is a warning cry and pause before it starts to move
• The FIND area is colour coded - if the top text is red, look for a red book. If the bottom text is white, look for white text in the book
• Owls won't damage you when sitting idly on a shelf

...

Hi, thanks for checking out my game! I created it over 11 days for the GDN Book Jam.

Some of the fun things about the project:

• Lighting system - if the game is laggy, blame this. The flickering candle lighting is a Texture2D which gets its data set pixel-by-pixel every render frame. At least the effect is nice
• Tight and simple physics for player movement and strawberry collisions
• Learning about bézier curves and using them for owl swooping behaviour
• The glyphs floating around the shrine was satisfying to get working
• Creating the 32 glyphs and creating a font rendering system to create sentences
• Bookshelf random generation - just supply no. books, how many are readable, and no. candles. Then store a seed when a level looks good
• Making the levels was one of the last things to happen, and it ended up being a very painless and enjoyable experience because of a bunch of code design decisions made along the way. So that was neat

Things to do when there's more time:

• Procedurally-generated levels (score would then make sense)
  • Seeded, so other players can try the same layouts
• Proper end of game - probably just a splash and you get an award on the screen
• Make the books look a bit nicer
• Maybe swooping shouldn't use a bézier, and should instead just be a rapid fall + fly back up
• When choosing a random shelf to fly to, avoid flying through player if they're close? Or maybe just warn when owl is about to "normal fly"
• Work out why MonoGame icon still appears instead of custom one