Desert Dig

Here is my entry for the Brackeys Game Jam 2020, my first ever game jam. I enjoyed learning the basics of puzzle design (although I did begin to run out of ideas towards the end; you can probably tell).

Please give me constructive criticism but don't be too harsh.

I'm sorry it's so short: I was busier than I expected this week. Given more time I would have added sound and made it so the mechanics were explored more fully. I would also have liked to make it an HTML5 game so you could play it in the browser but some combination of GMS and itch.io decided that this was not to be.

I used GameMaker Studio 1.4 for pretty much everything, although I used GraphicsGale for some of the assets I made before deciding to use GMS.

If my level design isn't good enough at teaching the mechanics, here they are:

Basic Movement

You can click the ground to move. The character (a meerkat, although they are quite hard to draw in 8x8 pixels with 4 colours) moves in straight lines. The aim of each level is to reach the flag.

Clicking on the character will cause them to dig in or out of the ground. While underground, the character cannot be spotted by enemies; however, going in and out of the ground leaves an impassable hole.

Enemies

If you ever enter an enemy's line of sight, you lose the level and have to restart. Enemies can see only in straight lines, and they cannot see through walls. If you touch the flag and get spotted at the same time, you still lose.

Basic enemies stand there and face in a certain direction.

Enemies with arrows (I would have liked to make the visuals on these more intuitive, sorry) rotate either clockwise or anticlockwise/counterclockwise depending on the direction of the arrow. They rotate after you have finished moving, so they effectively take turns with you.

Enemies with stripes will walk in the direction they're facing one space at a time until they hit a wall. If an enemy tries to move into a wall, it will instead turn around and simultaneously move one space away from the wall. Since they are the only enemies that move, they are also the only ones that can fall down holes (I would have animated this).

Buttons

Pressing a button will toggle all of the "doors" - the bits of wall with blue padlocks on them. These can be used to block enemies and their lines of sight, or open pathways to the flag.