Tower of Merrix
For too long has Merrix the Mad lorded over the citizens of Separ. Explore his tower and bring his reign to one final end.
Goal:
- Defeat the evil wizard Merrix
Controls:
- A/D : Move Left/Right
- Space : Jump
- Mouse : Aim
- Left Mouse Button : Hold To Charge, Release To Launch
Made for Indie Game Clinic's Collab Jam
Credits:
Lead Programmer, VFX Artist, Designer: SQLPY
Game Programmer, Character Animator, Designer: Hagen Heubel
Systems & UI Programmer, Writing, Narrative Design: Vrood
Sound & Music by: JoeHateClub
Environmental Art and Character Design: Controverse
Environmental Art and Character Design: Mado
Special Thanks to: BurgerLad
Post Mortem:
There's quite a bit that is rough about this release. A lot of us struggled with sickness, loss, national policy changes, and technological issues all outside of our control. The last week of the jam was planned to be a polishing stage, but in reality most of the game was built in that time instead. Such is life. Forgive the mess, there's a few portions that are obviously W.I.P., but hopefully there's enough here for our interpretation of the theme to shine through. We hope you enjoy the experience despite it's flaws.
Bugs Reported:
- Options & Credits Buttons lead to blank screens, press Esc to return to Main Menu
- Main Track stops looping
- Falling between a certain pair of bookshelves results in a soft lock
- Head will be perma-smushed when ramming against certain objects that are much larger than you
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Comments
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The music is great!
Suggestion: Have a timer on each of the "open" series and if the player doesn't do anything popup a little message to help them understand how to move forward. Had a friend play it and they told me it was broken, but they just hadn't clicked on the screen.
The artist and sound members of the team did a really good job! I love the animations of the cat, the lil flick of its tails with the movement, and the pounce is really fun and really gives that cat-like feel to the gameplay. The music gives a nice fun cat vibe too!
The space jump felt unecessary to me b/c there really is no part of the map that fascilitates a need for it outside of the stacked shelves that you just spam jump up on (and even then, you can still use the pounce on the ladder portion very easily).
A lot of these sections could have been replaced by the waterfall thing, the bubbles or the moveable ladders. Those 3 features I would have loved to see a lot more of in the level designs! I feel like the shelf asset got used a bit too much in places it didnt need to be/substituted for above mentioned set pieces.
I noticed a small issue with jumping in regards to the clutter. As fun as it may be to be a cat and push things around and off shelves, sometimes these objects would catch into the sprite and cancel jumps. Also, during the moving books platform section, the sprite will move against the books and you have to maintain position. This can make landing those narrow jumps really tedious because you can easily be pushed off by the physics of it. In the early section of the room w/ the flying books, as mentioned by others, there is the hole that many get trapped in, but also, there is a small clipping that you have to jump over to get into the hole in the floor part. Also, the mouse runs backwards lol. Small thing there but I noticed it and laughed a bit.
I know you guys had a really rough time of it so just wanted to say I am still proud of the team for their efforts! I would honestly love to see a more refined and completed version of this; levels where you might see projectiles (that are intigrated into the environment and the platforming in some way) from the heros as they are fighting their way to the wizard etc as the cat chases an actual mouse and not the wizard himself (maybe at the end of the game he gets morphed and kitty gets two mice snacks)
It is uncanny how much it sounds like you were part of the team and our planning phase before it all went off the rails, everything you mention was either discussed, originally planned, scrapped from scope, problems we noticed but didn’t have time to fix or other hahaha. I agree though, we really, really would have benefitted from a level designer on the team—The only section in the game that was not thrown together nilly willy in some capacity was the huge bookcase which had some setpiece planning around it for level design. And the execution on that one still has … room for improvement if we wanna put it generously (it was me who put that in, I can say that about my own work xD)
The original concept was something closer to “you, the wizard’s cat, are trapped in the fight between the heroes and the wizard. The game acts as if the wizard is the important guy and achievements are given for things the wizard does. The cat just happens to be there, and you play by doing cat things and interacting with random magic junk the wizard has lying around in his tower, not really caring for the fight going on around you. Also there’s a rat to catch, much more important than whatever those humans are doing.”
However the action and whimsical magical interaction things were at odds with one another so we went less down the action route, banking on having a lot of art to put to use and make unique small fun interactions (like the bubble room)… Then yeah stuff happened and here we are lol. I did put in some assets from the action playtest in though if you try to touch the cauldron you’ll see what that is.
Oh and very interesting feedback on the small jump. I advocated for adding that because I felt like using the pounce for everything was clunky (I was getting sick of having to charge a pounce over every little thing in playtesting) and didn’t really sell the feeling of being a nimble cat. We couldn’t find a combination that combined both purposes of the charged jump and a simple one button directionless jump into a single button.
What we really would do if we had another few days was to get the sound part of the game in properly, we have a lot of unused sounds that we didn’t get to implement due to time pressure. I honestly think this is the most bare bones sound thing we could get away with. I feel sorry for Joe who spent the time putting those together, but at least we got four out five of his songs into the game hahaha
Thanks for the feedback (and the love for my tail simulation!) <3
the cat is adorable and the animations are amazing! I unfortunately got stuck in a hole I couldn't jump out of
Cool! Good vibes, nice art, *great* music. The main jumping around mechanic with the mouse is nice, I basically didn't use spacebar.
I didn't really understand the interpretation of the theme however - the hero trying to defeat the wizard is the mouse, right? And you play as... the wizard's cat?
I got softlocked twice - once between the bookshelves you mentioned, and once trying to push a dresser through the gap near the floating section and it got jammed in there and I couldn't get down! :'(
Oof, sorry that it was unclear!
The Wizard was turned into a mouse by the hero. You play as the Wizard’s cat who’s feeling a little snacky.
Adding to this, it’s the best we could do. This kinda became our forced interpretation of the theme because we haven’t heard from our then main artist for around two weeks now so we had to make do with the assets we had at the time. We had a much clearer version of this story in mind but it required wizard and hero models as well as full screen illustrations.
So uh, it’s up the the player to exercise their imagination in this version. lol.
(Also the reason for the mishmash of art quality and styles present in the game)
Thanks, that makes sense!