The Only Way is Down

How long can your skills (and a neverending supply of boxes) prolong the inevitable for?

Controls

Movement: WASD / Arrowkeys

Dash: Space bar (held)

About the game

'The Only Way is Down' is my submission to Trijam #288, the theme being 'Break a box and see what happens'. It was developed in Godot 4.3, using GDScript, and took about 6 hours to make.

My original idea for a submission was a short dungeon crawler where the player must find retrieve a series of artifacts (by smashing boxes, of course) - with the player starting out overpowered and each artifact steadily weakening the player.

While I quickly abandoned this due to a combo of scope and lack of skills, the idea of the player steadily weakening through box smashing appealed to me. I quite quicky settled on the idea of a top-down infinite scroller/runner where time running out meant loss for the player - the only way to get more time was to smash boxes, with the trade-off of making the game more difficult.

I realised about an hour and a half in that I wasn't going to be able to finish on time, and that was fine by me. My goal was less to score highly in the jam, more to finally "finish" something after so long; even if there is no Audio and some (visual) bugs remaining, I'm genuinely happy with what I've created here. Meaning to say, that even though I just about doubled the alloted 3 hour time limit, I had a great time joining Trijam! Hopefully next week my goal can be to submit a valid project to the following Trijam.

All the art assets come from the brilliant Kenney (kenney.nl), without who's generosity in creating and releasing such a wide range of quality assets my GameJams and prototypes would be about 80% less impressive.