Glowsticks

About The Game

A young boy goes to sleep on Christmas Eve and is excited to open his gifts the next morning, but to get through the night he has to go to battle with every child's worst nightmare; the monsters hiding in the dark. Using only your glowstick gun, can you make it until morning? BE CAREFUL! If your glowstick gun runs out of battery, you won't survive the night.

There are 15 waves of these terrible monsters, each wave getting harder than the last. There are two monsters:

Walker:

         

A walker does what he says on the tin, he walks around and follows you... he never stops, other than to chomp your face off. If you keep moving these shouldn't be too much trouble. These monsters have a 35% chance of dropping you a powerup!

• Speed Powerup (Increase movement speed by  100%) / 15s
• Battery (+15 Battery)
• Battery (+22 Battery)

Spitter:

         

The Spitter is the most fearsome of the two! Unlike the walker, he prefers to stalk his victims from far away, you'll never see him move once he's made himself known and he will never be in the middle of your room! He spits venom balls at you and boy do they hurt if they touch you. The spitter will give you a 20% chance of getting a powerup:

• Rapid Fire (Glowsticks do 2.5x more damage, uses 0.5x the battery per glowstick, also allows you to hold the fire button down for continuous glowsticks)  / 20s
• Battery (+30 Battery)

Why

This game was built for the GoDot Wild Jam 64 and the theme was illumination. Not only was this our first jam, this was our very first game... ever. We took part in the jam from the 8th - 17th December 2023. 

Brothers, Alfie (17) at college for game design and Connor (27) a professional Web/App developer for almost 9 years. We both really wanted to make a game and thought throwing ourself in at the deep end was the best way to go about it. As this was jam, we decided to do everything ourselves. All the art and animations was done be Alfie, in Aseprite. All the code and VFX were done by Connor in the GoDot engine.

Scheduling

Unfortunately due to one of us going on a little holiday break from the 15th of December, meant we didn't have all the time of the jam, so there are obviously some things we'd like to add. The major one being sound. The game would benefit from sound but we just simply didn't have the time to learn how sound worked in GoDot, make and then implement the sounds.

Things we'd like to add in the future

I think it's only right that since this is our first game and it's close to being something almost complete, once the jam voting is over there's something we'd like come back and improve on slightly before moving on to our next little project.

•  Add SFX
• Add Music
• Adding settings page to control sound
• More Monsters
  • Maybe a boss for a final wave?
• More power ups
  • Shield
  • Unlimited Battery for small period of time
• More weapons
  • Flashlight - powerful close range 
  • Light bulb grenade - long range AOE

As we planned a lot of this in the beginning, obviously we had never made a game before, A LOT of the foundations for these things are already in the game, for example here' some sprite for the lightbulb and flashlight weapons Alfie made but we just didn't have time to implement and had to scope down: