Minotaur
Playing as the mythological beast, find your way through the labyrinth that is your home
Find the way through the shifting maze, discover your origin and glimpse into your future.
A puzzle game with 10 levels, and a poem in dactylic hexameter, the meter of the ancient epics.
Made with Godot 4.1.2, Aseprite, Bosca Ceoil and jfxr.
macOS users: The web build probably won't work great for you. Try the downloadable version instead.
Comments (13)
Thanks for your comments @laaph!
This game seems to make my web browsers suffer.
I assume you're on Mac since you mentioned Safari. Godot 4 web exports are… not great on Mac yet – I'm surprised it ran at all (should have mentioned this in the description!). I added downloadable builds.
WASD did not seem to work correctly! It felt to me like W was mapped to down and D was mapped to left, but A and S did seem to work correctly. I used arrows to make the game.
Ha, I made a booboo there. I also allowed .EOU for dvorak users like me, as a secret feature, because the letters conveniently don't overlap. Those keys are in ESDF positions on a qwerty keyboard. But I left the option to match on physical key location enabled, leading to hilarious overlap with WASD. Fixed now. (Fixes of this nature are explicitly allowed by the rules.)
The "ë" in "Pasiphaë" did not get rendered correctly on my screen, I wish I had taken a screenshot.
I know; this font doesn't have a glyph for it. I considered replacing it by a plain e but figured that an ugly but correct character was slightly better.
Though I only got to level 6, I was saddened you never mention the Minotaur's name, Asterius.
Wow, yeah, good point, I should have, since the whole point was to make him relatable.
Fun game, and starting from level 5 definitely not trivial.
The only comment I would have, and one that doesn't fit in the rating system, is that the controls feel a little … off? As in they're a bit on the sluggish side. E.g. with an input sequence of "hold up", "right", "hold down" (making a quick U bend) sometimes you walk 1 tile sideways, then one more tile up, and then start walking down. Some kind of queue there or something…
Some kind of queue there or something…
Nailed it! First time I tried this input queue thing, the idea being that if you briefly tap e.g. right while still walking up, the tap does not get ignored. Maybe the queue should be length 1 at most. But then I was already abusing it for the forced movement at the level entrance and exit, so couldn't easily change it anymore. Jam code eh :)
The "ë" in "Pasiphaë" did not get rendered correctly on my screen, I wish I had taken a screenshot.
I know; this font doesn't have a glyph for it. I considered replacing it by a plain e but figured that an ugly but correct character was slightly better.
It was an ugly ë on desktop, but I just realized that it renders as tofu in the web build. Then e will have to do :)
I like the main puzzle mechanic though it gets a bit repetitive towards the end. I didn't even use the left side in the final map. Could use a new mechanic or two. Sfx & music work well with the simple graphics style. I think the poem was a little disconnected with the game. Maybe if it there was a wise poet character at the end of every level with a speech bubble it would have felt more in place :D.
@bradur Thanks for your comments!
I didn't even use the left side in the final map.
Oh, interesting! I didn't know that that was possible (obviously).
Could use a new mechanic or two.
I think there might still be untapped potential in this one as well. I'm just not very good at level design yet.
I think the poem was a little disconnected with the game. Maybe if it there was a wise poet character at the end of every level with a speech bubble it would have felt more in place :D.
That would be great :D I did have some vague plans to make elements from the poem appear in the levels, but that didn't happen (obviously).
Love the lever mechanic, reminds me of the classic block-pushing puzzle games but this mechanic plays very differently. The art and music is very polished as well, nice job.
I have to agree with bradur that it could use another puzzle mechanic or two to keep things interesting, but for a 10-level game made in 48 hours I can't really complain. I solved the last level using only the right three levers, there's a pattern where you can use the top lever to shift the exit row over one, use the other two levers to get that top lever off the exit row and "reset" it, then bring it back to the exit row and repeat. I think that's fine though, having multiple ways to solve levels and maybe having some red-herring levers can't be a bad thing.
The story element was interesting as well, it's definitely not something you usually see in game jam games. At the start I thought maybe there'd be some clues in the story that I'd have to use to solve the levels, but I'm not too sure how that would be done. Regardless it added some character to the game. Great work!
Phew, made it to level X but have to sleep now! It reminds me a lot of "De betoverde doolhof", I was also thinking of perhaps making a game like this (shifting rows/columns) but did not consider it long enough to come up with a challenge. When I started out on this one I wondered whether there would be some challenge to it since the first three levels are quite trivial, but it gets really hard towards the end! The levers sometimes turn twice on me (on Firefox) which is frustrating but also kind of discourages brute-forcing.
P.S. my game is also up now in case you want to have a look.
It reminds me a lot of "De betoverde doolhof"
That was indeed the inspiration :)
When I started out on this one I wondered whether there would be some challenge to it since the first three levels are quite trivial, but it gets really hard towards the end!
The first three are a bit of a tutorial. Probably trivial for a seasoned gamer, but I try to make my games approachable to complete newbies as well.
The levers sometimes turn twice on me (on Firefox) which is frustrating
I built an input queue, so that you can whack space while you're still walking into the lever, but clearly I overdid it. Lesson learned.
This game seems to make my web browsers suffer. I've tried on Chrome and Firefox and though I did get it to load, I just got a message "this tab is making your browser slow down". I did get the game started with Safari though! However, several times while playing the web page reloaded due to Safari thinking it was taking too much memory. Due to frustrations I only got to level 6. Is it possible to make a downloadable executable?
A few thoughts: This was the game I was going to make! My idea was slightly different but my idea was to blend a maze game interrupting it with the the story.
WASD did not seem to work correctly! It felt to me like W was mapped to down and D was mapped to left, but A and S did seem to work correctly. I used arrows to make the game.
The "ë" in "Pasiphaë" did not get rendered correctly on my screen, I wish I had taken a screenshot.
Though I only got to level 6, I was saddened you never mention the Minotaur's name, Asterius. I don't know if you mention his name later or if knowing the name a mythical creature is really that important, but I always feel for him, everyone knows him as the bull of Minos but no one ever uses his name.
This is a lovely rendition! Thank you!