possibly world's first blobtroidvania... no upgrades, no hp, no dying, no checkpoints, no jumping, no problem
i do not recommend trying an all-skulls run until you've finished a normal run at least once!
Its really good. The limitations of what you can are permitted to do ( no upgrades! sob!) work really well in the game.
I don't know if it's just me, but I'm finding it really difficult! I can't really explain where I've actually got to, so I'm going to guess at about a dozen screens in.
This is cool! Puzzled through the first few rooms, but will be back!
Escaped to the surface and working on getting all skulls. Great game with some deceptively simple rules. I hope the blobtroidvania genre catches on.
Also I saw the name and had to make this. Enjoy a meme fresh out of the oven :)
This is super cool! I want to do all skulls but there's a few rooms that I couldn't figure out how to get in on my first run
Love it. Still haven't figured out all the rules.
For example, why can't I push the bubble left in this configuration ?
Another point : there's no continue option. I understand the entire map configuration would have to be saved, and since you can put bubbles wherever, the amount of info of a save state would be much bigger than the 256 bytes of carddata, but you could still implement it with two carts and cstore() .
This is one of the screens I can actually do! I hope we are talking about the same screen (the one with two white barrels, one high up and one down below, with a green skull in the middle of the screen.
Solution:
noooooooooo!
Worst thing is, the missing skull was actually bubbled , but too early, and I forgot to re bubble it !
Also spent a lot of time on the screen below the exit.
From this screen , you can push white blocks to adjacent screens and resetting the adjacent screen returns the white block without removing the bubbles.
I was very surprised this mechanic isn’t needed anywhere in the game and is just a red herring.
Puzzles could have been built around it .
I did it!!! Argharaghgh - it probably took about an hour and I did pretty badly on the skulls.
I'm not sure I am even enjoying playing it, yet I am strangely addicted. I find the whole process quite nerve-wracking and I fear having to reset a room.
Personally I'd like a bit more presentation in this cart, such as a timer, progress indicator, map. But it is what it is and I've sunk far too many hours into it so far.... Oh well, back to trying to do a perfect run.
Found a softlock : if you go to the leftmost room of the game and reset the room while near the left skull, you can't escape.
Interestingly, the room can be exited by falling on the giant block skull on dondokodon's map.
Was there a time where the giant skulls were actually part of the game and not just doodles on the unused parts of the map ?
EDIT :
new soft-lock found :p
Skeleton Gelatin sounds wild! A blobtroidvania with no upgrades or dying is a fresh take on the genre. Can’t wait to see how it plays out!
You want a map, a timer, a save feature.
The map I had already done for myself, but I added a timer for you.
Saving is tricky because you have to save the entire map, but also the position of the player and all the info about what goes back where when resetting a room...
Doing that cleanly in game using cstore is not trivial (you also need the map data as string in the game so you can replay the game after winning it), but I guess a clipboard based save/load feature is easier to add, provided you play on PC. Would that suit your saving needs ? I would have loved a save feature when I first started playing, but can now do the full bubbled run in 20mn, so I ended up not adding it.
To display the map, just press down.
You only see rooms you have already visited. You can search for missing skulls in the map, but you won't see those in unexplored rooms, nor the ones you may have crushed.
Bubbled skulls are represented by an orange pixel.
The current map is purposefully messy so it looks like the game.
In the first page of sprites, I used the flags to tell what map color each tile should be represented as. You can uncheck the flags for non solid tiles like dark blue background or plant leafs, for a much cleaner looking map, but I think it detracts from the game as secrets and mechanics become too obvious. At that point, you can play just in the map.
Speaking about crushed skulls, I'm currently trying to achieve worst possible ending :
maximum crushed skulls, and at equal crushed number, minimum bubbled.
@RealShadowCaster - Wow! Thanks for posting this. The timer is very helpful. It's interesting how the map's importance diminishes as you become more familiar with the game as I've pretty much learned the layout.
Thanks again for posting.
Found a way to finish with just one green skull, and have 2 crushed skulls.
Found a hard lock.
Found a way to crush the pseudo "out of bounds" skull, but unfortunately, it doesn't count :
Even though the crush occurs in the screen below the skull's origin screen, when the screen below is reset, the reset area includes one tile more than the screen, all around the reset screen. Unfortunately, the starting point of the skull is in that extended zone and gets reset. It's the only skull of the game that is on screen border.
Still working on maximizing the number of crushed skulls.
@Adam Atomic @phil
The crush skull challenge was absolutely brutal, much harder than all bubble.
In the end, I won with a single green skull and 13 crushed.
The fact that skull A gets restored because of the extended restore zone was a bummer.
B is the only bubbled skull at time of win. It is crushable, like many other highlighted in red, but crushing it makes you unable to progress further.
Skull C was one of the most challenging ones.
D was annoying : with the white barrel and the skull you can bring from the screen above, it looks like you should be able to crush it, but in the end you can't.
E was the hardest to crush without getting green bubbles. Used the extended reset zone to my advantage, a nice revenge after the A failure.
The 13 crushed are the ones highlighted in green.
Thanks to @dondokodon for his map that helped me plan the route.
Oh, and thank you also for the trolly post. If someone has a link to the old version where the map is coming from, I'd like to visit the giant skulls and the title.
@Adam Atomic : Did I find all the intended skull crushes ? Were some unintended ? Did I miss any ?
Insane softlock found
This little corner of the map is driving me insane.
In most other places, you can be reasonably be sure to have considered every possibilities, but in this corner, there are a multitude of possibilities that might be combined :
- The purple area that can be reached from a secret passage below lets you reset rooms 2 3 4 5 and 6.
- The sky blue area lets you win with the secret exit, reset screens 1 2 and 3, and Hard-lock yourself in infinite fall (red).
- secretly movable block A can be moved down into the ceiling of rooms 4 and 5, and down into the main area of room 5.
- skull B can be moved to the same places as block A.
- barrel C can be moved to room 4 and then be reset and return to its original place without resetting room 5.
- skull D can be bubbled and pushed against the left wall, and then be reset by the extended reset area of screen 4 without resetting room 5.
- you can go from room 2 to the dead end in room 5 by going through room 3 and 6, witch lets you reset room 5 without going through the main hole between 2 and 5.
So, what can be done with all of this ?
Skull D seems almost crushable. With 3 objects ABC than can go down, it seems almost doable. You can even bring block A or skull B to the tile right of it, put a bubble over it, return to room 2 and reset, and you get a nice bubble overhang and you're one object short of crushing it... but you can't because room 5 needs to be reset to either push A or B left to the skull, or to remove the bubbles created to reach C that block access to skull D.
Skull B seems even less promising : its starting point is too high to be reached by something else, and if you bubble the skull, you'll need some spikes to un-bubble and crush it.
spikes in room 1 are unreachable because objects are blocked by doors, even open ones. Spikes in the room left of room 4 are also unreachable : you'd need to push the skull over the two barrels of room 4, but at that altitude, the bubbled skull would be blocked by the little ceiling overhang between room 4 and 5...
Yet in the end, it's still skull B that I managed to "crush" :
I moved block A to the ceiling of room 4, then bubbled skull B to block A's starting point. This unfortunately requires to fully block the access to room 5. After that, I entered room 1 and reset the room.
The extended reset area of room 1 reached the ceiling of room 4, and block A was reset, witch destroyed bubbled skull B. That's a new mechanic that's never used anywhere in the game, but I'll take it. I can see a couple skulls that could be crushed with this, but I already knew other ways to crush them, so no extra potential crush, aside from the one I'm working on.
Unfortunately, skull B in now destroyed and that closes room 2's door. I bubbled skull E, but that didn't re-open the door : there's no 1 tile extended effect for opening doors, it seems.
What I accomplished there is to softlock myself in a very complicated way...
I could have prevented the softlock by pushing A into room 5, put B on A's starting point, and reset room 5 from the dead end, but that only achieves temporary crush of B, I'd still need to reset room 2 to return to the inside of room 5, and that would restore skull B :_(
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