Adventures of Antennio (HEJ 2024 August jam)

A physics platformer where you swing from tree to tree, collect energy crystals and sometimes you fall back a bit. Or a lot.

Since the quite famous GMTK Jam was happening in August 2024, the organizers of the HEJ ("one game a month") Jam decided that one of the three themes for the month should be whatever the GMTK theme turns out to be. And it turned out to be quite a good one: built to scale. After it was published we started making a prototype with the intention of submitting the game to both jams, but then stuff happened and we couldn't make the GMTK Jam's deadline. Oh well.

As quite a few other attendees, we interpreted the "scale" part of the theme as scaling a mountain and fairly quickly landed on the idea of making another 2D physics platformer. We kinda like this sort of thing.

I unearthed some old doodles and found one called "ninja rod" which had a wonky mechanic similar to the ninja rope in good old Worms, except it didn't behave like a flexible rope, but more like solid bar. It seemed like a fun concept, so we figured that the player character should be some kind of robot which can use an extendable antenna as a grappling tool. Thus the character of Antennio was born.

We kept the rest of it quite simple: you have to collect items (energy crystals), avoid some hazards (water) and get to an exit. We added a some checkpoints too so after a big fall you have to option to go back to one. We wanted to spare players from a Getting Over It-like experience :)

As August was a busy month for us, we couldn't add as much content and polish as we'd liked, but submitted the prototype in a playable and I guess.. acceptable condition. If you'd like to give it a go, you can find it on Itch. All graphics and level design was made by Tibor, and I did the programming as usual. Unfortunately we didn't have time to add audio or touch input either, so you'll have to use a keyboard or a gamepad to play this.