Journey to the west

A game based on the old tale of Monkey : The Journey to the West.

It was made in 2 weeks in Construct 3. I'm still learning Unity and I didn't feel quite confident to start working with it with such a tight schedule for that gamejam.

The game was created by first trying to put as many vile ingredients (from a gamejam called Glinny's cauldron) as possible in the game and try to make sure that the story was still coherent and the game fun to play.

Ingredients included:

- You have a 1% chance to not be able to double jump
- Spells that inflict status effects virtually never work on bosses
- The first waterfall you discover has a secret cave, but the following 23 do not
- Instant death from touching the SIDE of a spike
- Customizable hairstyle but every selection clips through your weapon and armor
- The final boss of the game is a character first introduced directly prior to the final boss fight
- The game's soundtrack is written by Nobuo Uematsu, but performed by 4th graders with recorders
- L3 enters stealth mode, R3 triggers a loud super attack, but if the character faces the camera, the order is reversed
- The protagonist can fast-travel but the party has to manually reach destinations, and their pathfinding is lacklustre
- Every town has a bad anime hot springs scene (peeking included)
- The interact button to talk to an NPC is the same button for using a precious consumable resource
- The character sprites in the overworld don’t look like the character portraits in the menus
- There is no way to tell how much time you've played
- A minor NPC shares the exact character model as the player. This is never acknowledged or explained by anyone
- Redeeming Mountain Dew codes unlocks powerful armour. Not doing so causes Dew-related comments from your party
- Every time you move off-screen, enemies instantly respawn
- Sleezer, an extremely annoying sidekick who trips up the protagonist constantly and is beloved anyway
- You can only input up to 4 lowercase for you and your party's name, but the default preset are longer and horrible names.
- Ian McKellen as the Raudy Old Man
- Justin Bieber as Squeelin Shay Higgins

Ingredients partially included:

- A cutscene where the party mourns an insignificant, once mentionned NPC
- No buildings can be entered, and any attempt makes the protagonist say "it's not the right time for that"
- The game launches with a cool jetpack mechanic but doesn't feature anything cool to do with it
- Slogan: Hurt me Daddy

It was going really well, but all this time spend figuring out a way to making a good story, with decent animation and cutscenes and creating other very different ingredients from scratch (like a world map with fast travel and bad pathfinding, a name input screen, etc) was, unfortunately not spent making gameplay mechancis, levels, enemy variety and AI. And thus, I think the moment that you are actually playing during my game are probably the worst.

So, in the end, I have a kinda complete project, as in, the game can be played from start to finish, but I had to patch most of my levels and bosses with simple text describing what would had happen.

I now fully understand how those devs from the big companies that end up having to do this to cut money/time...

For instance, I also had two more fully playable character with a different feel from Monkey, but I didn't get the chance to create a level where they would be playable after the player recruit them.

It's my first game ever, and I think I might keep working on it, even if it's only for fun. I certainly intend on adding those two playable characters, at least 1 level each where their special talent can be used and at least 3 or 4 of all the bosses that I had in mind.

Or maybe I won't and I'll keep those idea for a future project that I will actually own.

Important note: I do not own the art or the music of the game. 

EDIT: With Version 2 posted the following day, I can now say that this is much closer to what I was trying to achieve, albeit still pretty far from the full potential, since I still had to cut many things.

Made in Construct.

How to Play:
Open the folder for Window 32 or 64.
Double-click on nw,exe