Nobody told me loot is heavy
Summary
Nobody told me loot is heavy is a game made with a team of five for Finnish game jam 2021. My responsibilities were coding the game in Construct 3 and making most of the game design decisions. Assets and the initial level design were made by other members of the team. I also spent a bit more time after the jam to fix and finish the game.
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In the game up to 5 players delve into the dragon cave, trying to haul off the most loot to win. As the name implies, the trick is that the more you carry, the slower your character becomes.
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Play the game for free in your browser here
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The idea
Theme of the game jam was "lost and found" and our team quickly landed on the idea of being lost in a maze. From there we figured they would also be found by something, and that ended up being the dragons. After that, rest of the game was figured out quite naturally.
The players enter a cave full of treasures, with two dragons guarding them. I proposed the core game mechanic of the players getting slower the more loot they are carrying, which we as a team ended up liking and making the core part of the game.
Player and the loot
As a jam game and being designed for browser play, the mechanics for the players are very simple. Players run into treasures to collect them. Movement speed goes down based on the weight of the treasure, and more valuable treasures weigh more. Players can also drop the treasures by clicking them in the inventory, but then of course another player may snatch them! Big part of the game is trying to lure the dragons into players carrying a lot of treasure, forcing them to drop most of it to run away.
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To turn the treasure into points, players have to bring them back to the starting area at the cave entrance. The game goes on until there are no players left in the cave. Players have a single health bar that cannot be replenished and can leave the cave at the entrance when they think going back in is too risky.
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For giving the game a feeling of intensity and being lost, the game is quite zoomed in and has simple light and dark system. Players can hear each other and dragons with positioned audio, which is a lot of fun and builds the atmosphere.
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The players can also sneak in the game. This stops them from leaving tracks the dragons follow when chasing them. There is a slight effect around the player to show they make noise when not sneaking, but this is one part of the game that could've been communicated better to the player.
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The cave is always the same, but the treasures have random spawn points. I created 3 tiers of spawns (yellow, orange and white rectanges in the image) that would spawn the treasures at the start of the game, with different odds. The spawns that have a higher chance of high value treasure are deeper into the cave, making that area more valuable. This creates more risk vs reward gameplay, as the longer distance you have to carry the treasure the higher the odds you run into the dragons.
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Every game will also have one dragon egg, which is both the most valuable and heaviest treasure of the game. I also made this one to only spawn in high danger locations.
Layout of the level.
The dragons
The cave has 2 dragons guarding their treasures. I made them chase the closest player they see, and if they cannot see one, they follow invisible markers left behind by players who are not sneaking. If these cannot be seen either, the dragons patrol to points in the cave (green rectangles in image). I positioned more of these points in the middle, since players will be passing through there often and the spot also has many treasure spawns.
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When the players are within range, the dragons breathe fire on them, dealing damage each second. To differentiate the two dragons a bit, one of them has longer range to start firing from and the other moves faster. This helps ease a bit the issue of them stacking on top of each other if chasing a single player.
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If not carrying any treasure, the player can quite easily outrun the dragons and make them lose the trail by sneaking or leading them into other players. However, when the dragons start breathing fire, the damage zone is quite large to make sure running into them most of the time causes you to take at least some damage. And of course the slower you are due to loot being carried, the more damage you will likely take.