The Labyrinthine Night is a top-down, survival-horror-ish adventure game intended for entry into the first No Excuses Game Jam, for which the theme was "lost family".

　　

Controls

Move around, navigate menus

　　W/A/S/DDirectional Pad Confirm and Do Stuff (also special input)

　　Space (Shift)X (LB) on XboxSquare (L1) on PlayStation Pause

　　Escape or PStart (Options on DualShock 4) The Rules You're tasked with searching through a maze-like forest for your lost family members, who are caught in dangerous situations! Find them all, save at least one, and make it back to the entrance in one piece!

　　You have a set of three hearts to represent your health, and a flashlight battery meter to represent the time you have left to find your family. That said, there's a few ways to lose:

　　If you run out of battery, the Night's darkness will overtake you and it's game over! Letting all three members of your family die will cause you to succumb to hopelessness, prompting the Night to end you.Running out of health removes your will to go on, allowing the Night to claim you. The concept might sound familiar; it's similar to that of the Temple Runs of Legends of the Hidden Temple! It's an idea that has inspired how I think about game design, and I thought would make for fun gameplay if done top-down.

　　

Why I Made This

Originally I jumped into No Excuses Game Jam with The Labyrinthine Night as another fun, small project to complete, a way of improving my dev skills. However, scope crept out of hand just before the halfway point and life events kept me from meeting the deadline. Instead of throwing the idea out or onto the backburner I stuck with the spirit of the jam, and I whittled away at it as often as my schedule would allow. I now wanted to finally release more than one game in a 3-month period; with The Labyrinthine Night that was made possible.

　　Want to know more? I'll be writing up a postmortem for The Labyrinthine Night and posting it on my blog. Stay tuned!

　　

How I Made This

The Labyrinthine Night was built with Godot Engine (I love it I love it I love it).Player/background sprites and objects were provided by the Slasher Forest Tile Pack by Malibu Darby. Check out his other work as well, it's great!The Edit Undo Line font was used for the menus, and the Volter (Goldfish) font was used for dialogue.Aseprite was used to edit or otherwise modify the above assets as needed, including the player, feral dogs, and death animations. Any other unmentioned visual assets were made by me in Aseprite.Sound effects were sourced from AudioBlocks, except the menu sound effects which were derived from this sound by broumbroum.All background music was composed by me, using the CompiFONT sample library in LMMS.

Changelog

v1.1.0 Added A "Quit To Title" option has been added to the pause menu, restart screen, and game over screen. Fixed Clown float controls fixed for keyboard users!Restarting from the pause menu should never reload the same layout now. A bug with dialogue occurring alongside this behavior has been fixed as well! v1.0.3 Fixed Menus should now register input coming from controllers regardless of controller typeClown float controls refused to come up for some reason when you started to float, but now they appear correctly! v1.0.2

　　Fixed

　　Menus not registering inputI've been getting quite a few reports of menus not registering input, and I think I've figured out why. The issues with some menus (such as the pause menu or game over menu) not registering input should be fixed. Windows fix is live, fixes for other platforms on the way soon!

　　v1.0.1

　　Fixed an issue with the Sis rescue where players would be unable to shoo the dogs away. Hopefully she can make it out alive with you now!Mac-specific: Turned on "High Res" for Mac OSX exports. If any Mac users can report any issues they have with this build that would be great! v1.0.0 Initial release!