Souled

Scream Jam 2024 entry. In this game you have a debt of souls to repay to the Devil. You can collect the souls needed to repay the debt by hunting the demons out roaming on Halloween. The catch is that that your weapon, the soul shot, costs souls to use. Can you gain more souls than you use, and repay your soul debt?

So the idea for this game originally came out of the prompt from a different game jam. I didn't have time to participate in that previous game jam, but the prompt sparked an idea that I wrote down. The prompt for that game jam was "Your life is currency". And from that I started playing with the idea of, well, what if you health bar was how you paid for everything? Your health bar is health, so when an enemy hits you, it comes out of the health bar. Your health bar is also your ammo bar, so when you fire a shot, that also comes out of your health bar. Your health bar is also your money, so that also comes out of your health bar. This would lead to some interesting scenarios, like being able to die from being too trigger happy or from shopping addiction.

The Scream Jam gave me an opportunity to play with this idea, I just needed to make it Halloween themed, and that's where the idea of the currency being souls came in.

Coming in to this game jam, I ultimately had other life events taking up half of the jam week, so I only had half the available time to work on the game. This did ultimately lead to a lot of things hitting the cutting room floor. The game has no sound. The game has no music. The game only has a single enemy type. The graphics were completely rushed. The game could use a lot more balancing. Etc. But I did manage to get the core concepts of the idea into the game, such as a store and ammunition that each cost you health in addition to enemies taking your health. All in all, I think that it was a fun idea to experiment with, and it's one that I may play with and polish more in future games down the road.

Thanks Scream Jam for giving me the opportunity to build out this idea.

Edit: After the conclusion of the jam (and the voting period), I went ahead and updated the game to add music and sound and updated the background tileset, along with a couple of bugfixes, just to give it a small bit of polish. Outside of that, the game plays basically the same as it did during the jam.