Save Everything

In 'Save Everything', you must rush through a burning building and pick up every item and person you can before the building burns down or fire blocks your escape.

As a broader theme, you must maintain virtue in the face of the guilt you might feel as you are forced to make uncomfortable value judgements and evaluate tradeoffs between saving different items, and eventually, even different people.

HOW TO PLAY:

Tap an area of the screen to move in that direction. (Up, down, left, right.)

If you exit a building, you advance to the next level with whatever you collected.

If you get burned, you start over at Level 1.

TIME TAKEN: 3 hours 59 minutes 45 seconds. This includes every line of code other than standard boilerplate config.lua and build.settings files. Art and music assets created outside the 4-hour timeframe, per the rules.

INTERNAL/EXTERNAL LIBRARIES USED: None.

CODE: @brainofsteel (me).

MUSIC: @brainofsteel (me).

ART: All art downloaded from DeviantArt for non-commercial use, with deep gratitude and credit to the following DeviantArt users: Ayene-chan, CarmenMCS, chi171812, CrAzYoYoS, DoubleLeggy, dreamer-sruki, gaaragirl654321, GodOfDarness18, JpopKitty, JuliaKaktys, MaxxyVy-2, NeoBolt, peppermix14, roseannepage, SD-Arius, telles0808.

SOME THINGS I'M PROUD OF:

I think the art came together reasonably well. It took some massaging to get the pixel art assets to all play nicely with each other (they came from a lot of different places) but the DeviantArt RPG Maker groups turned out to be a prolific source of plausibly-related sprites.

I like the concept. I really do think there are situations where it's hard to feel virtuous, even when you're doing your best to do the right thing.

I like the pickups and the descriptions. It obviously needs more work to really connect into the game, but it's a start and it was fun.

IF I'D HAD A COUPLE MORE HOURS:

I really wanted to put a lot more emphasis on what you took versus what you let burn. A list of saved items and burned items at the end of each level could have done the trick.

The game also could use some better transitions between levels. It just loads the new level and dumps you into it, which is a bit abrasive as far as pacing goes. Welp, that's four hours for you.

I would add a way to start the fire in a specific place each time so you could tune the scenario of each level more.

I would place items in a meaningful sequence rather than just throwing them all over randomly. That way you could start with easy and obvious choices and then build to ones that feel more complex and difficult.

I would spend some time on animation and sprite sheets. Animation is pretty much nonexistent as it is, unless you count the fire "flashing".