About the Game:

Playtime: ~5-10 minutes.

Masquerade Carnival Ball is Pocket Pulp's submission for GBjam12.

You have received an invitation to the Carnival Masquerade Ball! To get to the ball you must trek through the spooky swamp, creepy cemetery, and clown town. It's a dangerous journey, and kinda smells like a trap, but the invite said there's free candy.

Game Controls:

Keyboard	Action	Controller
Left/Right Arrows	Move	D-Pad
Up Arrow	Enter Door	D-Pad
Z	Run/Attack	B
X	Jump	A
Enter	Start/Okay	Start

If you have a USB controller it should work with the game. Go to our site where you can adjust music, sound and gamepad settings.

The most obvious way we incorporated the 'spooky' theme of this year's jam is the environment and characters. You can pick between 3 classic spooky characters, a witch, vampire, and werewolf. Each character has their own special ability that will allow them to explore areas of the world the others cannot access. 

There are 3 levels plus a boss. Each level has it's own spooky setting and enemies. Some of the enemies are classic horror characters, but the spookiest part about them is their behavior. If we tell you about behavior here, we'd spoil parts of the game. Let's just say there may be a jump scare or two.

Probably the least obvious way we incorporated the 'spooky' theme was by laying a few Easter eggs from some of our favorite horror films. If you spot them, let us know.

The spookiest thing we did this jam was push the 4 color palette restriction by giving each character their own palette. We are rule followers and it gives us the heebie-jeebies to bend the rules. Polyducks did say the rule was only 4 colors on the screen at one time, we're pretty sure we didn't break them. 

How it was made:

It was made by 2 people over 10 days without a game engine. Here is a list of the tools we used to make the game:

• JavaScript (code)
• Asesprite (art)
• Tiled (level design)
• FamiStudio (music)
• jsfxr (sound effects)
• lospec (palettes)
  • Witch (Andrade Gameboy by Andrade)
  • Vampire (Velvet Cherry GB by Klafooty)
  • Werewolf (Optimized Grayscale by Yousurname)

We are working on a video on how we made the game. Eventually we'll link that here. In the meantime, you can checkout our Pocket Pulp YT channel to see the devlog shorts we made for the first 4 days and the art streaming we did days 1-7.

Gratitude:

We had a lot of fun this year and we want to thank those who helped make it fun. Thank you to:

• Polyducks and the other jam hosts for running an awesome jam full of positive energy. Y'all are awesome!
• Everyone on the GBJam Discord. Thanks for keeping it fun.
• Our Retro Releases Discord server friends. Thank you for cheering us on and giving Casey feedback on her art and ideas when her brain was fried.
• All the artists who share their palettes on LoSpec. Colors are not our thing and we'd be lost with out you.

This is the second game jam we have participated in and we are looking forward to hearing your thoughts.