#corrypt

Hello friend,

Corrypt is absolutely 100% my favourite game of all time. This is not hyperbole. I’ve spoken to Michael Brough on several occasions. I’ve never mentioned this to him. I probably should.

Please play Corrypt until you understand what magic is. Saying anything else would ruin the experience. I would really hate to ruin the experience.

Corrypt is available for PC, Mac and iOS.

(@damiansommer)

Premise: Explore procedural caves with Spelunky style design with grid-based movement. Mechanics:

Move in any of the cardinal directions using arrow keys.

Gravity will start having an affect after one turn in the air. Each turn will drop you by one square, but will still apply your horizontal movement.

It's impossible to die in the game, but enemies can push you off ledges. You can also stand on top of/ride enemies.

Hitting the spacebar will skip your movement step allowing all other entities to take a turn

The player can pickup and hold one item at a time and it will affect their gameplay. You can pickup/swap with items on the ground by hitting down on top of them

Each entity in the world has a built in logic of how it will react to the player and other entities in the world

Entities:

Goblin: Will patrol paths horizontally. If a player is nearby horizontally, it will push the player towards the nearest wall or ledge. If the player is riding the Goblin, it will continuously patrol its platform.

Bat: Patrols the sky. If a player is nearby, the bat will approach the player to keep them grounded and push them around. If the player is riding the Bat, it will patrol as usual keeping one unit from the wall to keep from crushing the player.

Lava: Lava will continuously grow throughout the room until the player is effectively stuck. The only way out at that point is to undo.

Items:

Winged Boots: Gravity will take an extra step to start affecting your movement

Pickaxe: You can destroy certain types of environment squares by walking into them

Magic Wand: You can't move with this item equipped, instead you cast a spell in your hit button direction that swaps your position with whatever entity is hit

World:

Unlike Spelunky or Corrypt, the world is endlessly large

You can keep playing continuously until you get yourself stuck

You only have 100 undos throughout your run, no exceptions

The world you're exploring is documented on a map you carry and can be used to backtrack and retrace your steps

Unless you're actively playing, your progress will be wiped at midnight and a new map seed will be generated

Leaderboard:

Stats shown: steps taken, rooms explored, riches gathered

Sorting: friends/global

In order to design well and make really compelling experiences, I need to actually play games of high quality. My plan for now is to play as many IGF and indie games as I can get my hands on and continuously analyze and understand their development so I can draw on them as reference. Here's my first batch:

Corrypt - Michael Brough: This game took me by surprise more and more the longer I played it. From the get-go you have grid based movement and can affect entities based on your proximity and movement. It felt like a puzzlescript game or any other very simple puzzle type game. The first section has a number of block pushing puzzles of varying difficulty that get you to better understand the mechanic as well as your movement around the world. After playing for about an hour, I got over the hump of solving the pushing puzzles and made it to a magician who sold me a bit of magic. In the game, you can use magic to save the contents of a grid square in your room to be carried across all other rooms. This sounds complex, but it's very intuitive to understand in the context of the game. As you're collecting mushrooms and buying more magic, it becomes clear that these spells are affecting the world in unexpected ways. The first spell I cast destroyed the magician revoking my access to more magic. Luckily the game doesn't punish and can undo at any point in the game. As you use magic to save more grid spaces, you notice that the world is being destroyed and all the rooms are becoming more and more similar. This layering of the normal block pushing/puzzle solving and the completely innovative square saving mechanic allows for interesting changes and makes the game a different experience for every player.

Grid based movement

Your movement affects entities in different ways

Inherently puzzle based

Layers second to second puzzle with minute to minute

Exploration requires you to change your reality

Everything can be figured out through trial and error

Complex system of interacting entities

Continuous rise in complexity and interest

You can tell a well designed game by how simple it is for someone to understand and this game does a good job

Gorogoa - Jason Roberts: This game's mechanic is deceptively simple, but it's still very impressive even without thinking of the tech required to pull it off. In Gorogoa, you search scenes for interest points and overlay these scenes to move your character, a young boy, across the world. He seems to be interested in a large mystic creature running through his village and attempts to follow some arbitrary prophecy that will eventually lead him to meet the beast. Sometimes, the scenes become different and somewhat surreal definitely elevating my interest. I'm interested to see how deep into the world the boy will go and what interesting scene will be in the final game, although I think there's not too too much more to be explored with this mechanic.

Beautiful hand drawn art

Interconnected world with an impressive mechanic

Simple hidden item logic puzzles

Corrypt is not by any means an “easy” game. The puzzle elements are mind-bending, the Magic elements completely chaotic, the anarchy of corruption is the most apparent and readily visible statement the game makes, at least in my opinion. 

For me, what was ludicrously weird, is the part where you save a small child.  What is different here is that the child has a set of unique characteristics;

1. It is the only intractable element, except magic, that can be moved from screen to screen. Well magic, cannot be moved, as such, it is more like persistent from screen to screen. The child is not persistent, so yes, i would say that it is the only object capable of moving from scree to screen

2. the child, although acts like a block, in most terms has the change that it follows the controller on two axes and not just one. The blocks can be pulled and pushed. The child drags along even sideways. 

This has the beauty of presenting the vulnerability of the child. The child feels sticky, attached to the player. Getting the child to stop following you is a choice, an effort. One has to get the child in a particular position and then almost slide him off, as if you are trying to brush him away. 

The child is also a burden, it is hard to move around, with this child physically attached to you, and his vulnerability, and lingering persistence almost prevents him from ever arriving to his mother. The player needs to go through repetitive “Shrugging off” of the child and has to go through various detours to be able to bring him to his mother. It is almost the child does not even want to get home, he’s happy tagging along. Why did he escape anyway... why did the child not want to get back to his mother? what did the mother do to the child? and why does the mother reward you with a path with access to the magicians, while telling you to stay away from them. Almost like tempting you, or daring you, to go talk to the magician. A little bit like showing you a big red button of doom and asking you not to press it.. 

New on Venus Patrol: JUEGOS RANCHEROS' Fistful of Indies: February 2013