In April I entered the #LowRezJam, a game jam about making a game in a limited resolution. I had to make a game that fit within a screen that was 64×64 pixels. Quite small. I spent 5 days on it. This is what I ended up with.
The Legend of Dad – A Quest for Milk
The game was inspired by the fact I had become a father a couple of months before. I was spending a lot of time running around after the little man and thought it would be fun to reference that. As such, the baby in this game is my son, and the father – is me 🙂
Legend of Dad was also strongly inspired by the 2d Zelda game series. One of my top games of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening on the original gameboy. I loved that game. And I’ve played and completed every Zelda game since.
I’ve wanted to make my own adventure game ever since – but it’s always seemed like a daunting task. There’s so many things I would have to do – and didn’t know how to do. Joining this jam seemed like a good way to make a start on it since the requirements were so restrictive.
The game was built with Phaser – a HTML5 game framework. This is a framework that takes away a lot of the repetitive tasks and browser incompatibilities in game development and lets you focus on building the fun bits. If it wasn’t for Phaser I’d probably still be programming.
The world was created in Tiled, an open source map editor for game developers. This made it quick and easy to layout the world, and to add the interactive objects such as the scrolls, energy drinks, and the all important milk.
The map showing the layout of the game, Legend of Dad. Note – there’s some secret areas in here, so don’t look too closely if you want to discover them yourself 😄
Spoiler alert: If you look closely, the map image above will show you where the secret areas are. One of them is essential for completing the game.
A special mention should go to Itch.io as well. This is the platform I used to host the game – also where the game jam was being hosted. Their service is awesome and I hope to use it for other games in the future.
The game jam was great fun and I learnt a lot participating. It’s now given me the confidence to go ahead and make a bigger version. Perhaps I’ll actually make my dream game after all. It’s only been 25 years since I was first inspired! 🙂
Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).
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