Boxed Dungeon

You are a box that found itself a heart. Thankfully you can expand! and fit more items to solve puzzles and get outside of this dungeon, hopefully.

You can grow up to three times your size and get any items you want but, be careful not to lose your heart 🖤

About the game

The main mechanic of the game is scaling the character for storage. The smallest size of the character can only have one item and it must be a heart. To use objects like keys, you need to grow your character. There are three sizes in the game: 1x1, 2x2 and 3x3.

To Scale you use the Q (Shrink) and E (Grow) keys on your keyboard. While pressing them, you can set the direction you want to scale to with the arrow keys, just the same as you would to move your character. If your character does nothing it means you can't scale in the position you are at.

Moving towards an object adds it to the player and pushes the other objects it had.

There are different types of obstacles and objects the player can interact with:

Heart: The one you can't live without. You can have multiple but not zero.

Key: Placing it on top of treasure chests or locked doors will open them.

Daga/Sword: I wanted to do more with it but for now it is more of an obstacle than anything else :(

Treasure chests: They can be walked through and opened with a key. They contain a heart. Nothing better than an extra heart just in case.

Locked door: You can't walk through a locked door unless... You have a key. One key per door.

Heart taker (?): This one wants your heart. Until it gets a heart it will not let you pass with any other objects (Empty is fine). The door to the next room won't open until you have given every heart taker in the level a heart.

Full playthrough: 

Watch this if you are stuck.

Why and How

This is a small prototype/game for the GMTK2024 game jam. I would love to read your opinion/feedback if you want to share it (Comments section below ↓).

I took it as an opportunity to challenge myself and decided to try to come up with something using monogame. I did the images in Figma just for early development but when the time came to improve them and maybe put some color... There was not much time left and I grew fond of the originals.

Thank you

I had a great time making this. Thank you for taking some time out of your day to check it out.

This little game has grown on me and I will probably work on polishing it and making more levels just for fun after the jam has ended.

Thank you for reading (and maybe playing?) I hope you have a nice day :)