Genre: Puzzle RPG
Features: Upgrades
- Project started on: July 1, 2016
- Project ended on: July 31, 2016
- Approximate time spent on project: 75 hours
GEAR LINK is a GameJam game that I did for the 'A Game By It's Cover' jam, where you had to use the fake cart image from Famicade 2016 and make a game based on that. I've looked at the different images, and decided on this one.
The fake game in question was called Item Connect, which I naturally translated to a game where you had to connect items together while collecting them. There were a few core tenants in that idea; A long list of items to grab, some kind of connecting mechanic and a reason for the player to do so. I had a few ideas about how linking gear together would improve your stats, and I went from there!
The goal of this game is to get all gear by buying them from a store. To unlock gear to be bought, you need to complete challenges in a hundred levels while fighting enemies. There are multiple types of gear to link and each type does something specific. I feel that even if the game is a bit difficult and random, since you always get something from fighting - experience, gold, challenges - no matter if you win or lose, you'll want to keep playing it.
Screenshots
About the game
The player starts GEAR LINK with a basic weapon, armor and food item. Connecting weapons gives attack experience, connecting armor gives health experience, connecting food restores health. When the player gains enough experience for a specific stat, it goes up. After each move, both the enemy and the player attacks each other based on their attack stat. When an enemy is defeated, some of the gear on the board turns into loot that can be connected to give the player gold to buy more gear. There are other gear types as well, such as potions that usually must be mixed with other gear to create specific potions, or spells that require power to be cast. Later in the game, powerful artefacts also make their appearance.
There are 110 weapon gears, 32 armor gears, 25 food gears, 55 loot gears, 42 potion gears, 80 spell gears and 9 artefact gears, for a total of 353 different items to unlock and buy. There are 100 levels with various gameplay mechanics spread across them, such as not being able to use weapons or taking damage for every block you connect, and most stages have challenges. There are 132 challenges in total; 100 of them are required to beat the game - since you need to collect all of the gear for that - and the 32 remaining ones multiply your loot and experience collection, in order to help you with endgame leveling.
Gears have special abilities as well, detailed in the codex of the game. There are options for sound and music, alongside color palette editing tools for people that would rather change them. I had a few more ideas that I won't implement from lack of time, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with this project.