It's still a wip, obviously.

It plays like Dig Dug, but it's more puzzle-oriented, where you need to dig a hole to grab a key buried in the ground then go back to the surface to open the locked door. The player can jump and climb (both of these actions have a range of one block).

To limit the player's movements, there's a limited number of wood pillars and ladders. The wood pillars need to be placed when making long horizontal tunnels so the dirt won't fall and crush you. You can break it to strategically drop the dirt and solve certain puzzles.

The ladder allows you to climb stuff higher than one block of height. You can tie two or more of them to make a longer ladder. You can take a previously placed ladder to reuse it later, too.

The gameplay idea sounds nice, though it'll probably need a bit of refinement.

The mockup itself looks okay so far. What sort of specs were you going for?

well, I didn't follow any spec, but the sprites/tiles fit in 8x8 squares.

the gameplay is still half-assed so I'm working on it yet. Thanks for the comment!

added player, refined some tiles.

It looks very cute, but what is that :5 in the cloud for?

He looked like mario without a stache from a distance, but a closer look on my crappy screen revealed his hat was in fact yellow or orange or something.

Any enemies planned?

Looks good, but you'll want to do things with the wide brim of his hat (or is it a hard hat?), because right now, it looks like a Mario-style hat.
Coming up with some other ways to make him more different from Mario might be good, too, but that's up to you.

that's pretty interesting because I wasn't thinking on Mario at all when doing him

will come up with a better design tomorrow (or later)

put bullethead there for the sake of having himbeing there.

(07-02-2010, 10:35 PM)1UP+ Wrote: put bullethead there for the sake of having himbeing there.

no shit that's a bad idea sorry

I think your ref. fits better in there.

It just strikes me as terribly bland (the tileset, the concept sounds good) :I
Maybe try and find a more defined theme to the game?

I just used a simple tileset to convey the gameplay idea in an efficient way. If this became a real game, then I'd take more time on them. Not trying to backpedal or something, tho.

Maybe give the ground some more saturation, so it will feel more foreground-ish.
Then maybe make the tiles of grass larger, and the green just a smudge darker.

Also, the character also reminds people of Mario for some obvious reasons, but it/he would probably look more original/remind people less if he was another color besides red or green. (Or, maybe that's just my opinion)

i see bullethead spinning its way to the ground oening its own path to glory.