Routine Bounty Hunting

Hey there! This post is about Routine Bounty Hunting, a small game I made in 8-9 days for Godot Wild Jam #93.

Synopsis

You are a career bounty hunter.

This used to be cool and special, but now it's become routine, even though the competition is getting a bit rough.

Your goal is simple enough: collect 5 heads before the other bounty hunters do, and you're set for today.

Player experience

In terms of actual player experience, Routine Bounty Hunting is a top-down pixel art game, set in a small town with various recognizable landmarks.

The goal is to find the NPC who currently has a bounty on their head before other bounty hunters (controlled by the computer) get to them. The first bounty hunter to kill 5 targets wins.

The current bounty is shown in real-time on the top right of the screen, which allows you to see what they look like and to see a few bits of the environment around them. All you have to do is... find them, get to them first and kill them.

Inspiration

Assassin's Creed II: Multiplayer

The game is strongly inspired from a somewhat obscure mobile game I rememberd playing back in high school: Assassin's Creed II: Multiplayer. In that game, you play as an assassin in a city where every character (both players and NPCs) look essentially the same, and you are given a target (another player) that you have to find and kill.

The way I remember it, the whole point was to try to walk and act like an NPC as you navigated around the city to find and get to your target undetected by other players.

Given my time constraints with real life responsabilities and the short duration of the jam, I didn't have enough time to make my game multiplayer, so I took the general concept and tried to adapt it to a single player experience.

A few more screenshots...

Reception

The feedback from people who tried the game was very positive: people enjoyed the game, liked the concept and the art style, and didn't experience any game-breaking issues (which is not so infrequent in jam games..!). 

The difficulty was a bit off however, and a few people said it would have been nice to have an easier difficulty setting. That made a lot of sense: I balanced the game using my own experience, but I also knew every detail of the map because I had built it myself and play tested it a lot, so I was obviously biased on that front.

You can see all the comments and ratings on the itch.io submission page.

Overall, the game was ranked at #50 out of 204 submissions. Not great, but not too shabby either for a solo project with very limited time to work on it!

Here are the scores that the game received, based on 15 ratings from other participants:

Play the game

You can play the game online on Routine Bounty Hunting's itch.io page.