Hardened Criminals

Hardened Criminals was our team’s entry for the Metroidvania Month 32 game jam.

Our initial pitch was to create a 2D side-scrolling Metroidvania where players pilot an unreliable mech suit while under police siege in a 90s retro anime inspired bank heist.

• Scavenge and Retrofit: Modular system lets you swap scavenged limbs to tweak your mech’s appearance, movement, weapons, shields, and traversal
• Synthesize and Combine: Mix-and-match limbs to see what sticks. Stack speed on firepower, armor on agility, or just throw everything together and pray it works
• Pit Repair: Your mech’s seen better days. It groans, sparks, and smokes under pressure. Make quick pitstop reparis or risk meltdown.
• Go Big or Go Home: Each “limb” has an overdrive mechanism. A high-risk maneuver with bigger payoffs and wilder consequences.
• Hunt down vault keys while combatting the police

These overarching ideas drove the development of the project. It was important that we didn’t overscope, particularly with how quickly issues would permutate due to us wanting a modular limb system. Once we settled on the game’s concept and a high-level design, we focused on building out an MVP for the game. The goals would include:

• Player Character
  • 5 equipment slots for each limb and the core
  • Basic Attack
• Basic UI displaying Health and Limbs
• Equip menu to change slots
• Basic enemy with a single attack 
  • Drops an equipable limb
• Item(s) that can be walked over and added to player inventory

Completed over a month, I was responsible for design, programming, and project management. My primary duties involving programming the player character, mecha, and auxilary systems such as saving/loading, level transitions, and the camera.

Play it here: Hardened Criminals