Game File: 

neuttowr.zip

Neut Tower finds a software developer named Jaye trapped in her office after an earthquake. Working together with NEUT, a program she's written to traverse the inner machinery of the tower, she must repair the damage and hack her way to freedom.

What's up Glorious Trainwrecks! It's been a looong time since I released a game!

It so happened that this year, Global Game Jam coincided with a weekend during which the rest of my family would not be around, my house would be totally empty, and I would be highly susceptible to cabin fever if I didn't get out and do SOMETHING. So I figured, what the hell, let's make a game.

I knew going in that I kind of wanted to make a game where you controlled multiple characters that had to cooperate with each other to progress, and where the whole puzzle was laid out on a single screen. I have a special fondness for games like this; for whatever reason I keep coming back to Gobliiins & DataSoft Goonies. I didn't find out the theme ("repair") until Saturday morning, but in the shower I came up with a central conceit that I liked, and a bunch of mechanics that could fit.

I decided to write the game on a 286 MS-DOS PC. No emulators, real hardware. I did this because for about the past year I have been noodling around on a game, and had ended up with a reasonably capable engine (devlog) that I knew inside and out, having written every line of it. It has integrated sprite, tile & map editors and an interactive debugging console that runs over a serial port, and is fully scriptable with a Forth-based programming language interpreter (devlog). So I knew it was capable of being a solid basis for my game idea, and I knew I wouldn't have to spend any time reading bad documentation and learning how to do things, like I would have with Unity or Godot or a Javascript framework.

Anyway! Two days later and I'm really happy with how it turned out! I hope you all like it! I will probably keep working on it!