No Broomstick in the Mall

Published 2023-06-12


The arcade in the mall was screaming for a minigame but it took me a while to think of one. The minigame can be played once per game and it doesn't affect the ending. Nari (the white witch) will alternate between moving randomly and actively chasing Dona in the shortest distance. It's technically beatable but just barely.

Edit: Can't believe I forgot this, Nari was always facing down in the previous version. Now she faces the direction she moves.

Dona the Witch needs to return a library book and that's the entire goal of the game, which can be accomplished in half a minute. But the underground mall has a lot of distractions should you decide to explore, and Dona has a tendency not to think before spending, or think too hard and rationalize the impulse buys.

X : jump
O (when landed) interact with stores
or (when jumping) fly with broomstick
or (when flying on broomstick) jump off broomstick

As a witch, she can fly over things on her broomstick. She can't walk past the stairs, but she'll ignore the stair collision while she's on broomstick and this will be necessary to reach certain areas in the mall. There's a limit to this, and the broomstick points can be charged with a cup of coffee in any café, which also serves as a respawn point. But there are security guards who will come after her if they see her flying in the mall. After all, you really shouldn't.

There are 12 items she can buy from the mall, and she can carry up to five. If you return the library book and head back to the metro (the starting location), you'll see different endings depending on what items you purchased. Each time Dona buys something, she'll think of what else she wants.

As a game, this is pretty light. The guards have been added to give a minimum condition to fail and thereby make this technically a game.

There's some performance issues, sometimes the camera can be slow to catch up. (I feel like this happens more when running on raspi version using Anbernic handheld than on PC.) I had to cut a lot of effects and decorations as a result, and hopefully I'll figure out how to optimize it down the line.