Made in 3 hours, for Trijam #319

Instructions/Controls

WASD / Arrow keys - Move character

Left click/Space bar - Swing hammer, towards your mouse cursor

Hit the Cyclops to get the potion it is holding - collect all 8 potions to create your own Crazy Elixir of Limitless Luck!

Ghosts will spawn to chase you when you hit a Cyclops  - hit them to temporarily stun them! If they touch you, you'll lose a life!

Easy mode - Start with 3 lives

Hard mode - Start with 1 life

Development

My idea here changed half a dozen times, I was finding it a tough theme to work within. I ended up going for a similar approach to Trijam #300 and turning 'Cell' into an acronym.

For pathfinding the chasing enemies (Ghosts), a few years back I had played around with an interesting approach I found in an article by Nazgum of A Bit Awake games (link in credits). I made some changes to include steering behaviours for obstacles and in case entities fully lost track of the player.

The pathfinding for the fleeing enemies (Cyclops) was a entirely me and as a result, much tougher to implement and a rougher result - while it does have moments where it can do genuinely unexpected things to evade the Player, it does have a habit of getting stuck in corners. I ran out of time to bugfix this, but will look into it after the jam.

Credits

BoxFox - Trijam game template, plus character controller from Trijam #313

Ghost reactive pathfinding - Adapted from this great article by Nazgum

Kenney (kenney.nl) - Tileset from the 'Tiny Dungeon' pack

Kevin Macleod  (incompetech.com/wordpress) - Menu music 'Big Drumming' and game music '8bit Dungeon Boss'

Pixabay - Sword swing

Zapsplat - Monster hit sfx

Boxfox - Player hit sfx