The Other Adventurer is a short action RPG in the style of the original Zelda, made at TOJam 12. You must explore a dungeon maze and collect the four elemental keys to unlock your path into the lair of the final boss and save the princess.

The jam's theme was "Prepare For Disappointment," which should explain itself as you play the game.  My guess is about an hour to beat. Saving/Loading can be done by going to the screen to the south of the starting screen and moving over the save/load section for the three save slots.

Controls:
Arrow Keys: Movement
Space: Sword attack
Ctrl: Fire bow (when obtained)
Tab: Toggle minimap
M: Toggle music

So thoughts....

The game runs smoothly in sphere 1.5 via WINE on MacOS (it can't run in minisphere as it uses SetLayerScaleFactorX which is apparently not supported in minisphere)

Warning minor spoilers below

The game places the player initially in an opening area with lots of green enemies that die in one hit, and dead ends to the north and east.

The combat is a smoothly implemented action based system - hit space to stab, ctrl to shoot your bow (when you have it) if an enemy bumps into you it hurts.

To the west is the way to go to both find useful items and a switch to remove the dead ends, the player then finds 4 different coloured areas each of which contains a key, to get the key from each area requires walking in a large circle to hit switches in the right order each switch blocks one route and opens another - each area seemed to require backtracking several times to hit the switches correctly.

Note throughout each of these areas there are enemies coloured for that area which take a few more hits to kill.

On finally completing each area and going to the room where the keys are required the player gains access to another area with the same basic puzzle but this time completing it does not give a key it instead gives access to the "boss" room... - see attached

I completed the game in one sitting in just under an hour without dying at all, though I went back to the start to heal several times, this normally wasn't out of my way as the game requires you to backtrack to progress (you have to get back and forth between switches - unless I was doing it wrong)

My thoughts
- the game does what Beaker said
- frustrates and disappoints
- repetitive puzzles with seemingly endless lack of progression
- empty chests everywhere
- and then the final room...

Smooth running/engine etc: 4.5/5
Graphics 3/5 - no mistakes etc but nothing exceptional
Story 4/5
Enjoyment 1/5 - sorry a whole game intended as a prank doesn't actually feel that fun in the end

The game runs smoothly in sphere 1.5 via WINE on MacOS (it can't run in minisphere as it uses SetLayerScaleFactorX which is apparently not supported in minisphere)

Hm, somehow I didn't know about that function.  Go figure!

Hm, somehow I didn't know about that function.  Go figure!

I was going to mention it, but I forgot.  I've done it a bit before in order to do things like 2x+ scale factors, though the scaling of the tiles isn't that good at times (depending on the driver). 

Question for you Beaker: how much of this game's engine (map handler, movement, combat etc) did you write in the 3 days? If you did all of that as well as making the maps that is insanely impressive.

Question for you Beaker: how much of this game's engine (map handler, movement, combat etc) did you write in the 3 days? If you did all of that as well as making the maps that is insanely impressive.

All the code was written from scratch starting at the beginning of the jam.  It came to about 2500 lines, the same as RRRP, but I felt like I got a lot more done this time around since I was able to do other things besides mainly coding during the jam, like I felt I did with RRRP.  There's 80+ maps in the game, which is an improvement over GaMc, which had more like 40.

You do three day game jams for ten years, you get good at getting stuff done in those three days.