Super Overachiever 42000 Deluxe

About the game

The title promises a lot, and the game keeps its tongue in its cheek. The opening screen draws "Super Overachiever 42000 Deluxe" in big hand-drawn letters on black, and under it a line tells you to use the arrow keys and to press space to start. What follows is a short platformer in the old style: a small hero on a field of grass, rock and walls, who has to cross each level from left to right, picking up the coins that lie about, jumping gaps and avoiding the metal spikes on the ground.

There are enemies of two kinds, the walkers that move along the ground and the jumpers that hop around, and both of them can be defeated or avoided. A potion adds to your health, so you can take a hit more, and some hazards and enemies take it away. A coin counter at the top shows how many you have collected, and the game has a list of fifteen small achievements, for things such as your first jump, your first coin, hitting your head on a ceiling, falling a long way, touching spikes, getting a one-up and a one-down, and the number of minutes you have played, which pop up on the screen when you earn them.

The screen is small and sharp, and you can see it larger in the window thanks to a pixel-perfect scale-up. The sound effects were made with the sfxr generator, and each level is a drawing, one pixel per tile, that the game converts into a map.

Artur Iwicki, who goes by "suve", made it in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 42, whose theme was "Running out of space".

Playing it here

Click Play, click once inside the game to give it the keyboard, and press Space on the title screen. Use the arrow keys to move and jump. Your progress and your achievements are not saved between visits. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Spikes are the main danger. They hurt even when you land on them from above, so jump with a margin.

Potions are worth a detour. Extra health lets you absorb a hit that would otherwise send you back to the start of the level.

Try things that look silly. Many of the achievements are for doing what a sensible player would avoid, and the popups tell you what you did.

Credits and licence

Super Overachiever 42000 Deluxe was made by Artur "suve" Iwicki for Ludum Dare 42. Its source code (the Makefile and the src folder) is under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0, and everything else, the graphics, the sound effects and the maps, is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Both texts are included with the game files and linked from this page, and, as the AGPL asks, the exact source of this version (the author's repository at the commit we use, the script that builds the files and the converter for the maps) is hosted next to the game. Changes made for this site: the build was repeated with a script that does what the author's Makefile does without PHP, ImageMagick or pngcrush, and the maps are converted by a Python port of his PHP script; the result plays exactly like the original.