You area two kids who are out in the woods exploring, but when a blizzard starts up, you must get home as soon as possible!

Light campfires to stay warm, or else you may freeze to death!

Avoid spikes and pits to try and get home!

If you die, you will respawn at the most recent campfire.

If even just one kid dies, they both will respawn at the fire, "nobody left behind".

The Way Back Home is a short, 2D platformer with light puzzle elements. Inspired mainly by Celeste on the Pico-8 (in art, and difficulty on hardmode)

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Incorporation of the theme:  For me, cozy is family, sitting by a fire, drinking tea, Christmas trees, etc. I wanted to get the feeling of family sitting by a fire, telling stories in this game, forcing you to rest by a fire to get warm. It is a rather shallow incorporation of the theme to be honest, but at least it's something.

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Incorporation of Wildcards: 

SEGAAAAA: Open the project, I couldn't get the tune how I wanted it, but it's good enough. 

New Game Plus: Hardmode is an extra challenge after completing regular mode, and while you can technically do it before beating regular mode, you are strongly urged to at least try regular mode first. 

Overworked: For this one, I took the general idea of needing to take a break every once in a while and made campfires! You must sit around the fire to get warm, and It creates a respawn point for the player.

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Time for excuses (you don't have to read this): 

JSON: I don't know how to implement .json capability into the export, the original project has .json files that store your most recent time. I might figure it out and reimplement this at some point. But as of now, this functionality is missing. 

MUSIC: I was really struggling to make a theme for the game (music), and I eventually just took from one of my old projects on scratch that had a song, my friend advised me to just use that so I could focus on the game itself. So forgive the composition for not sounding well (my musical inexperience), and the BeepBox sound (I use LLMS now).

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Overall am I satisfied with this entry?

Actually, yes! I accomplished the idea in my head for the game, I didn't let scope creep kill me, the game looks good (in my opinion), I managed to keep the artstyle consistent, and overall it feels like a solid entry to me (at least when compared to ruben goldberg), hardmode might be a little more frustrating and unfair than difficult, but that was a bit of my goal... sort of? Either way the jam was a lot of fun, and I hope that everyone else had a good time as well!

And to everyone, have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

- Skript-Kitty