Molly’s Nightmare is a game jam entry in the WhatWouldMolydeux jam, the MolyJam 2012. This was the first time I participated in a game jam and I joined it as part of a small team with some friends.

The game is a 2D top-down shoot-em-up game with the interesting twist that you must be hooked up to a an electrical outlet, a wall socket, within the game in order to be able to shoot the enemies. It’s actually more fun than I had expected.

Molly finds her self in a world where her nightmares are real, but with the help of her trusty Dream Extractor 2000 helmet, she can make her way back to sanity. The only problem is that her helmet needs to be plugged in, and the electrical outlets in dreamland are not willing to cooperate!

“What if you lived in a world where all guns are required to be plugged into wall sockets? Now THAT would be a tactical shooter wouldn’t it?” Molydeux tweet that the idea and concept was based on.

Version 1.0 [2012-04-02] - Initial release. Sound effects are temporarily disabled in this version.
Version 1.1 [2012-04-03] - Sound should now be working on all systems.
Version 1.1b [2012-04-03] - The game now accepts either of left control, space or right control to fire.
Version 1.2 [2012-04-05] - Major performance improvements. Game should now run smoothly on most machines.
Version 1.3 [2012-05-06] - New boss level. Some new sound effects.

The game is made in Java using the Slick2D engine. It runs in 800×600 windowed mode and works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX and Solaris.

We were a team of four developing this game, three coders and one graphics artist.

John David “Jiddo” Olovsson - code
Einar Holst - code
Cem Eliyürekli - code
Simeon Atanasov - gfx

License

The game is released under the CC BY-NC-ND license.

Windows (.exe) + Crossplatform (.jar)

Gameplay video (YouTube)