Pit Crawl

In Pit Crawl, your job is to squish worms, grab gems, and make money. However, something a bit sinister lurks beneath the peppy surface.

The player is a wee Terracore mine-worker, whose job is to squish worms and grab gems. The actions available to the player are relatively simple: Move, jump, squish, and click. And falling. You're gonna have to fall.

Process
Perhaps the more alternative aspect in our approach, is the way we handled the health of the player. There are a lot of numbers on the player’s score card and health is somewhat buried. This is on purpose, to take focus away from the numbers that will end up affecting the final reward for the player, in the form of a paycheck from their fictional corporate overlord.

At the same time, heading down into the pits will reward the player with gems (and income). Falling doesn’t hurt, in fact, the space is meant to be entirely exploratory. Not sure if that means it’s an open-world platformer, but it leans into that convention, which I suppose is an alternative approach to a conventional platformer. Squashing the worms and collecting gems pays the player, and they can watch their “Est. Income” go up as they play. However, it’s a futile aspiration. The final win screen reveals that every time the player is hurt, their “reward” goes down. And while this is not explained in the game (we’re debating how much should be explained), any missed gem will also count against the player.

Pitfall Theme
To play the game, the player really does need to fall down a pit. We called the game Pit Crawl, both as a play on “Pitfall” as well as an instruction for gameplay. Indeed, there is a lot of falling in the game, sometimes coming as a surprise. This may be a stretch, but one could argue that the overall game represents the pitfalls of working in capitalism. Wage theft, healthcare, and a focus on shareholders at the expense of the worker. It is tough to even make $500 YTD in the game.