Journey Through Dark


Made for the GMTK Game Jam 2025.

In Journey Through Dark, you craft a perilous path for a lone hero venturing into an unknown wilderness. Every tile you place has a chance for great reward or great danger. Be careful not to go too far, as the only way to secure your spoils is to build a loop back to the safety of your camp.

Upgrade your hero between runs with the gold you've earned, push yourself further into the darkness with each new journey, and become a master of the loop.

Key Features

  • Roguelite Path-Builder: No two journeys are the same. Forge your path tile by tile.
  • Risk vs. Reward: The farther you travel, the greater the riches... and the greater the danger.
  • Permanent Upgrades: Use the gold you secure to purchase upgrades for future runs.
  • Escalating Challenge: The night grows darker. As the Threat increases, the path becomes more treacherous and the game gets faster.

Tips for New Adventurers

  • Beware of trapping yourself! If your hero has no empty tiles to build on, their journey will end.
  • The farther from camp you are, the more gold you will earn.
  • Don't be afraid to make short, safe loops at first to secure gold for cheap upgrades.
  • Every enemy is unique! Ghosts are hard to hit, Spiders can poison you, and the Skeleton Warrior is a formidable foe.

A Note from the Developer

I would love to continue developing Journey Through Dark, as I can see a lot of promise in it. It's why I pushed myself so hard to finish what I could for the jam. These are just a few of the things I would like to add:

  • Items: Temporary, in-run upgrades to create unique character builds.
  • Action Cards: Instant effects that give the player more tactical choices.
  • A Bigger World: More to discover, like traders, caves, and other points of interest.
  • Puzzle Strategy Elements: Connect three of the same tiles to instantly upgrade them for the current run!

Thank you for playing!

Tools

Engine: GameMaker Studio 2
Art: Pixel Studio, Sketchbook
Audio: Sourced from prior personal projects. Not made by me.

All programming and art (aside from the audio) was done by myself during the jam.

More information

Comments

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miktak239 days ago (1 edit)

Cool game!! It was neat balancing going back to safety and getting more coins. Good work! I think a futher developped version of this would be more fun than loop hero

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jaypeabee239 days ago(+1)

Great adventure, really like the balance of risk and reward for what loop you take. Lots of potential to expand this and play more!

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Creeper111763240 days ago(+1)

Quite fun once I got into it. There's no incentive to keep doing big loops (if you have infinite time) unless you want to see how hard it could get. That wasn't a problem for me though :)

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Scatterbrain Software240 days ago (1 edit)

Yeah I agree. Unfortunately the limited time forced me to scrap some of the "end game" content but this is a project I really want to continue working on.

Thanks for the feedback!

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