A downloadable game for Windows

The Tragic Tale…

One blissfully bright morning, two jolly wizards by the names of Spadivon and Astervex subtly sneak into a mysterious castle in search of a… love potion? Silly wizards, that’s what Tinder is for! Anywho, their daring plan soon turns into a colossal failure as they end up captured by the infamous EVIL WIZARD himself! The situation is dire, with Astervex trapped outside the castle and under attack by villainous wizards and ferocious beasts. Our friendly neighborhood Spadivon isn’t much better off unfortunately, as he finds himself confined within the castle walls at the behest of a deadly sleeping spell! If these two wizards are to escape the EVIL WIZARD’s compound in one piece, they’ll have to work together by exchanging keys, exploring the map, and collaborating to unlock barriers all while avoiding the cold hard grip of death! Will the two wizards teamwork their way into an epic escape? Or will Spadivon and Astervex become another pair of unfortunate victims at the hands of… the EVIL WIZARD!

The Gosh Darn Good Gameplay!

With a unique dual-camera mechanic allowing players to seamlessly swap back and forth between both characters in an attempt to overcome the castle’s many dangers, “Free Him” is a fast-paced, nail-biting puzzle game that is sure to test your reaction time and wit! Players will soon realize that the two jolly wizards are completely interconnected, with the game’s lock-and-key system forcing both characters to swap, share, and survive their way into glorious freedom!

Our imprisoned Inside Wizard is responsible for finding mystical stones that serve as keys and transporting them to the Outside Wizard via colorful teleportation portals that are hidden within the interior. Players will soon find that navigating the inside of the castle isn't as easy as they expected, as the Inside Wizard is restricted by magical barriers that can only be unlocked once Outside Wizard retrieves the mystical stones and places them into the elusive Ritual Circle located on the exterior of the castle.

How will the Inside Wizard successfully explore the inner workings of the castle and find keys without succumbing to the evil effects of the sleeping spell? How will the Outside Wizard help the Inside Wizard achieve freedom via the Ritual Circle without being brutally burnt and axed to death by the resident Wizards and Monsters? Most importantly, do you, oh beloved player, have the speed, precision, and strategic might to overcome these challenges and free our wizards from their dastardly dilemma? Download and play “Free Him” now to find out if you have what it takes!

User Controls

Post Mortem

What went right?

Being able to take out initial concept for our core game loop and fully implement it into the end game is something we are proud of. While the specifics of how things in the game work are slightly different, the main core loop came together just as we planned.

The AI and hiding mechanics for the enemies worked out really well for us in the end. While had some bugs initially, the ability for the hiding mechanics to work in sync with the enemy's movement is something we are proud of.

What went wrong/what problems did you face?

One of the problems faced, or I guess most of them were related to bugs in the game. Much of which came from the movement of the players and enemies. We had some of them around inside of the game for quite a while as they weren't game breaking, but more so just slightly annoying. In the end we ended up fixing them without much difficulty, but it most likely would have just been easier to fix them early on, and not have to worry about them too much. Also, out lack of a dedicated artist definitely hurt us in both sticking to a theme and being able to build a good map early on, as we didn't really have any assets to build a map with until the last couple of weeks.

What changes were made and why?

The game as a whole definitely went through quite a few changes throughout the development of the game. The biggest three are as follows:

Originally there were going to be enemies inside of the building as well. We decided against this because we had come up with the idea of having each character be in a different type of risk situation, where the outside character is running from zombies and the inside character is tasked with some other kind of challenge (which ended up being the sleep spell meter).
We were going to have the player be able to attack against enemies. This was something that mostly left with the inside enemies, as only the inside character was going to have an attacking weapon, but some sort of defense against the enemies for the outside character was discussed. Ultimately, we ended up not having the time to implement that mechanic.
The theme was initially two people in a zombie apocalypse, with one trapped inside of a supermarket. This idea was really a placeholder even when it was thought of, just because we didn't really have any other sound ideas for what else it could be, but it was still how we referred to the game for a majority of the development. We decided to switch to wizards in the end simply because it sounded more whimsical.

What did you learn?

One of the biggest things we learned was the importance of a dedicated artist for the visual assets. This made building the map and integrating animations take place very late in development.

We also learned about the importance of the merging systems used in Gamemaker Studio, with the local packages. While initially we were merging manually, we luckily discovered the usefulness of them. We also learned how important it was to not interfere with the same object at the same time as someone so that it wouldn't cause merging issues when one of us tried to combine the two.