Embervania

As per the bonus rules which were announced at the start of the competition, we had some constraints to follow here:

• Water/wet theme: it's set in a damn sewer, but to be honest this is probably our weakest implementation; it's not like the water's everywhere…
• Use subliminal messaging: You probably won't notice them right away, but there are some very dangerous and subliminal lyrics from Jerma's Rats Birthday Mixtape in the background of the intro and teleport screens.
• Use teleporters: not teleporters in the traditional sense – but certainly in the functional sense! Ember can move between levels (or sometimes between areas in the same level) by entering 'rat runs', shown as cracks in the wall.
• Use image post-processing: under the bonnet, the game uses full 32-bit colour – but for post-processing, we're using a colour reduction and dithering shader. 6 shades per channel are allowed, giving a total of 216 colours that can be displayed on screen.
• Bonus rule: we were allowed to modify or skip a rule if we used memes to explain our reasoning, but chose not to.

Embervania was one of the ideas we had going into this - and though the sewer setting wasn't planned, lots of other things (eg. the player sprite) were.