Cynthia Johnson

Meet Cynthia Johnson. An archeologist who believes in the existence of forgotten realms, like Atlantis and many more and she starts her quest in Egypt to search for clues to solid evidence these realms actually exist.

Cynthia is a puzzle game, in which Cynthia is always placed in a puzzle you have to solve, by either moving Cynthia around or to make a grab stuff she can push or pull or swap or collect. Her quest starts in Egypt, but who knows where she has to go next? As you complete a realm new realms with new puzzles will unlock.

The game will feature on-line charts of those players who did it in the lowest amount of actions or the least amount of time. Can you beat other players?

Features:

• #Keyboard support

• Buttons for #mouse and #touchscreen

• For #Windows, #Mac and #Linux (Linux users do require Love2D to be installed as depedency)

• A #FemaleProtagonist

• Many many #puzzles. It begins easy, but more challenging puzzles will come

• #OpenSource (licensed under the #GPL3). Source code is freely available. In other words the game is completely #free (both as in #freedom as in #freeofcharge).

Controls:

• You can use the on screen buttons, but they are most of all there to make it possible to play the game on a touchscreen-only device.

• You can walk around using either the cursor directional keys or the WASD keys

• You can turn around by either using the Q and the E keys, or by holding shift and one of the WASD or arrow keys

• Ctrl + WASD/Arrows = Push and pull (yes even on Mac that is Ctrl)

• Alt = Throw (providing you have something to throw)

• Locked doors will be opened as soon as you touch them (providing you got the required key)

Cynthia has unlimited lives, so no bother to restart a puzzle whenever she dies or gets herself trapped in a "no-win" situation. Time and and actions are only counted for your record so you can see if you can solve the same puzzle faster or with less actions the next time.

Technobabble:
The game has been written in the #lua programming/scripting language using the #love2d game engine (http://www.love2d.org). I did as much as I could myself, however I did require some work by other people, and they are all listed in the credits.md file, which you can view on my github repository.
Also note that the code as you find it in my github repository may not work if you just zip it for love for two reasons. First I used my own building tool, which automatically includes all my dependencies, and I only included my own stuff in the dependency not the 3rd party stuff. This to protect the copyrights of their respective creators.

Sites:

• Official Site: https://tricky.gamejolt.io/cynthia

• GitHub: https://github.com/PhantasarProductions/cynthia

• Game Jolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/cynthia/294717

• Itch.io: https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/cynthia-johnson

• Leaderboards: http://tinyurl.com/CynthiaLeader

• #Discord channel: https://discord.gg/RU3V6YU

Development:

Cynthia Johnson was created with the LOVE2D engine, and very likely this is the last time I'll use that engine. The game was created with a building tool which sorted everything out before putting it into the game. The puzzles were created with the TeddyBear map editor, which was perfect for this job. A translation tool coverted these puzzles into pure Lua code as that loads quicker.

The game did need a bit of research, and the puzzles in Egypt and China may show this most. The woman on the walls in Egypt is Isis, the goddess of life. She sings a song for you after you die, so you will be resurrected from death so you can go with her to the realm of the dead where her husband Osiris is waiting for you, to welcome you, that is if you lived as a good person. The buildings in which some China puzzles take place took me some study to see what houses there look like.

In the leaderboards you may see Veda a lot. Veda is a friend of mine who can be very very annoying when it comes to games like these, and that's precisely why he was perfect for the job I gave him. The leaderboards are overseen by a bot named Anna who tries to block out cheaters. Don't worry Anna doesn't store personal data in order to be sold to 3rd parties, only game data in order to make sure cheaters are blocked out. Veda went into the extreme to get Anna to go berserk with him, but making sure no cheats were used, and unfortunately he did get her pissed off many times, and thanks to that I could make sure Anna's protocols were up-to-date so she won't respond falsely anymore. It's never perfect, but hey, nothing can be. Anna was named after the song "Boten Anna" (means: "The bot Anna", or "Anna, the bot" in Swedish) by Basshunter. The leaderboards do allow you to see if you are better in solving puzzles than others. Can you do it in less moves or less time. Try it.

The music all came from musicians who selflessly dedicated their music to the creative commons or similar licenses. Check out the game's jukebox to listen to them all.

The game was entirely coded in Lua, and if you wanna see the source code well check it out on my github repository, which is also the place to go to report bugs.