Arvo Pond is a renowned jewel thief who happens to be a frog. Help him steal 9 diamonds from various locations around the world in SMALL PONDS, a puzzle-platformer for PC. Pick up and toss objects, trigger various buttons and mechanisms, and avoid traps and obstacles in your quest to 'liberate' diamonds from their current owners.

Originally commissioned for Indiepocalypse 72.

Even though I've made many games before, this is my first serious attempt at making a "real" platformer game. I'm pretty happy with the scope of the game, and the various interactions between the mechanics, but I think there's room for improvement with the game physics and the level design. I want to make more platformers in the future so I can improve my skills.

Controls

Up/down to change menu selection, space to select items, ESC to go back, left/right to change options
Left/right to move, space/Z to jump, X to run
Down + C to pick up items, C to throw items, Down + C to put down held item
Up to enter doors
ESC to pause game
R to restart from checkpoint if you get stuck
F or F11 to toggle fullscreen

Credits

All game design, programming, music, art, sound effects, level design, etc was done by me (cassowary). Play testing by cabalamebae and Rod R. Driver.

Tools used

Graphics: Aseprite
Music: Ableton Live (+ electric/acoustic guitar, electric bass, and various virtual instruments)
Level design: Tiled + ulvl
The game was programmed in C using SDL2 and the SDL2_mixer library.

The game is originally for Windows. I've now added a version for Apple Silicon Macs as well. The game was written from scratch and is not a signed application, so Apple makes it very annoying to run and will claim it is damaged. Sorry! For Linux and Intel Mac, it's just a simple SDL application, so it should run fine on these platforms using something like Wine. I may publish a real version for Linux soon.