Burn Money Burn

This game won the Best Hungarian Game Jam Game award on the PlayIt event, chosen by a professional jury in 2025.11.16. Thank you PlayIt and HEJ! 🙂

For HEJ February, in the themes of Post-Apocalyptic and Burn Money (leaving out Weather Control and Glitch) I made a Vampire Survivors style game, where you kill money-mobs, collect XP gems, get and upgrade fire-based weapons to kill even more and bigger mobs.

Wait… That’s not what I submitted… Working on this idea for over a week I realized it’s a bigger task than what I could do in a month. All the weapons, upgrades, different types of money-enemies, so I dropped the project. I still want to tackle this genre at some point, but with a different setting and more time.

For HEJ February, in the themes of Post-Apocalyptic and Burn Money (leaving out Weather Control and Glitch) I made an action platformer game, where you kill moneysters, collect ammo, and find new fire-based weapons to kill even more and bigger moneysters.

I kept the character design, but now she holds a powerful repeater rifle shooting incendiary ammo. As the inspiration for this idea – besides Alien and Aliens – was old action platformers, like Metroid, Turrican and the like, I coded the shooting like it was in the old times: only horizontally. An alternative fire button would make the character stand still, and with directional inputs the player could rotate the line of fire around. But it just didn’t feel right and then I remembered another action platformer from the DOS era, called ABUSE. It was a great game and it had a really good level editor. So, I coded a new control, separated the character’s sprites to legs and upper body. Now the player can jump, run around or stand still and wherever the cursor is, the upper body turns that direction, aiming and all. Shooting with the left mouse button shoots towards the cursor, with single shots, the right mouse button makes the character stand still and shoot at a much higher fire rate. Besides the monsters are now fast and agile with a 1, 8, and on the queen, 100 on their bodies, representing that they are money.

I made three different weapons and they are used the same way, they can also activate switches, but their inner workings are a bit different. The repeater is the base weapon, shooting out an incendiary projectile. Can only hit one target for low damage. Its alt fire shoots out much more ammo. If all ammo is depleted, still able to shoot single shots, making it the essential base weapon with infinite ammo. The flamethrower is on level -2, in the armory. It has moderate damage on a short distance. The single shot is a puff with decreasing damage as it travels, the alt fire is a stream of flame with contact damage. Both can set monsters on fire, leaving them with an over time damage (with the puff, 1-4 cycles for 1 damage, depending on the distance of the flame traveled when they were hit, with the stream it’s always 4 cycles). The laser gun is in the laser laboratory on level -4. Its projectile makes moderate damage, and pierces through enemies. When that happens, its damage decreases, and fades a bit until it completely dissipates. Still, this is the most powerful weapon in the game.

The game works like this: enter an area and if it’s infested, you’re locked in as long as any living or hidden monsters are in it. You have to hunt them down all and only then the door opens. The GUI shows the number of active monsters, with a small radar that shows 10 of the closest monsters. There are checkpoints, teleport looking pads and should the character die, respawns there (no extra penalties). There are switches and doors, lifts to operate, the usual suspects that can be in a game like this.

And this is how the level looks like in GM’s editor. You can see the different trigger boxes that activate monster spawners, checkpoint and the ones starting a new background music. As for the hidden parts, you have to find them for yourself. 🙂

Originally I drew 16 bit-ish graphics, but I found it to be too bland. I decided to play around with GameMaker’s effect layers, and I found that the combination of Posterize, Contrast and Mask (with a drawn separate mask) can make a really good 8 bit and dark atmosphere. I also used a Glow layer, and a control object that draws everything shiny in one draw event, making the game super nice. As for the story, I included a small backstory, why there are money-monsters running around. At the end it turns out it was a story on how a young woman burned her money on non-essential stuff. 😀

All in all I am very satisfied with the result and people seemed to like it. At the end I almost couldn’t submit the game, well, I couldn’t as I encountered a little problem. But as the project was uploaded just right before the deadline, it was still accepted and submitted later. So thanks to HEJ and Bence Koós for making it happen.

After the award ceremony at PlayIt, I sort of wrote some lyrics about the game, and an AI music generator made it an industrial-punk-rock number. I edited it further, that’s what became the single of Robotic Cherries (see the video link at the top of this page). Here’s what I draw for it as a single cover:

Share this: