Backstabber Hero
Story
This is the story of the mysterious backstabber hero. Whilst most people carry on with their carefree lives and sleep safely at night the backstabbing hero is taking care of the world's backstabbing chores.
Become the backstabber hero and play through 20 levels on desktop or mobile. Try to catch as many knives as possible to impress your backstabbing rivals.
Once seen the game is over, hence the need to always backstab. Observe enemy patterns based on their suit colors to find strategies to beat all levels. You may crouch, walk above or hide in barrels to avoid attention. Even in a barrel, you can't let anyone see you move through.
Happy backstabbing! 🗡️
About
This game was originally created for the js13k game jam 2019 that had Back as its theme. One month of development and a size limit of 13kb is a fun challenge but isn't a recipe for a game without flaws. The itch version is mainly untouched but adds music and is a bit more polished. The gameplay and level design isn't touched at all though. Just by adding music the file size grew ~500 times!
- Original game jam version: https://js13kgames.com/entries/backstabber-hero
- Created by Niklas Berg / The Infinite Monkey
- Music from OpenGameArt: Laid Back by Spring Spring, Puppy Dog Swing by Spring Spring and Victorious by SpiderDave.
- The game uses a heavily customized and outdated version of Kontra.js.
- Zzfx was used to create sound effects.
- Interesting fact 1: The game randomizes skin colors at each run
Interesting fact 2: The game has a PWA manifest which means that you can install it on your android mobile.Not yet working on Itch.
Comments
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Thanks for this game! Too bad I missed your submission in 2019, but here it goes my “jugde feedback” :)
I managed to get all the knives on all levels, and wanted to take a screenshot of the level selections, but the game got stuck on Level 1 screen (probably after trying to get to the next level after the 20th).
As I saw in your other answer, yeah, I think a review on the level order might be due. I found that there was quite variety in levels types, ones requiring lots of dexterity, others requiring just figuring out the order. I had the most fun with the latter type.
The limited time on the knives and that crazy purple enemy are a great idea on keeping the player on the edge. It enforces the player to keep to a certain order and does not leave much room to think, you need to be fast and creative sometimes. I did not enjoy though when the timers were dozen of seconds longer just so you could have the time for the enemies to be in a certain configuration, that down time could be removed and then you’d remove the doubt of “Am I doing some jump/move wrong or I should just sit here and wait? Oh, the timers are long… so wait :/”.
Thank you for the feedback! I think you're right about why the game freezes after finishing level 20.
I would love to alter the levels more than the direction, but they are still in a complicated custom format adapted for the 13kb jam and I didn't have the time to rewrite it. They are actually made in Tiled, parsed with a script into strings that are finally concatenated into a long level data string with things like positions of knives and their times baked into shared bytes. Now, with a little more experience I think I could have skipped some of the tricks since zip probably would do it better anyway...
Again, thanks for the feedback. I'm super happy someone actually finished it with all knifes.
nice arcade
Thanks for playing and for the video. After watching it I think I might need to review the level order. At least level 3 should move to a higher number.