Hello there,

The Madness of Little Emma is a baby of Castlevania, Binding of Isaac and American McGee's Alice. I am very close to releasing a playable demo (~2 weeks), however I still wait for my graphic artist to finish two short cutscenes for the game(intro+one of the endings). The game is developed in Java using Slick2d.

The game tells a story of Emma who is looking for her little brother after he has disappeared in eerie circumstances.

Some screenshots:

A boss fight

Exploring the undergrounds.

A mini-teaser for upcoming Emma's trailer (and intro as well)

The game is very similiar to games like legend of zelda, binding of isaac in its very core mechanics - you explore screen-sized rooms, kill mobs and look for items. The biggest difference in the gameplay mechanics is that by collecting more items you increase your character's madness, which results in more wild enemies to appear, so in a way, a player can affect the pace of the game by deciding if he collects everything or leaves less powerful stuff behind. I have explained it more indepth on my indiedb page http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-madness-of-little-emma/news/gameplay-video30
I have tried my best to have unique monsters and items so there are barely few of those that differ only in stats, most of the items (currently almost 40) have unique effects, like making your shots bounce, making enemies explode when you kill them, double jump, making your bullets laser-fast, immunity to spikes and so on and so on. I have also aimed at having very powerful item interactions possible(sort of like in Binding of Isaac, however in boi lots of interactions look like hard-coded and I tried to do it more generic way, this has its pluses and minuses), for instance here Emma has killed an enemy, he exploded in 5 lasers which bounce off walls or pass through them, which killed another enemy causing chain reaction:

If anyone is interested you can watch a ~11 min gameplay video here: