Initial images from my latest project.

about latest game

I just started on a new project. I set aside 4 hours to make a super simple game. The idea was to have a one-button game. I would have a wheel that would roll around. There would be a rocket attached to the wheel that would release a burst of energy when you pused the space bar. The idea was that by simply timing your jumps with the rotation of the wheel you could move around. The problem is durring play testing the game just wasn't fun. Simple tasks were too hard, and the wheel would get spinning too fast and make it almost impossible to really time things correctly. I could reduce the friction making the wheel turn slower, but then you would often be waiting too long for the wheel to come back around to direct your next jump; Also it made the physics look akward. If I wasn't using a physics engine, you could probably do a better job of making it fun by making it more like a puzzle game, but it just wasn't working out.

controls

I decided to start over-complicating things right off the bat by adding directional "jumping" by using the space bar, to jump towards the mouse. This is an intuitive way to move around and using the mouse give you very fine-grained contol over your direction. To make things interesting, I disable jumping again until you collide with something. This allows you to still chain jumps, but keeps you from doing too much in-air maneuvering.
By holding down the spacebar you will see an arrow pointing towards your mouse, filling up indicating how much power you have stored up. Upon releasing the space bar you will be hurled forth!




























gameplay

You can beat levels by ether completing it in a certain ammount of time, or a minimal ammount of jumps. Either way will win the level, but you will have to earn a bronze in either one to progress. You will also be rewarded for completing levels in both ways and by getting gold medals for exceptional efforts. There will be many natural obsticals to overcome as well as bad guys to avoid. As the game progresses you will get powerups to handle these situations including lazer-guns and rocket launchers.