Run for your life is a Fantasy Endless runner plateformer.
The basic idea came from the movie the Hobbit with the goblin chase

I wanted to create an endless runner where you have a party of adventurer that need to create their path through a lot of monsters and plateforms. The have to use magics and the environment to defeat their enemies.

To get there, I started with a smaller version where you only have one character with a fireball and that will need to avoid Ogres or destroy them to get further. This version is also inspired by "Jetpack joy" another endless runner ;)

I would be happy if you can try it and give me your feedbacks and/or ideas to get closer to my first idea.
Have fun ;)

The 6th Kajam now has ratings open! You are free to play, review and rate these hyper-casual games according to how addictive you feel they are. Also, most of you are already aware but due to popular demand, there is a last minute change to allow 4 more days for submitting late entries. Here's the final schedule:

• Submissions close: Thursday 31st January, 7pm UTC
• Ratings close/Results out: Tuesday 5th February, 7pm UTC

We're not extending the ratings phase until the end of the week because… Guess what? It will be time for the 5th Alakajam already, with theme submissions opening on the following Friday :D

Congrats to everyone who already entered the jam, and good luck to those still polishing their work!

So I really wanted to take part in this jam but I've just been way too busy.
The thing is I started working on a game that fits the hyper casual bill around xmas last year and I'm just finishing it now?

Is it cool if I submit it unranked? Would love to take part but I've just not had time to work on a whole new project as well as everything else.

Slowly working on my little platformer. Trying to tweak the difficulty is a bit tough, but I think I have enough hazards to keep the player busy. If I have time I might work on powerups before the deadline!
https://twitter.com/SnowFoxGames/status/1084336785780400130

I've been making good progress with my jumping game, with the core mechanic now mostly done (…although physics were harder than expected to set up).

The next steps will be to draw final art… and more importantly, balance the difficulty. That difficulty part is quite tricky, as a good level design should be able to avoid "impossible situations" where deaths are forced. How could we do that yet keep the game hard, and even make it get harder with time? I see two main approaches:

1. Keep the levels procedurally generated, and do some clever coding to make level generation harder & harder without being unfair ;
2. Use pre-made "level chunks" of various difficulties, that would be playtested by hand.

Solution 2 would be too time consuming & unexciting, not mentioning I'd need to playtest again from scratch if I decide to tweak physics constants… So yeah I'll stick with fully procedural levels. To quickly get something I can ship, I've wanted to avoid being too concerned about imperfect levels: a trick was to introduce an "oxygen management" mechanic. The way it helps with level design is that it lets players do (limited) air jumps, which means that even if there's a huge hole in the level it still leaves a chance to survive.

Now, for the ideal solution…

The main idea I've had for "100% solvable" level generation is to place an AI player below the screen, before rockets are even spawned, that "plays" exactly like the player would. It would randomly decide to swap sides & jump, the trick being that the AI also decides when it lands: When reaching one of the 3 "rocket lanes", he'd be able to trigger rocket generation. A rocket would then magically appear right where the AI is, so we're 100% sure that the game is playable :)

We could then adjust the difficulty in various ways:

• Especially in early phases of the game, filling voids with some additional rockets would help make things easy and the "AI path" not too obvious
• The AI could play with increasingly tight timing
• The rockets could be made shorter, or positioned so that there's little margin for error

I'm not sure how widespread this technique of using an AI is, but it may be fun to try. To be continued…

Having a blast coding this weekend. Hard to believe that the simplest things could be so hard to code.

Like trying to get bullets to fire on a consistant velocity. That took me a good few hours to figure out. Stretching my math muscles was a welcome change.

Not sure how to post pics or vids of my progress, but I just posted what I've made on my Twitter account! Then you'll see the meaning of my post's title! hehe.
https://twitter.com/SnowFoxGames/status/1082080890178551808

This is a really interesting one! Gonna have to shift gear in my brain and try and design something with different goals than I usually have!

This should be fun, going to try and push myself to build this for mobile because I've never made a mobile game. Probably just Android because that's what I own. Mobile is perfect for the hyper casual genre so we'll see how it goes.
No ideas yet so I better get brainstorming, good luck everyone!

Just took a look at the theme for this months jam. I don't tend to play many Hyper-Casual games, but I'm familiar with my temple runs, flappy birds and such. I think I already know what I want to do, and it stems from a project I did way back when I was using GameMaker Studio.

I'd created the basics of an endless runner, with moving platforms where a player had to jump from platform to platform to gather coins. As the player score got higher, new obstacles would spawn like turrets on platforms and rotating saw blades.

With GameMaker, I managed the basics, but never finished it and never got to add the obstacles I wanted.

That being said, I am currently using Unity, so I basically have to start from scratch.

In a month though? Hope I can pull it off!

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, submissions will remain open until the end of the month! That means 4 bonus days. We'll still open game ratings on January 27th. See you then :)

The theme of the January 2019 Kajam is Hyper-casual gaming. As usual, you'll have about one month to make a game exploring the topic, with submissions due for Sunday 27th! Will follow a week of ratings on how addictive your game is, with the results out on Sunday 3rd February.

About "hyper-casual" games

I discovered this new term pretty recently, thanks to Bitslap sharing an interesting article about the trend. We're interested here in a particular niche inside the world of mobile gaming. It's been years now since casual games have taken over the world of app stores, from match threes to strategy games to puzzles. But now, the idea behind "hyper"-casual is that there's a growing number of successful apps that are actually very small games, focused on a single simple mechanic.

The obvious examples would be Flappy Bird of course, or 2048. Both were made in 3 days or less. An older one would be Doodle Jump. There's been a lot of games like this now that have been successful, even commercially successful, while at the same time seeming like they did not take that much time to develop. Studios like Ketchapp have outright specialized in such games ; their recent success Stack is a good exemple.

Tips

It seems like the overall hyper-casual recipe is as follows:

1. Rely on a very simple but fun mechanic
2. Make it require lots of practice to master (either by getting timing and precision right, or by perfecting strategic decisions)
3. Make the game infinite, having the player aim for a high score
4. Balance the difficulty right (to avoid boring or frustrating the player)

While I can't promise you this will make your game a success, it's certainly a type of games worth exploring. For me it will be a nice change to finetune a simple gameplay rather than cramming as much features & contents I can in a limited time :)

Bonus: One Hour Game Jam meetup!

Because those games are super easy to prototype, let's try something special and join the One Hour Game Jam to get our games started! OHGJ is a weekly event, and completely informal (no prizes nor enforcing any rules, ie. it's ok to submit late, reuse existing art etc.) so it's perfect to get your Kajam entry started.

I'm proposing either of the next two events for us to gather and give a try at a hyper-casual game!

• Saturday 5th January, 8pm UTC
• Saturday 12th January, 8pm UTC

See you there maybe! And even if you don't, have fun making a minimal but addictive game!

I have tried to think about any simple but fun and mobile-friendly mechanic I could find, and here's the result:

Story: It won't be told explicitly (except maybe through the game name), but I always need a story to get me engaged in my projects. Here, humanity is escaping Earth due to an imminent disaster. Thousands of rockets are launching into space, except you have been forgotten behind :D You had the brilliant idea to just hop on a launching rocket, so now let's just try to stay alive…

Gameplay: It's simply about staying on screen for as long as you can, by jumping between rockets that scroll at different speeds. Maybe you just you can't stick to the rockets correctly and are constantly sliding along them, forcing you to jump to something else before you fall off. Anyway the controls are just:

1. Hold touch for the right time to jump on a neighbor rocket
2. Tap to switch sides of the rocket you're on
3. Use 1 & 2 to stay alive as long as you can

I aim to build this both for PC and Android. And will probably prototype this during a One Hour Game Jam.