Posts

Run for your Life 0

Thrainsa • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam entry  Run for your Life

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 ;)

Can I submit something I started early? 2

Ztuu • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

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.

More Traps Please! 1

SnowFox • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

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

Rocket Jumper: random level generation? 4

Wan • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam entry  Rocket Jumper

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…

Welcome to Hell, little blue square! 2

SnowFox • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

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

Let's do this! 0

Ztuu • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

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!

Hyper-Casual? Time to resurrect an old project. 0

SnowFox • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

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!

My attempt at single-button gameplay 4

Wan • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

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.

Time to get back to programing 1

SnowFox • 5 years ago on 6th Kajam 

Welp, November was an interesting month. Participated in Nanowrimo and got away with 23000 words. Less than half the goal, but no matter. Pretty happy I was able to churn that much out in that short time.

December has been the month of relax, especially now with that holiday right around the corner.

It's time to get back into game dev. I imagine my coding skills are a bit rusty after such a long hiatus, but I hope it will come back to me in time for the next Kajam.

I'm looking forward to stretching my coding muscles once more.