This project is the result of a Game Jam organised by my fellow IT students.
We came up with the theme "one rule".
My idea for that theme was clear:
a game I used to play as a child.
My idea for that theme was clear:
a game I used to play as a child.
The goal of this game is simple: get to bed!
Jump from chair to sofa to table; whatever you can climb on, so you don't touch the floor.
I added some markings to the wallpaper, so the player always knows if the floor is "floor" and when it's not.
The levels are dreamlike and twist and turn in on themselves.
I made the levels "twist" by using splines. This makes it perfectly smooth.
The rest of the mechanics emerged from messing around with basic properties:
Weight, size, friction, bounciness.
The first level is normal. A safe space to get used to the controls.
You can knock over the books on the table, making the level slightly more interesting.
The second level is a bit more difficult with wider gaps.
When you fall off the side of the level, you land on the "ceiling", which is safe to walk on.
However, the bed is still stuck to the "floor". You have to jump off the chair to reach it.
The slight incline in the floor causes the chair to roll off the side by itself (if you ignored it).
In the third level you suddenly become small!
Here, you have to roll the globe across the room to reach the, also tiny, bed.
This is it, the final level.
Roll the globe down the hill, but don't go too fast or you'll lose control.
Ride the chair across the floor and keep your head down so you don't crash into the barriers.
Jump off the extra-bouncy sofa to the reach the top and face the wall of beds.
Mind the floor-ceiling as you climb over the beds.
After all of that, I put a few more books that you can knock over, as a way to celebrate your victory.
At the end the level wraps back around to a copy of the first level.
The player character can jump and crouch and roll. There were more abilities I wanted to add, but I couldn’t implement them in the span of the Game Jam.
"Somersault" and "Roll" became the same "Crouch-Jump" state,
where the character spins around like a ball.
If I had the time, I would have made the character act like an actual ball.
I like to let players experiment instead of spelling out exactly what they need to do, but in some cases it is necessary to let them know that they have an ability that they didn't know about. Encouraging players to experiment, and find success in those experiments, is an ongoing problem that I want to solve.