Back in June I made a small game at the Full Indie game jam in Vancouver. The concept is that you have to kill the player character in order to beat the level. It was well-received by people at the jam and by people I showed it to afterwards. Everyone I said that they haven’t seen a concept like this before, which is encouraging.

Here’s a video of the original game jam version.

At the time I knew the game had lots of unexplored potential, so I planned to work on it some more and release it as an online Flash game. I did a bit of work after the jam including improving the font, adding lava, and creating a few more levels.

You can play the “extended” version here.

Recent Features

Since then I’ve added:

– Particle effects/sounds for different deaths
– Fireball shooters
– Water (including splash effects)
– Water death and floating corpse (still working on this as it’s a bit buggy)

I haven’t made any new levels with the above features yet; I’ve just been testing the features out in the built-in level editor.

Also I’ve been working on the underlying framework to make sure it’s good for future Flash/download games.

The Plan

During the last few months I’ve been pretty busy due to packing up to leave Canada, going on a 3 week road trip in British Columbia, and then settling into our house back in the UK. Therefore the game hasn’t progressed much. However, now that I’ve got my home office sorted and nothing much on my to do list, I’m ready to get rolling with finish this game off. Yay! I also need some money pretty darn soon (like yesterday), and thus my aim is to finish this game in November and get some sponsorship for it in December via FGL so that my family can actually eat something other than snow at Christmas.

If the game is popular as a Flash game then I’ll turn it into a larger PC/Mac download. This isn’t very difficult because I’m using the excellent Monkey cross-platform language. I’m not planning a mobile version though because the game has too many controls for phones in my opinion.

A cool side-effect of making this game is that I’ll have a) a decent re-useable cross-platform framework in Monkey, and b) a fully featured platform game engine that I can use for other ideas.

I’ll be posting regular, perhaps daily, developer diaries to chart progress and to keep me accountable 🙂 So please check back often!

Future Features

Here are some features and wishlist items I have planned:

– 20-25 levels (10-15 mins play time)
– More background/foreground graphics
– Bombs
– Spring/catapult
– Buttons/Doors
– Moving platforms
– Enemies
– Traps
– Ladders
– Conveyors (maybe)
– Slippery ice
– Map Screen
– More stuff!!

This list is of course subject to change depending on what works and how much time I have left in November.

Please try out the game and let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

Thanks!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Developer Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.