Super Small-io World! by micahcowan

Play in your browser here (HTML5/Canvas. You may also see earlier milestone versions.
Super Small-io World! Inspired by Super Mario Galaxy.
These worlds may be small, but they're yours! Rife with gold coins, just yours for the taking! Better hurry, though, because they seem to leap from your pockets back to their original spot if you take too long to make your getaway! Also, there are dangerous and evil gas cloud monsters roaming these parts, so watch out for those too (but don't let them slow you down!)
Made in 48 hours (including sounds, music, etc). Source code is licensed under the ISC (like BSD)
Post-Compo Tweaks
I've uploaded a version with minor tweaks to make the gameplay a bit less unfair, as follows: * More of the largest world, with the circling baddies, is visible from an important vantage point. * Jumping immediately upon landing is somewhat easier now. * The first coin has been removed, so you don't trigger the countdown as soon as the game begins (until you move to take a coin) * Made game patterns more consistent after win/loss
Things that haven't changed: * All the graphics are still crappy placeholder stuff * The control scheme * The aggressive coin respawn timeout. * The collision detection for coins or enemies.
Links
- PLAY (COMPO version)
- PLAY: POST COMPO (minor tweaks; see above!)
- AUTHOR'S SITE micah.cowan.name
- TWITTER @micahcowan
- SOURCE GitHub
Tools Used
- TypeScript
- Visual Studio Code
- Ionsible (my own very work-in-progress game engine)
- GIMP
- Bfxr
- Propellerheads Reason 8 (for music)
Ratings
| Overall | 423th | 2.939⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 274th | 3.152⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 373th | 2.848⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 151th | 3.727⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 525th | 1.97⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 283th | 2.833⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 352th | 2.2⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 464th | 2.483⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 38🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
Do note that the music can be toggled with the "M" key (though the other sounds will still play)
over all you've made a pretty strong demonstration of the core mechanics which is an accomplishment given the short amount of time you had to do so.
The wavy-line-following enemy was intended to be a _touch_ aggravating. But it _is_ predictable, following a path that's just a combination of sine waves that have a whole ratio (so it cycles predictably). But yeah, it trains you to pause for a moment for it to reach you and return, when all the rest of the game is "go go go! you're going to miss the time!"
BTW, I hadn't actually beat the game at the time I published it, so wasn't 100% sure it was possible in such a strict time limit. :D I was gratified to learn, after a few more practice runs, that it is indeed possible - even easy, once you've learned the right pattern of moves ;)
It'd probably also help if you don't hit a coin automatically when you fall at the start. That starts the timer the moment you've fired up, before you've had a chance to think/move.
Sounds from a few peoples' comments that the collision could use some adjustments. I think they're all radius-based, so probably just need to expand it a few times. I think I did purposefully ease up the enemies' collision a bit so it wasn't _too_ ridiculously tough.
The controls are intuitive and so is the objective although I had a hard time figuring out what the enemy.
Maybe a short story line would help tie the game mechanics and graphics together.
Great job overall, +1 for custom engine.
EDIT: Yeah, I kinda figured that it had something to do with the bouncing. Not that big of a deal once I got used to it.
Usually when you can't jump when you feel like you ought to, you're in the midst of a bounce from having landed in a previous jump (or from a bouncepad, especially). Ideally you should be able to jump when you bounce, too, but I guess I didn't get that quite right. ;)
Struggled a bit with the third planet for a couple of tries, but then focused on just jumping at the right time and running around it until I collected all the coins.
Good work!
There wasn't a reaction when I died which ended up being really jarring when it happened the first time. Enemies ended up being hard to dodge (one of the early bounce pads could sometimes send you straight into one?).
Overall I liked the idea.
Without joking, the game is too hard but it is really fun !
Rated
Good job! :D
This game would be *substantially* improved, I feel, by the addition of levels with a ramping difficulty. Each level would still have the "get all the coins before they leap out of your pocket" mechanic, but the the level the game ended up with should be one of the later ones.
I had wanted to make something more Mario-ish, but with 5-ish hours left to go all I'd done was the mechanics and the music, and probably the bounce pad sounds. So I just whipped up the gameplay you see here, which I'm pretty happy with, but yeah, it's definitely on the higher end of difficulty.
Ideally I'd have larger levels, with more worlds, and more to do on them, and various types of enemies. But if I did that, I'd probably scrap the disappearing coins - they can only work if you can very quickly get back to where you started to reclaim them, and wouldn't be good at all for larger worlds.
All in all, the coins were a "clever" device to keep folks playing, instead of the game being done in all of 10 seconds. ^_^
Feedback: Sometimes I'd land on a planet or jump on a pad and try to move one way only to go the other, which was frustrating and lost me just enough time to not be able to beat the level. I don't know that there's an easy way to solve this problem - typically you'd keep your camera aligned with your character's orientation but I'm guessing you can't do that in your 2D engine. Another point is that it was hard to see the cloud going around the planets. I eventually learned its movement but if you made more levels this isn't the kind of thing you should have to memorize every time. You could fix this pretty easily by adding a little trail behind your clouds (plus this would make your game look better!).
It actually would be a piece of cake to make the camera orient on the user. But I wasn't convinced I really wanted to do that, and left it out. I think I was concerned that it would move the world around the player too much and could be a bit dizzying. I don't know if "lagging" the camera a bit behind the player's alignment might help or hurt with that.
There's been a few other games with a similar control scheme to mine; on one of them, a user suggested orienting A/D to "left/right", but with the same key meaning the same clockwise/counter-clockwise direction until it's released. That could possibly work to help alleviate confusion with the controls... but I imagine a quick reversal after the "meaning" of D had changed might then be surprising. That is, if you were underneath the world, and used "D" for right (counter-clockwise), and then, once you looped around to the top of the world, you quickly released and then pressed "A" for the reverse direction, you'd actually wind up going in the same direction you were, even though it's a different keypress.
I imagine you could fudge that away with some sort of release timer or something, but anyway it's an intriguing idea. Of course, the camera alignment method is much more reliable at ensuring the player isn't confused about the controls.
Another way to improve visibility of the world-gliding enemies would be to have the camera zoom out a bit more, either by default, or when the player is near the prime jump spot to that world.
Enemy avoidance would probably be much better if I improved the ability to jump when you bounce from the big landings. Maybe I could find a way to fudge that so it "feels" better.
I don't currently plan to do a post-compo version of this game; or if I do, it'll probably be very substantially different (and later).
(also I think it's really awesome that you've rolled out your own game engine, great stuff I'm going to take a look)
I think I've been avoiding it mainly because when I was practice getting my runs fast enough to beat it, I'd just spam refresh when I knew I was taking too long - so I always got the same pattern to practice on.
@gamerjenn, I know the single-hit kill can be frustrating, but I liked the challenge of it, so I'd like to keep it. But I _would_ like to diminish the sheer frustration of it, particularly when the death isn't really your fault. I'm thinking that fixing the above-mentioned timing issue, increasing the visibility of the jump to the large world, and maybe being more forgiving with the "can't jump when bouncing" thing?
@izunah, yeah, more bodies would be nice. But then I'd need more mechanisms and obstacles to keep it interesting, and there wasn't any time left for that... and with the coin reappearing mechanic, you don't want to get too far away from the starting position!
Keep up the great work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQvFJMpbZ5A