Planet Hopper by carrot
I've been a software engineer for 10 years, and a game programmer for all of 2 weeks. Not sure why I thought entering a game jam when I can barely stop my character falling through the floor was a good idea! I just need to find a theme that turns my programming bugs in to features...
In Planet Hopper you have been turned in to a giant by a freak industrial accident. Without your space ship you need to find a way home by hopping between planets and asteroids, and using radioactive mushrooms to shrink down to normal size to collect fuel to power a rocket, or solve other puzzles to help you progress. Controls are the usual ASWD or arrow keys for movement, and space to jump. If you want to reset your lives press 'o', or to instantly complete a level and get back to the galaxy press 'p'. Sadly only had time to make 2 planets as it took me waaay too long to work out basic controls and movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGQkQUgENIw
The sprites and sounds are mainly free ones, but there are a couple I bought as I'm so bad at art I miss when trying to paint a barn door!
But, my first attempt at a game and I'm fairly happy with it in spite of dodgy colliders (with a bit or work I can probably turn them in to hover boots...) and freak gravity problems. I think I learnt more this weekend than in the past few weeks trying to learn how to program games!
Event: Jam
Opt-outs:
- graphics
- sound
Links
- Web Version: https://itch.io/embed-upload/460613?color=333333 (takes a while to load)
- Download Version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1R8XA8Ok9OHMlRGbWd6MVhZeTg/view?usp=sharing
Ratings
| Overall | 637th | 2.909⭐ | 13🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 631th | 2.636⭐ | 13🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 712th | 2.273⭐ | 13🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 543th | 3.091⭐ | 13🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 523th | 2.2⭐ | 12🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 616th | 2.727⭐ | 13🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
The controls were a bit difficult to handle on the ice world it would have been good to have been able to jump a little more but as a game programmer of only 2 weeks I think you've done a great job!
- The movement doesn't feel very good. There must be a technical problem, because the movement in my game looks totally different than what's in your gameplay video. While on a planet mine moves at a third of the speed, making most of the jumps impossible. You might need to move your physics code inside FixedUpdate, or scale it by delta time so that it feels consistent across all platforms.
- Jumping and hitting the bottom of ledges didn't feel great, and you might want to make those one-way colliders instead. The visuals give a bit of indication that you should be able to jump through and land on top of them.
- When changing directions, the character's collider moves around which leads to unintended consequences. I can be standing on the edge of a ledge just fine, but as soon as I change direction I fall down off of it. When you flip the character between left and right, make sure to keep the collider and art centered so stuff like that won't happen.
You're off to a good start though! Keep tweaking it and improving!
The movement feels a bit slippery. It was also really annoying to have to retry the whole level every time I died.
Platformers are tough. You might do better with something more constrained.
It's a good first game. Good luck in the future!
Stuck forever, despite having 7 lives left :-(
Other than that I like the idea, theme, sound and graphics of the game. You wrote that you opt out of the graphics, but the graphics rating is still there.