Peak Hamster Engineering
Thank you so much to everyone who played Hyper Hamster and left some feedback, the response has been so positive! :hamster:
Although this was not our only game idea for the jam, this was the one that we felt had the simplest fundamental elements and would be relatively quick to prototype. This saved us a lot of time to focus on visuals, sound, and game feel to make the game as fun and satisfying as possible.
Here is the actual design document of the game, annotated just for you!
The only things missing from this early document are the actual goal of the game (reaching hyper velocity!), and what obstacles would actually be, but most of the inner workings were set from the start.
Here is what obstacle spawning looks like in action:
It was of course important to make sure the player never sees this, so we split the wheel in 4 segments and only spawn obstacles in the one right behind the camera.
Obstacles are placed using a vector that goes from the world center (which is also the center of the wheel) to the pink trigger, we then rotate that vector along the wheel with a semi-random angle to determine obstacle positions. Obstacles may then be shifted along the X axis for more variety.
There was actually a fair bit of math involved in the making of this game, even something as simple as the speed meter uses a Sin function for the oscillation and a square root to make the progress feel more accurate/fair.
As mentioned above, one of our main focus was game feel and making the game as satisfying as possible despite its simplicity. This is done through a myriad of little details, like the aforementioned speed meter, the dangling apples on the HUD, the "SPEED LOSS" and "SUGAR RUSH" blinking texts, particle effects and distorsions using FOV and chromatic aberrations, sound effects, and of course that signature Hyper Hamster front flip.
This is all of those things in play, minus the sound:
And that's all of the beans I'll spill for now! :hamster: