I thought I would take a break from playing entries to write a quick post mortem on my game Rokhopr. If you haven’t played it yet, it’s a simple 1 button game for 1 or two players. It can be played on desktop browsers with the keyboard or on touch enabled devices.

Play it here!

Here are a few points regarding the development:

The good
I decided to make the game from scratch using the HTML5 canvas tag and JavaScript. I wanted to make sure the game could easily be played on desktop browsers as well as touch enabled phones and tablets and I think I achieved that (though I’m sure there are some devices and/or browsers that don’t work, but haven’t encountered any yet).

I think the 2 player mode was a nice addition that I decided on quite late on. Though it took a while to implement, I think it worked out pretty well.

I was pretty happy with how the minimal 4 colour Gameboy-style aesthetic turned out in the end (although I probably spent too much time trying out different colours/designs).

The not so good
I ran out of time before I had done any game balancing (tweaking the rock spawning rate, speed up rate, player rotation and movement speed etc), and I feel the game really needs this to make it fairer and try to eliminate situations that are impossible for the player to deal with.

Also, the game is completely silent. I knew that getting consistent audio behavior across devices/browsers might be tricky, so I decided to not even try quite early on. Obviously the game could have been improved with some sound effects and music, so this was a shame.

Well, that’s all from me – back to playing my way through the entries!