Way of the Dodo
Way of the Dodo is the LD43 entry by Chris McMath and me!
An invading force has discovered the island of the last dodos. Sacrifice fellow dodos to save the species! And can you rescue all of the eggs?
Play it here and let us know what you think!.
Read on if you'd like to find out a little bit more about how we came up with this little platforming experience / tribute to a tragically extinct bird.
First thought, best thought
Whilst I was en route to join Chris for the jam, we swapped ideas based on the theme via text. Once I had crossed Bristol, we had enough ideas to fill a whiteboard (with what unfortunately turned out to be a permanent marker). Too many, really. But we kept coming back to a particular Mario move that Chris had remembered - the sacrifice of Yoshi in Super Mario World. This ‘exploit’ of sorts is described in detail here. Essentially, if Mario is riding Yoshi and seems unlikely to make it across a chasm, he can launch himself from his dino pal and gain some more height. In the process, poor Yoshi plummets into the abyss.
➚ Mario and Yoshi, in happier times.
Stacked hens
We decided this would the central mechanic of our game. Chickens seemed like an option. As flightless creatures, perhaps they could traverse levels better by teaming up as stacked pairs - we envisaged them gliding across great gaps with their doubled wing-power. But then, cruelly kicking away the lower hen whilst in this form, Yoshi-style, they could reach the level's higher platforms. The ultimate double-jump, and the ultimate sacrifice.
Before long (after a brief penguin detour) we had pivoted to a more interesting, more extinct sort of flightless bird - the dodo!
➚ A dodo, as rendered by Frederick William Frohawk for Walter Rothschild’s 1907 book Extinct Birds.
Adorable, doomed, and as far as I know, never before the star of a colourful platformer. If we can have blue hedgehogs, why not a hot pink dodo?
The last dodos
Things started to come into focus when we considered the dodo’s historical enemies - the 17th century colonists of Mauritius who introduced numerous predators to their island, and cooked them en masse. Way of the Dodo’s twist on this is that there turns out to be one last island of surviving dodos, and the invaders this time are a robot army - in the future, even colonialism is outsourced. Taking this ahistorical approach neatly allowed us to be as anachronistic as we liked. By the time I was drawing the invading fleet for our title screen, we could imagine a future level in which the dodos storm the enemy warships (think Sonic 2's Wing Fortress Zone).
In the meantime, we very much hope you enjoy our first attempt at a dodo simulator.
Thanks to all at Bristol Games Hub!