Made a new video game for a 2 week game jam with the theme of “avoidance”. My idea was fairly simple and the game jam was long enough that I ended up putting a bunch of polish into it in weird places. Had a good time making it and it was worth it for the practice either way.
To touch on the design of the game: I’ve always liked “reactive” play in action games and don’t tend to love memorization so this game is almost entirely the former. It basically plays like a bullet-hell shmup but without the ability to memorize anything. It’s a game about risk-reading and fast decision making.
The game itself takes place in a looping space and you’re essentially dodging bouncing particles in a frictionless environment. This provides a really nice balance of like micro predictability but macro chaos.
it’s quite difficult! the game slowly speeds up over time so i always feels like i’m choking. like there’s some certain inflection point where you should flip between aggressive point collecting and survival but i have a hard time nailing it down.
I keep forgetting to use the focus, but I got 17 when I remembered to. Yeah, it’s tough. I can see doing better though. It’s got all the basic compulsions of exactly this type of arcade game.
I love the soundscape too. It’s very crunchy but in a good way. Only been able to manage like 14 or so orbs. I kinda wanna check out Picotron, it seems like a really interesting platform.
ha i actually noticed a difference in “crunch” between the desktop version and this web version of pictoron so i think maybe it’s actually sampling at a lower rate on web. but it sounds pretty good regardless so i wasn’t upset about it.
also sometimes it’s hard for me to hear crunch exactly because i’ve used a lot of crunchy trackers in the past (e.g. making genesis fm music) so i’ve like overexposed myself to it and it doesn’t stick out to me as much anymore.
oh and to talk about picotron a bit. it’s very similar to pico8 but with less restrictive limits (the code limit is the particular one that drives me crazy in pico8 and it’s so relaxed here to basically be non-existent). a lot of the APIs are similar or borrowed wholesale from p8.
it’s also still early so the documentation isn’t perfect and there are some bugs, but it’s very fun to develop for.
