With a double download!

Day 5

Today I changed the input scheme. Instead of having direct control over each arm, both arms are operated by the left mouse button.

By releasing the button in order to fire the second arm, the first arm automatically retracts. The upshot is that this mechanic is like rope-swinging – almost as if the player has only one arm. I’m not entirely happy with this, because I think that having two arms going at once is more interesting. But for now a single arm will do.

I have also implemented a continuous level system. You can go left or right forever. The problem with this is, once you go a few hundred screens in either direction, the physics starts to get glitchy (it’s a floating point precision thing). So I will have to add mechanism to occasionally move the entire world back towards zero, where more numeric precision is available.

Here is the download of today’s version, and a screenshot:

Day 6

Today was mostly spent doing paperwork, so I didn’t really get into Captain Stretchy-Arms.

The “two-week game” thing was originally supposed to be contiguous – days would still tick by even if I didn’t work on the game. It was just unfortunate that the interruptions between Day 2 and Day 4 would have taken out the entire two-week schedule (and then some).

So I’m going to count Day 6 towards the schedule, even though I didn’t get any work done on the game. Besides, I can still change my mind and cheat by tacking an extra day on at the end 😉

Day 7

Today I added the move-the-world-back-to-zero functionality I described in Day 5. I then created a new way of representing the world – now each slice of the world is a tile grid. At the moment I generate a world by placing tiles randomly. Here is a screenshot:

All of a sudden – I have a fun game mechanic! How far can you swing your way through this random maze?

I modified the tile placement to favour placing tiles at the top, rather than the bottom of the screen, and this made the game vastly more playable. It will still occasionally generate some terrain that is very difficult or impossible to traverse – I think I will add a system that double-checks the randomly generated level to ensure that a path through it exists, with sufficient hand-holds.

You can download the Day 7 prototype here.

I was hoping to have gameplay finished in the first week, to leave the second week free for doing art and sound. At the moment I am anticipating that the gameplay will take another two maybe even three days to complete, leaving 4-5 days for art and sound.

I did have a rather exciting idea for an opening cut-scene. I’m not sure I’ll have time to do it in the two weeks – but perhaps I can just do it outside the schedule, as part of the game’s proper release (I was already planning to do porting outside of the two weeks).