Wow, how time flies when you’re being unproductive! It’s been three and a half weeks since I finished the original two-week schedule for Captain Stretchy-Arms.

As well as procrastinating (I got another 700 points on Stack Overflow and overall #4 in the XNA category — that site is insidious), I’ve been doing some work on Captain Stretchy-Arms.

I’ve already shown the tiny bit of art that I’ve done. I’ve also done some play-testing, which has resulted in some very positive feedback. I have decided to, instead of making Captain Stretchy-Arms a quick two-week project, made it a “proper” game.

Play-testing has also revealed opportunities for some gameplay tweaks: Now the grab action is click-on instead of click-and-hold (good for touch devices!), the automatic difficulty curve (used in level generation) has been improved, and most importantly now there’s a “Bad Guy”. His name is “Baron von Badass”.

The role of Baron von Badass is to force the player to move forward. If the player slows down, the Baron will catch up and start destroying blocks in an effort to cause the player’s death.

My original design called for Baron von Badass to star as the mad-scientist villain in the opening cut-scene and to then chase after the player, reading out the score (distance) and taunting to urge the player onward. He got cut from the main game early on, when I found a better way to display the score. But now he’s back!

(He also got experimented with on Day 10 and 11, but that attempt didn’t really work.)

You can now download and try out the latest version of the game with Baron von Badass and all the other gameplay improvements.

~

Going back to the whole “proper game” thing – I obviously still have not done the vast majority of the required artwork (not to mention the cut-scene). I am going to be away for a couple of days, but as soon as I get back I am dedicating an entire week to making the game look von Badass!