ANDY VO
Game Designer, Programmer, and Artist
I AM ROCK
Overview
I AM ROCK is a prototype game I developed as a concept for a one finger game. It is an Action Side-Sidescroller (with a bit of Platformer). The player plays as a boulder that can fling itself around to crash through various obstacles and enemies.
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One-Touch Control
The simplest form of control for a game is a game with only one input. My first goal was to produce a game that gave the simplest form of control the most amount of power and fun. As a lover of action, I figured flying around and crushing things was a pretty forward subject for fun. Putting those together, I found the idea of a slingshot mechanic the most amusing - the harder you pull, the harder you fly. Though, to prevent the player from going absolutely crazy, I did impose an experimental stamina bar and a count limit for the number of times you can fling yourself midair before touching the ground again.
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Impact
My second goal was how to make the slingshot rock mechanic feel as good and heavy as possible, though not necessarily realistic. The motion is acceleration based, and the player's speed is reduced by percentage every time they bounce off of a wall (until they fling themselves again). I kept gravity weak to give the player more hang time to sort of simulate that appearance of slowness you get from larger objects (which is largely due to the illusion of scale and inertia).
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Next came aesthetic impact. I added a handful of things to make the fling mechanic appear more powerful than it was by itself.:
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A Shock wave and a brief flash for when the player flings themselves.
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Simple dust particles and a deep audio rumble when they collided with walls.
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Screenshake.
And now the Rock flies hard and hits harder (aesthetically).
Enemies and Obstacles
For the prototype level, I felt the worst thing I could do to my mechanic was to have things the player couldn't crush (aside from the level boundaries, of course). As such, I created hazards that were physically inconsequential to the player or could be destroyed. The mob enemies did not affect the player's movement and were easily be destroyed. There is a barrier type enemy that essentially was made to do nothing more than block paths and take extra hits, but was otherwise another crush-able object. The most threatening thing in the level was the red spikes, which damaged the player on contact. For a game like this, I felt indestructible spikes would be too much of a slap in the face, so I made them shatter on contact as well.
The one exception would be the boss, who was meant to actually be a fairly imposing challenge.
Credits
All programming, art, and animation assets were done by me in GameMaker Studio 2. Sounds were made in bfxr (https://www.bfxr.net/) and music used came free to use from Darren Curtis (https://www.darrencurtismusic.com/).
Download Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gEEd9GWkTZXuL0FQ2Uum2dE5RKVmJby1