Squishy Hurdles (One Button Jam)

Press and squash and release to jump

You can use left click or spacebar to play.

Once in the air, press and hold to fall faster.

Pay attention to the obstacle order and make it through all 10 waves! 

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Technical Details

• Submission Form Link  (Make sure it's public!)
• GitHub Link  (Make sure it's public!)

Lecture Details

My prototype is an "Alternating" one button game. Players must press, hold, and release the button to duck and jump over obstacles! Originally I planned for the jump to be more analog (as in players could control the height of their jump by holding the button longer), but this made the game way too difficult. So now all jumps are the same height.

Squash to duck under and jump over obstacles! My main idea was to have a main mechanic with side effects - in order to jump, you first need to duck down. That allowed for multiple types of obstacles since players are able to duck and jump. The other mechanic I was interested in was adding a "preview" of the upcoming wave along the top of the screen.

• Gameplay video (Make sure it's public!)

Design Details

Balance

I spent a lot of time on designing and implementing the obstacle waves. I didn't want the game to feel too predictable, so the waves are randomly selected from a pool. But I also wanted to game to slowly ramp in difficulty, so the waves are split into sections (Easy, medium, and hard).

Iteration

The main duck and jump mechanic went through a lot of changes! Originally the jump height was based on the how long players ducked, but this made the game almost impossible to play. There was not enough time between obstacles for players to "build up" the jump height. So I ended up removing this mechanic and making all jumps the same height.

I also made a lot of changes to the collider size of obstacles and the player. Because everything is moving so quickly, it was a little too easy to run into obstacles. So I adjusted all of the colliders to be smaller than their visuals.