a game where you can be a bird
Made for Lojam 2020 and the theme was “From the outside looking in, it’s hard to understand”
A game inspired by Celeste
The game lost track of the theme pretty quickly this Jam, but that’s okay. I find on my value hierarchy that if a theme will make the game I am working on less enjoyable to play, I generally just cut it and focus on the parts that do make it fun.
And in this case, it felt pretty fun to jump. I spent the first day of the jam just sitting there for hours, pressing the space button. My white square just bobbing up and down on a black screen. Thinking what would it feel like to play like a bird… Well having an infinite amount of jumps or “flaps” wouldn’t be very fun. The game wouldn’t be very challenging then. I thought of some restraint on the player could do some good, I always admired Celeste’s grip mechanic. How while you climb your stamina scales with how fast you go. What if it was that but with flapping?
I continued to sit there on my computer, making this white block now bounce a little bit differently on screen. I threw in some squash and stretch, got people to playtest jumping around on this black screen. Seemed like most people thought it felt pretty good so, I thought, well I guess this is it, it’s a bird game.
48 Hours later…
and now we have “FLAP”!
Also, I got a sweet Coffee maker as a prize.
Thanks to the guys who made Assemblance for letting me get dibs on the coffee maker.
Check out what everyone else made here