Blog - Player Thoughts : Squashly Boop

27th May 2018

After every game's release, the influx of feedback is intense!

Let's see what @RSKGames thought of this week's game.

@RSKGames

Overview: A fun little endless side scroller with lot of jumping and endless supply of enemies.

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I kept it nice and simple.
At one point I was going to add powerups and all sorts, but once I added the shield, everything else just seemed kinda redundant.

Gameplay: Initially I found it really hard to even last for a few seconds. But then after a few minutes I figured that if I hold the jump key all the time, I don't die so easily. This changed the game from challenging game to a fun game where I could focus of getting more and more combo jumps as possible.

I tend to use "Hold to jump higher" quite a lot. It's one of those simple mechanics that "should" be in a game, IMO.
Having said that, there's no Analogue Stick precision, this week! It's either full speed or stationary.

The higher the number of consecutive enemies you squash the larger the points for each enemies becomes. The three different enemies normal, rolling turtle and the bombs makes it necessary to make a conscious choice of which enemies to jump on. Avoiding the bombs or using the rolling turtles to kill them off is a good strategy.

I like the bombs most of all

I was originally going to make the bombs destroy all nearby squishies, like how the shell does, but in the end I felt like that was more of a punishment than anything else. It's more fun if you can run away, let it explode, then bounce your way back again, later.

The shield gives a breather for the player as the game has only one life.

The first of the powerups. The shield was going to be a simple object on the ground that you had to collect, but once I got testing it, I realised that...
A) It helps make the game not be as evil as it normally would've been.
B) It helps keep the three gameplay levels separated, with the different scoring requirements.
and
C) I didn't need much more than that..

It's quite a powerful little shield!!

Somehow I did not have the use for X key.

If I'd've continued with the powerups, they'd have made more ujse of the X key. I'd've treated it much like Super Mario's B button, with it being used to throw fireballs, and whatnot.

But, that never happened.
Perhaps an addition for a later day?

Graphics: The Shield graphics and the parallax effect of the background trees are well done. The player trail effect is good.

The giant tree sprites are more of a test than anything else, and apparently they're not going down too well in the framerate department.

The trail was needed once I added the trees, as "unnamed character" kept camouflaging into the trees, and getting lost.
He can still do that, now, but it's much less severe with the trail being there to guide your eyes.

Scoring: Liked how the scoring is implemented. Squashing the enemies in succession gives the following incremental points 5, 20, 45, 80, 125, 180, 245, 320, 405, 500, ... .

Oodles of points are available, if you can keep your hopping going.
This is one of the downsides of the turtles, as they tend to clear out the area, so there's nothing left to hop on.
Hop wisely!!

The shields are provided at every 1000, 2500 and 5000 points in normal, easy and hard levels respectively.

Yup, that was a really simple way to distinguish the three difficulty levels, and it was very much a last minute addition!
The bombs should show up more frequently in the harder levels, but other than that, there's not much difference between them.

Overall: A fun jumping game where player can try to achieve the biggest combo of jumps.

Glad you enjoyed it!
For more of the same, and to see where most of the ideas came from, why not try Mario's Fiery Fourth along with Eikon's original Fiery Fourth which I pinched the concept from!

Views 187, Upvotes 45

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