x-post from Cemetech. Thought I'd post this awesome project of mine here.
<short version>
I made a cool new game that uses a less-common speed-based movement system, combined with a time crunch, to induce hilarity upon players. It features multiple difficulties (and highscore tables), two different movement schemes, and fast-paced gameplay.
Now go read the long version, even if parts of it don't make sense to you!
<long, somewhat technical version>
I have been working on a new, fast-paced game! The concept isn't anything new: move around, collect tokens/points/coins/targets, in a race against the clock.
But this version has a major twist: I used an intuitive and easy to learn, yet very difficult to master movement system based off of speed, not just location. Instead of simply moving the character one 'tile' left, right, up, or down, I add to the speed in that direction. (the speed itself slowly decreases, too, until it becomes zero. I use that to simulate gravity, even though the gravity in-game is less like Earth, and more like the gravity on a planet with much less mass.)
This is really cool, because it means that a button press affects your movement even after you have released the button. This punishes trigger-happy people (like myself) and rewards people who think about the entire situation, then press the button(s). [size=0]I'm trying to be objective here, but certain people in the media recently (namely Trump and certain North Korean leaders) need to learn from this game. [/size]
Combined, this leads to a runaway effect, where people stressed out about the time crunch press the button too many times, leading to them missing the target, which makes the time go down further. (and the cycle repeats, at least until they pause with [clear] and chill/think for a few minutes, slow down, or lose a life and restart the clock. But those victories are short lived.)
Due to the fact that this isn't really a commonly used movement scheme (and people inherently aren't used to it), I have several difficulties. Easy isn't really meant to be a challenge, and experienced players can get indefinitely high scores (mine is 512, with three lives. It gets boring really fast with the lower difficulties and a relatively high skill level), rather, it's a lesson for the people who aren't used to the controls.
I have different highscore tables for each difficulty, because converting subjective difficulties to objective scores isn't really my thing, and it gets messy. (I also have different control schemes, but that's pretty self-explanatory)
I hate for this to be a side note, but I'm really happy with the speed I managed to get. Due to the fast-paced nature of the game, I don't wait for user input, but check if there has been user input in the past frame. (it appears the getKey command retrieves keypresses received while other commands have been running. This may just be my imagination, but it certainly seems so)
Download Adventures of JETMAN!