Platformer in a week

I spent the last week of April developing a simple fixed-screen platformer game, mostly to help me benchmark what kind of scope I could get away with in a week long project. A lot of that time was spent shaking the rust off my keyboard - I’ve spent more time job hunting than coding the last few months - and one of my goals here is to create portfolio material that will help me land a job.

So as you can see here my inspiration was simple platformers for early microcomputers like the Apple II and Commodore 64, the kind I played when I was a kid. Miner 2049er, Jumpman, Lode Runner - though for this project I wanted to de-emphasize puzzles and keep it fairly basic.

In that I failed a bit, as I was compelled to give each of the game’s stages a unique tileset and introduce new enemies and hazards in each one - and even worse, I was designing and creating the art on the fly as I went. This is very inefficient, and I should have spent more time in the beginning planning instead of trying to figure out why my spiders weren’t climbing walls.

Sunday I spent brainstorming different ideas, and eventually came up with the conceit that you discover caverns below your basement that take you to progressively stranger and more dangerous layers. The basement is the first layer, just bare concrete and spiderwebs with rat enemies. The second is a hidden brick subbasement that introduces those spiders and dangerous exposed rebar. Level three is dirt tunnels with water pools - no new enemy here, but if I had the time I’d have implemented some kind of burrower. Four is a cavern with pointy monsters that drop from the ceiling, and the fifth is a basalt lava chamber with a ghost that follows you around the screen.

As you can see I spent the week implementing those levels and that enemy behavior, drawing the tilesets in Pyxel Edit and the enemies and hazards in Asperite. I made some sound effects for jumping and dying, and a simple chiptune soundtrack that goes doot-doot-doot-doot-doot inspired by Donkey Kong. A happy accident left me unintentionally layering the basic sound in each new level, and I liked how that sounded so I left it in.

I didn’t really leave myself enough time to polish; I was finishing the last level on Saturday, so I never got around to external playtesting, adding in coyote jumps, or tweaking the tilesets to be less blocky. There’s also a bug that crashes the game between levels, but I was only able to make it happen once in an hour of testing and don’t really know what caused it, so fixing that would be a high priority. I’d probably also add in a few more layouts for each map style, and either create an end screen if you finished them all, or scoring and increased difficulty if I made the levels cycle.

But to be honest the game’s so simple it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort; my time would be better spent working on a new game for the next week. If you try the game out and really want to see it expanded on, let me know in the comments, and I’ll take another week or two to make it better.