This was my first game jam, so we didn’t know what to expect going in. The theme for the jam was “out of control,” so we started thinking about what elements of a game could be out of control.
Health
Enemies
Movement
Buttons
Level geometry
We quickly decided to have the character’s movement be out of control by continuingly adding speed. We set off coding and instantly ran into some problems. It was hard for the player to control but not in a good way, and after a couple of seconds, some jumps were almost impossible to complete.
To combat this, we took a different approach to level design. Instead of making platforms far away and difficult to get to, we would make them close together. We decided to put fun over challenge since it was hard to control how challenging the jumps were.
Later, we ran into a problem that the player could jump an infinite amount of times. This meant that the player could essentially fly around everywhere, which defeated almost the entire point of the platforms.
Lastly, we ran into problems when trying to submit the game to the jam. Unfortunately, the game was unplayable upon release, but we later fixed it and re-released it as Velocity 2.
The game can be found here on Sam’s itch.io page.