American Wallrunner!
Angie is a disgruntled former CIA agent with uncanny parkour skills. After quitting her awful job in an inglorious fashion, she attempts to earn some money by working some side jobs - jobs that require an experienced wall runner. But nothing can prepare her for the truth of her very existence...
Another year, another Glorious Trainwrecks Secret Santa game! American Wallrunner was created for mbtzl, who asked for a game that featured parkour with a Cold War aesthetic, among other things.
Currently, you can download it for Windows from Glorious Trainwrecks. A web version will be on Gamejolt and Itch soon.
Post-Mortem
I spent about half of the past five weeks developing most this project from scratch, splitting my attention between it and Danger Zone Friends, the Bloodjak Phillytron port, grad school applications, and holiday mirth.
The most unusual aspect of this game's development is the soundtrack. A day before the game was due, it had no sound! So, I dug through my hard drive and found a series of bass recordings, most of which I made back in the fall of 2016. During that time, I hadn't yet found other people to play music with, was trying to develop a solo act for open mics, and recorded instrumental song ideas that I could reference later. Ultimately, I never developed a solo set, but I was glad to have finally found a use for the recordings!
I spent more time developing the mechanical aspects of the game than usual. Many games have featured wall jumping, but wall running? In 2D? If there's a similar game I could have referenced as I designed and programmed American Wallrunner's movement, I had never heard of it.
This game combines the movement logic of 2D top-down games with that of 2D side-view platformers, and it needs to switch between them on the fly. The problem with this is that, in top-down games, the player only collides with the walls. As far as game logic goes, floors do not exist - they are defined by the absence of anything rather than the presence of something. However, in side-view platformer games, the player collides with both walls and floors - floors are defined by the presence of floor rather than the absence of wall!
As I made American Wallrunner, I began with the logic of top-down games, and added platformer logic later. This meant that floors were defined by the absence of wall instead of the presence of floor. So, when the player lands on platforms suspended on walls, their character is checking to see if they're making contact with nothing. In theory, this sounds simple. In practice, this is the complete opposite of how game collisions are supposed to work, and it's provided a series of technical design problems to numerous to fully document.
What I'm trying to say it, the game's movement seems straightforward on the surface, but it's terrifying under the hood. Take my word for it.
As is the case with most games, but especially games of small scale, I didn't get to implement as much content as I would like. While this is often invisible in the rest of my projects, the foundations for systems and events I wanted to add later are a bit more plain. For example, the whole game was structured around having a good handful of odd jobs for the player to complete before they could unlock the ending. While the final game works well with the two jobs that exist, the game's structure would have made more sense with at least one or two more. I also had planned for nearly every statistic displayed in the player menu to have some sort of bearing on the game world, especially hunger, thirst, and bladder. I laid the groundwork: the numbers are there, and they're dynamic, it's just that only a few of them have any sort of practical significance.
Overall, I'm happy with this! Part of the reason I do the Secret Santa jam every year is that it pushes me far outside of my comfort zone and forces me to make design decisions I never would have considered. Who the hell makes a 2D top-down game with wall running as the main mechanic, set during the Cold War, with fantasy creatures as the supporting characters, that casually condemns American foreign policy? I do. I am that guy.
Other News
Speaking of conventions, I am excited to announce that Underground Arcade Collective will be returning to Cecil Con this April! We had a lovely time last year. I hope to see the rest of you mid-Atlantic nerds there!
Finally, after I finish porting American Wallrunner to the web, I will be able to give Danger Zone Friends my full attention, and release it this month. Stay tuned.
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