Cloud Bounce
Join Squirt as he jumps and bounces in the sky through varying times of day, on his way to Cloud Land.
Controls:
Left/Right----Move
Hold Z------------------Small bounce
Hold X------------------Regular bounce
Hold Z+X--------------Super bounce
This is the full version of my single-Tweet platformer. The gameplay is essentially the same, but in just two tweets it has some important game features added, including:
- Animated title screen
- Checkpoints
- Control tutorial
- A much improved ending (the original was by necessity super abrupt)
- Birds!
There's no sound or music, and no enemies, but overall I'm pretty happy with how much of a full game I managed to fit in a little over half a Kilobyte. Hope you enjoy it.
Comments
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This was unbelievable - I'm astonished at how much you were able to fit into 560 characters! This would be impressive enough if it was an endless runner sort of thing, but the fact that you've made a title screen and ending as well is jaw-dropping! Well done!
Thank you very much☺️,
This was actually my fist game (well, technically a revision of my first game), and as such I ended up putting quite a bit of time into it, refining and cramming it down to size. Probably overkill, but it taught me a lot. I've had some comments expressing frustration with the controls, as it's designed around holding buttons down to bounce, but there wasn't quite space to explicitly explain that in-game. Hopefully you didn't try playing by just pressing the buttons. Did you play through to the ending?
I did get to the ending! Honestly it's astonishing that you fit so much in, and the controls feel great when you're holding them (but a bit of control-jank is par for the course with these micro-jams, anyway!) Can I ask how you did the title? I can see those characters in the code, but I can't quite work out what's happening?
Glad to hear you finished it, I've been hoping that people would do that. Went back and re-assessed my code, and managed to squeeze in instructions to hold the button to bounce, so hopefully that helps someone avoid frustration in the future.
As for the logo, that's pretty hacky. The characters are actually printed in black to the top left corner of the screen, then that area is scanned left to right top to bottom via a single loop using the floor divide and modulo operators, and the color value is tested for each pixel. For each one, a circfill command is given, but the radius value has the pixel color of that spot subtracted. Since subtracting 12, the number of the background, results in a negative radius value, no circle is drawn for spaces that aren't black. Finally, a blue filled circle is drawn over the printed text to hide it.=) You can see it printed out if you delete the chunk of code that looks like this:
c(0,4,k,12)
Oh, also, in case you hadn't tried it, I thought I'd mention a little easter egg. If you press the directional buttons on the title screen, you can make Squirt do a little dance. It's just an unintentional side effect of reusing his code while restricting movement, but with tweetcart games, you've gotta make bugs into features!
Outstanding, thanks very much for explaining that! :)
Managed to get to the tan sky color, but dang is this game hard without coyote time. It seems like only jumping when the clouds are moving upwards is a good strategy to avoid missed jumps though.
Very impressive that many of the random jumps were hard but still within the realm of possibility. It never felt like an area was impossible to beat, just very close to that. :P
Hmm, sounds more difficult than I was going for. I wanted enough challenge to make it engaging, but I worked hard to include an actual ending, and want people to be able to see it. The cloud layout is randomly generated, but I spent a while playtesting and tweaking values to make sure the gaps weren't too large, and also that the checkpoints wouldn't let you fall through.
There are a few instances, though, that require use of a Super Bounce (pressing Z+X), have you tried that? I initially included a little prompt to let users know they could do that at the first larger gap, but I cut it to make the 560-char limit.
Alright, I uploaded a new version. I tried tweaking the values to ease the difficulty a bit, but then I realized I only put in the lives system to show that I could fit that in the char limit, but the point of the game is to be a little journey that people can reach the end of, so I just removed lives. Now any falls will just result in the player being sent back to the last checkpoint. Added back the Super Bounce tutorial, though, and with the characters I saved I added in a few distant birds here and there. =)
unresponsive jump-buttons render this unplayable.
Well, just jumping from a standstill doesn't work very well because of the way the super-condensed jumping system functions, that's why I put the emphasis on bouncing, which lets you just hold the button down. Also, as the game is about 160 screens in size, you'll want to get a good bounce going for speed anyway. You can even gain height by bouncing into clouds, which will give you an added boost.