Lots of fun! I really enjoyed the creativity here with the mechanic, the rotation to move felt like it was well balanced (you got the Box2D parameters right!). It was fun to try and get it the stick either to jump as far as possible or to build a steady bridge.
For the jam, I would have liked to see a little more "game", since once your bridges disappear, it's a bit sad :') Maybe a timer that calculates your high score and restarts you from the beginning afterwards, rather than being kind of open-ended. Hopefully that makes sense :)
I feel like this mechanic could be a foundation for a much bigger and more interesting game! I felt I wanted to climb up, down, carry objects with me and go even further to the right. Anyways, nice work for the jam!
Viewing post in I Forgot The Level! jam comments
Thanks!
I had a lot of thoughts on how to expand this, but I only had about 10 hours to work on it in the end. – One of the things I had to decide between was going vertical or horizontal, because I knew I couldn’t do both.
By ‘less open-ended’, do you mean something like the space having an end, you could build towards?
Yeah, an end would make sense too! I was imagining a timer (e.g. 2 minutes) for you to build as far as possible, and then it restarts.
The thing that felt a bit uncomfortable was the "endless" style, which kind of progressively reset your progress and made it less motivational to get back.
But those are just some game design nitpicks! Overall the mechanic was very fun to play with and I'd love to see it used in a bigger game. Definitely gonna try out Box2D in my spare time.
Thanks! I think I see what you mean.
Please note though that the Box2D port I used here is of ‘Box2D Lite’, which is, as far as I can figure out, the renamed version of a really old version of Box2D (close to when the original author first presented it to the world) – this was likely done to be easier to port of systems like the Playdate, but it does make a lot of the tutorials out there not quite applicable to this version. For example, there aren’t different joint-types, it’s all done through the same joint-class. – It’s simple enough that you can just pick it up if you’re familiar with the Playdate C-API though!