Super Sugar Hoverjam
My first 2D platformer was made with 70% maniacal laughter, 20% confusion, and 10% swears.
If you like garbage and nonsense oh boy do I got the game for you!
Please unmute for the full experience.
Average Play Time: > 5 minutes
Engine: Unity
Super Sugar Hoverjam is the first game I ever made. For that reason alone, it is very dear to me.
Only one person who play-tested Hoverjam for me understood what the game was asking him to do and promptly adapted to it.
And that person is a thirteen-year-old boy.
Everyone else assumed I made a mistake with the gravity.
I accidentally the gravity. Oh no.
Reader, I did it on purpose.
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When building the game I was focused on playing with the Unity engine and exploring what I could do, rather than creating a rewarding player experience.
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While building, I realized the Avatar could continue to travel right or left while in midair. And therefore I could bend the gravity to it's greatest extreme and allow the player to just...hover...through the level.
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So you win the game by ignoring the rules and strategically hover-flying to the end.
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Basically, I made a platformer for Chads who can't platform. (Like me. I can't platform for beans.)
I work at an indie studio, Theory of Games. The team is very small and very awesome. And when I first started, a lot of the technical talk that happened in meetings absolutely flew over my head.
I'm guessing a lot of newer game writers will understand that feeling, especially if they also entered the field from the writing side of things. So I'll just cop to it. And it felt pretty crappy. How could I be a good team player if I didn't know what my teammates were talking about half the time?
So I got into Unity, picked a tutorial, and went ham. And I discovered that I don't just love writing for games. I love designing and building them, too.
I'll never be an employable dev -- I struggle horrifically with math. But I can be a questionable troll of a dev. And so I'm proud to say, I am.
I'd like to:
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Refine the max jump height so that the Avatar won't actually fly off the screen.
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Allow for more playstyle choice via collectible power ups (really, they'd be power DOWNs). Such as Grav Boots that only last for a limited time.
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Have the yellow diamonds you can collect actually mean something (they are not tracked and offer no reward other than the Pavlovian PING sound).
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I originally wanted to have the jump sound be a cat meow. But I couldn't figure out how to do that, and the "enemy defeated" sound was rather farty, so I stole that instead. I'd prefer to have meows AND farts, if I'm making a wishlist.