VALLEYRUN

Whew what a ride this game was. I did a decent amount of exploratory stuff in June, so I only had the extremely ambitious idea sitting around when it came to the last week. I would do bits and pieces of half-hearted work on that idea every day, but I wasn't feeling the push to really work a lot on it.

Then in the last week I decided I wanted to do a game with a sense of motion. And it had to have a satisfying button press. Decided against a shoot-'em-up after some internal debate. I've always liked the idea of the terrifying escape, so figured why not. Visually, I thought for a while about something similar to GULL from last month, but I didn't want to get bogged down in tile design and also it can be hard to distinguish detailed tiles from a detailed player sprite unless the artist is very careful. So I settled on having some cliffs fly past at speed to give the illusion of constant motion, and originally had the player moving around freely onscreen within this 'moving' space. It felt very rudimentary though, which is funny because the solution was actually to restrict the player further. By only allowing left/right movement, and adding the 'boost' to move  upwards/increase speed, the sense of being borne along with the game camera is a lot stronger.

I found myself just sitting down going through a list of ideas in my head with this one, and implementing each idea like it was nothing. Just idea, implementation, idea, implementation. Everything came so naturally, even things I hadn't done quite that way before. There was definitely a strong feel of flow and satisfaction, especially in the first half of development.

The obstacles were probably the part of the game I spent least time designing, visually. Maybe 20 minutes between them, at most. More variety would have been good, and probably they are not as visually clear as they could be. But the system that populates them, moves them, and warns of upcoming ones(!) works really well, I think. The warning was another way to create this illusion of speed and desperation - I guess speed you can't fully control. The game is bombarding you with information which is still useful (you can move into or out of the path of the upcoming obstacle) but isn't actually that necessary (you would see the obstacle itself in plenty of time, generally). But seeing the little warning sprites kind of drives the pressure up, and I like that.

The fuel was initially only to power boosts, and the player would simply not be able to boost once it ran out. At that point they would have to rely on their pro left/right arrow skills to continue dodging obstacles. But I realised that was too unclear and maybe too forgiving. If you're going to have fuel displayed onscreen, it should run out. And if it's going to run out, that should present a problem. Chekov's Fuel Gauge, I suppose you could call it. I added the fuel pickups to avoid incentivising the most boring means of play too much.

On having both time and distance as measures of a run - at first I only had time, which I was using to make the game harder. Every ten seconds everything gets a little more intense. But I realised it's not a great way to actually _measure_ progress, when you can increase your speed at will. Two 10-second runs could look very different if one run had the boost button held the whole time and the other didn't use it. So I added the distance measure and increased it more while boosting.

The music was a revelation - I realised you can set the different patterns in a song to play at different speeds, which *vastly* increases your options for e.g., percussion alongside slower melodies. Like all my games this music is extremely basic, but that change did a lot to help it be less basic than usual.

It's late and that's all I can think of right now. If I come back to this, one thing I'd like to add is some visual sense of the increasing intensity mentioned above. You would see it in faster-moving obstacles etc., but it's gradual, so it wouldn't be clear. Perhaps a speedometer/heat gauge that's filling slowly towards a 'redline' at which point the game is hardly survivable any more.