4/1/12

Molyjam 2012 - Dance Like There's No Tomorrow

The 2012 Molyjam is complete!

To reiterate, we started from this tweet:

We made a sort of endless runner style game where in order to keep going, you have to press DDR buttons to the beat (and sometimes doubletime). At the same time, you must also jump over, slide under and shoot your way through obstacles blocking your path. 

You get three mistakes - counted by either colliding with an obstacle or missing the beat. 

You can download the game to try here: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=158


Here's a video showing the game in action!:



And here's a video capture of the game itself, to give a better view of what was happening on screen.


Video showing failure:

If we were to work on it some more, I'd like to have segments devoted entirely to dancing - either freestyle (probably just requiring that you're hitting on the beats or quarterbeats), or perhaps a DDR-style 'guided dance section' where you have to complete a sequence. It would also be pretty sweet to have a section where you have to jump up & down to the beat with a crowd of people (would require pressing both foot buttons). Also we originally talked about having aiming to go along with your shooting, but we didn't have time. Note: I recognize that this is technically not an FPS. ;)  

Team:
Cat Musgrove
Issam Khalil


Screenshots: 





2 comments:

Brian Shurtleff said...

Hmm. I don't know how well you two captured the spirit of the initial molydeux suggestion.

You dance to keep the game going, but it doesn't really come across that you're regaining health by dancing. And you have music everywhere and constant dancing rather than dancing only in key areas 'where music is playing'.

Then of course it's not an FPS either. ;)

Cat Musgrove said...

Yes, it's definitely an interpretation, rather than taking the tweet literally. We sort of latched on to two things: having your survival depend on real life physical fitness, as well as 'doing two (increasingly disparate) things at once.'

In the initial brainstorm, we has this idea of wearing you down - the obstacles would appear with increasing frequency and have less to do with the beat, and you would get more tired from jogging to the beat (particularly during the doubletime sections). I do think we lost sight of that towards the end - the level wasn't really long enough to wear you down, and never got very chaotic.

We also had a sort of weird situation where Issam and I had wildly different experiences playing the game. For him, it was really hard to stay on the beat - so the game was pretty much impossible. For me, staying on the beat was easy, so I felt the game never got very challenging. We're also both runners... so even if the level had been long, I think we could have played it longer before getting 'worn down' than other players. Interesting challenges. :)

Also, I definitely would have liked to put some aiming in there - to make the shooting more interesting than just timing a button press.