BreezeBeat

In BreezeBeat, you play as Strawberry Jam, a deliveryman assigned to bring a weight attached to his ankle by chain to "That Building Way Over There, Floor 407." Obviously, the best way to do that and get your paycheck is to jump from rooftop to rooftop. There's only one catch, the weight stops you from walking! Good thing it's windy up here...

(Made for the GMTK 2021 game jam)

The theme of the game jam this year was "Joined Together." We initially thought to make a rhythm platformer where the character was held down by something they are connected to. This would have developed further into attaching and detaching from points the character could swing from, but we did not have the time to implement that, so we settled on just attached/detaching to the ground to halt momentum, which is the hanging/holding on mechanic you can see in the demo. Visually, we took the interpretation of the theme quite literally and put a ball and chain on the player character. We wanted to take control of a normal gameplay element (in this case, forward/backward momentum) while giving them a new gameplay element (the hold on mechanic) to interact with that restriction.