Flip Stride

Flip Stride

A negative-space flipping runner game created by Gunnar Clovis in about 20 hours for the GTMK 2019 Game Jam.

CONTROLS

Left/Right arrow keys or A/D to jump, slam, and swap

F11 to toggle fullscreen

Escape to quit

R to restart

CREDITS

Gunnar Clovis

• Game Design
• Programming
• Art, mostly
• Music
• Sound Effects

Vincent Turcot

• Character Art, licensed for transformative use in any context and edited heavily

INFO

This is an early pre-alpha proof-of-concept prototype.

Available in a downloadable Windows build. It was going to be available in an online HTML build, it really was, but HTML/JavaScript just refused to not be terrible and completely bjorfkted out at every turn. Hopefully it will start working someday but I am not currently feeling hopeful about HTML. Almost half my time was eaten up chasing down HTML-specific bugs, getting past the texture popping, the image shearing, the sprite misloading, the audio decay, but still eventually ending with the game freezing when the main level is run on HTML, while calling no errors or even warnings of any kind in the console. All of these problems only appeared when I dared try to run or export the game to HTML; Windows and even Android worked like a dream from second-one. HTML crap made me absolutely livid. I apologize.

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS

• More levels
• Endless mode, procedurally generated
• Collectibles, think Mario coins or LittleBigPlanet bubbles
• Collectible palette swaps
• New environment mechanics, like destructible terrain
• Polish, like jumping and landing particles
• Game does not instantly restart on death, but instead your body explodes into particles and the screen shakes, waiting for your input to restart the next run
• Better sound effects
• Some minor bugs ironed out
• Android-version
• HTML-version (if Grod smiles on me)

USE OF THEME

The GTMK 2019 Game Jam's theme was "Only One".

The game design concept of negative space has been forcefully kicking around my head for almost ten years as of this writing, and I did have the idea for a negative-space endless runner about six months ago, but I had largely forgotten about it. When I was scribbling and brainstorming game concepts based on the theme, writing down "only one bullet", "only one dollar", "only one jump", "only one shield", "only one friend", "only one chance", "only one reason", "only one job", "only one death", "only one punch", etc. However, Mark's suggestion of "only one direction" from the theme announcement video stuck with me, and my mind made the connection to the negative-space endless runner idea.

There was a version of this game with only one button used for input, but I felt that the two-button input was still simple and elegant while accomplishing much more. I had other ideas for greater reinforcement of the theme but unfortunately due to a rather shaky and bug-ridden development (much more than usual for me) and time-constraints, I wasn't able to implement them.

Flip Stride still carries the theme of "only one direction" in always running upward. I had ideas for reinforcing the idea narratively of "only one reason", but that didn't make it in.

The theme of "only one" did also influence my design in making the game have only one way to die: hitting a wall. Initially I was considering much more complex gameplay with enemies, bottomless pits on either side, etc., but the theme of "only one" lead me to pair down those concepts and simplify with the more elegant design of having only one fail-state in hitting walls. This let's the player purely focus on this one threat and I think helps with a flow state and intuitive gameplay. 

One bit of kinda narrative-y flavortext I was going to include in the game went as follows:

"Only one way to go"

"Only one way to die"

"Only one reason to go on"