Lifeline - Music Generator Obsticle Dodge

Not designed for small devices below 960 x 560.

How to play

Click game window, press SPACE to start
Press SPACE to jump, collect NOTES, speed up with BOOSTS, don't hit the red SPIKES, the yellow spikes in the background are your health.

Overview

Lifeline – music generator obstacle dodge for HTML5. Made within 48 hours for a game jam with the theme “Keep it alive”.

Why it started

Ludum Dare was holding their 46th game jam with over 10000 participates. There were two ways to enter, COMPO – 48 hours solo or JAM 72 hours solo / team to complete a whole game from scratch within the chosen timeframe. I entered in COMPO. The theme was voted for by the jammers before the jam begun and was announced the moment it started. LD46 theme was “Keep it alive”. I knew when it began I was going to focus heavily on sound / music. So for the first 24 hours I was recording single notes from my guitar and brainstorming what I wanted to do with the theme. I decided I was going to keep the song alive and make a music generator of some kind. Now 24 hours in, I had all my audio recorded, edited and a metronome running in game. I knew time was limited so I decided to go with something simple like an obstacle jump game.

What I learnt

I learnt how to quickly prototype ideas under pressure, the level of encourage the game jam community has for each other is amazing and that making a game within a tiny timeframe can be a lot of fun.

How it works

The yellow spike represent the notes and your health, when the notes are all gone its game over. You want to collect blue notes to add 1 note to the song at the time of collision and therefor increase your life points. Hitting any red spikes will cause you to lose 2 notes randomly, you can use this to freshen up the song. The green spikes increase the speed of the song and player movement. It can be quite difficult later on if you’re going too fast. When you run out of notes and the game ends you get a score based on how fast you were going, how many notes you collected and how many red spikes you hit.

Where next?

I got some great feedback from the game jam community and I have few ideas. Left and Right movement, ‘?’ button for in game help and slam to come down from a jump faster just to name a few.

If I did it again?

I would add more game juice like smooth transitions and general sound effects to add depth and a more professional appeal to the overall game feel.