Writings

For the first week of the project, I present LilyBad.  Remember those old games where you could sometimes bog the framerate down and teleport through walls / bullets / etc?  This game is entirely about framerate.  You have to, essentially, teleport from lilypad to lilypad on your quest, avoiding the water pits by conveniently never having been there.  

Time taken: 6 hours

Things learned: The first version of this had far more lily pads.  I had hoped this would lead to more player choice and creativity, but it just lead to a noisy screen with a million things on it.  The frog was half the current size too, but nothing seemed as important on the screen as the frog's face.  I also added the "sunk lillypads dot" to remind the player where the pads were supposed to be.  This one little feature changed the game from a rote memorization game to one where the player was trying to be as rhythmic as possible.  I had shrunk the latter lilypads in an earlier version of the game, but it didn't seem to fit the feel of making the player barely successful while in a full-on panic.

The raw flash file can be found here, and a direct link to the full game here.

On a personal note, I'm really excited about this project.  I look forward to the next 50 weeks!

- Chris Canfield