New Release: Dodge This!
You should be accustomed by now that on a Friday, there’s a new game released 🙂 If you didn’t know, well, now you know.
Dodge This was inspired by old Flash games like Ricochet and newer skill/puzzles like Ultraflow and Okay?. It brings a unique gimmick – kill two birds with one stone – but replaces the birds with ninja-like enemies and the stone with a throwing star. But since it’s minimalist and borderline abstract, it can be anything you like.
I’ve opted for a minimalist graphic style this time. Not always a fan of it, but sometimes I employ it (see That Word Game or Invisible Ink) and in this case I also wanted to test a different approach to level design than I did in earlier physics puzzles, so the minimalist art fit the purpose.
As per usual, graphics were done in Inkscape with additional Gimp here and there. I’ve chosen a 960x640px base resolution, which should be up-scale decently on mobile/hand-help devices. Not so much on full-screen desktop, but hey, you can’t have all 🙂
Cocos Creator was used as the middleware and coding was done in Typescript. A base “architecture” for level-based physics puzzles was developed, which I’ve used for sub-sequent games ever since, with little to no modifications.
Level design was done in Cocos Creator. Levels themselves are prefabs which are instantiated at run-time. Walls are physics colliders (polygons) that are drawn at run-time using cc.Graphics, kind of in vectorial way. Because of this approach, minimalist graphic approach worked best and all the 30 levels were designed in less than 3 days.
Game should work on all major browsers and most devices, going as low as IPad Mini. While the game is mostly suited for desktop/laptop/tablets, it’s also working on mobiles, albeit graphics are kinda small. If you’re playing on a Samsung device, the builtin Samsung browser is smart enough to do full screen and in all others, there’s a full-screen button under the game.
As the music track, I’ve used Loyalty Freak Music‘s Coexistenz track, which is licensed under CC0. Great track and goes so well with the game theme.
Sometimes, in the future, I might add more levels, but it highly depends on how the game performs. So please show it some love 🙂
In the meantime, I’ve developed two more games that will be released in the coming months. A third one is now during pre-production phase.
Stick around and let’s play some games!
