A Change of Seasons

My second completed game. Like my first game, it was made for the Technology Student Association's state level game design competition, earning 3rd place. The requirements were:

-The game will only be played for 20 minutes

-The game must be 5 levels long

-The game must have educational or social value

To work around those restrictions, we made the game an arcade style "avoid the projectiles" game without the ability to lose the game. Instead, you score points for avoiding projectiles, and can't earn points for a short time after being hit. After a set amount of time, the level you're playing is complete until you've finished all 5. 

The game lets you pick the order you want to play through the first 4 levels, each representing a different season, followed by a final level that featured all of the seasons changing. Each level has its own unique projectile to dodge, as well as introduces a "confounding factor" that all future levels would have. For example, Fall has gusts of wind the pushback the player if you run into them, and Winter has snowdrifts that fall from the trees and slow you to a crawl for a few seconds. 

This game is far from great, but does have some interesting design that's worth analyzing:

What's Good:

-I love the "choose your own" path aspect, which in an arcade style game like this lets you try to find the perfect path for your play style to maximize your score. 

-All of the different player powers were simple yet had their own gameplay style. In particular, I thought the "your character is a bit smaller" was particularly clever.

-The confounding factors all work together in interesting ways, and the different ways they stack up are what adds difficulty to the game. This way of increasing the difficulty by slowly adding mechanics feels very natural and provides a really good difficulty curve, as opposed to a more numerical solution like increasing the speed or number of obstacles to dodge. I particularly liked the rainbow, which didn't actually hurt you, but just randomized your player power (since player powers are tied to the 7 different colors of the rainbow). I also particularly liked how these graphically changed to match each level, such as Summer's firework turning into an exploding snowball or pumpkin. 

What's Bad:

-The levels are WAY too long, each is 2.5 minutes. Especially the first level, which only has it's basic projectile and confounding factor really dragged on once you got the hang of it. There isn't even any time to let you know how much time left you had in the game.

-The final level is a cool set piece, but plays essentially identical to the final level you played as it adds no new mechanics, it just changes the graphics between the four seasons. If the levels were only 1-1.5 minutes long, this may be fine. 

-There's only one music track while you're playing the game, and it really gets annoying after a while. Even swapping between that track and the only playing at the starting screen would've helped this a lot.