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Thought of it while I stumbled upon this on JiG. It`s first glance screen had me hoping to finally see a game about jumping with a pole with a nice physics touch. You can imagine how the pingu-throw-wonnabe flash scrap that I experienced did not rise to those expectation, so I decided to give making my own another try.
I say `another` cause I did try and gave up a few times before. You see, what`s challenging about such a gamie that is supposed to use a semi-proper physics engine (for me at least) is the tweaking, adjusting and most importantly fitting your target gameplay to the engine`s convention. You can`t for example just decide to stop the tip of the pole when you go into `lodging mode` - instead to not totally rape the existing engine, you need to adjust the land and air friction accordingly.
I was just about to quit trying this time too, but then tried a number of random values on the engine behaviour, including most importantly the pole elasticity and came up with something I considered decent.
Another thing that made me always think such a thing has no way of working is it`s repetitiveness - so ok you can adjust the bar height, but thats about it. Same jump, same movement, same control - how can you expect for people to play it more than once if that`s all that is to it. Well the solution to that dilemma was supposed to be the randomized ground - to max out on your score you gotta tap, choose lodging spot and jump spot accordingly to the surface. Of course the `maxing out` people will restart the game for as long as it takes to get a decent starting surface, but after milking that jump as much as they can they`ll still need to decently land the next two fully random levels. For my lowered standards that`s a good enough substitute for solid gameplay.
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