In Avalanche!, your mission is to create the biggest baddest avalanche ever! Our game is an endless runner where you build your deadly avalanche from a single snowball to a screen shattering juggernaut. Players can feed their avalanche by sacrificing cute snowmen or setting off explosions to knock more snow off the mountain. But watch out for trees! If you hit too many obstacles the avalanche will catch up and consume you, ending your run. Try to build the biggest avalanche and biggest score before your inevitable, but fun!, demise.
- Game Jam Theme: Exponential
- Team Size: 5 members
- Engine: Unity
- Development Time: 24 Hours
- Game Mode: Single-player mission
- Concept & documentation
- Game Design (level & controls)
- Systems Design (mechanics)
- Prop art
- Playtesting
Overview
In Avalanche, you want to build the biggest avalanche before you get lost in the snow. Points aren't given by distance or time spent alive, but by how much snow you can add to your avalanche. The catch is the more snow you add, the faster the danger becomes, and the harder it is for you to stay alive. This mechanic turned into a fun balance for players as they tried to ride the line of risk and reward, balancing their score versus balancing their speed and positioning.
The game also went through a lot of iteration. Players asked why the snowmobile didn't stop when it hit a tree, so I had trees flip over them comically and no one asked again. I put a cap on the player's maximum speed because I found that if you went too fast, you were just watching a movie instead of playing a game because you had no time to react to anything. Initially, I had the snowmobile slow when turning because it was realistic, but I found that this just made it harder to interact with any powerups so I removed it. The original design had speed up and slow down controls, but they were non-intuitive on mobile and the player's hands blocked the screen, so I removed them. In playtesting I found that because objects rarely spawned in your path you could often get a high score by not touching any controls, to resolve this I made 25% of all objects spawn directly in your path to encourage player interaction. In hindsight, I should have chosen another asset for our barrels, because players instinctively tried to avoid them thinking they were dangerous instead of score boosters.
My Role
I was the designer for this mobile game, and helped build art assets once the designs were done. I designed each hazard to have a different role. Barrels exploded and increased your score, snowmen slowed you down but added snow to the avalanche for points, trees slowed you down but didn't make the avalanche faster, and ice let you slide faster as a boost. The ice became a mini game if players could wiggle in and out for multiple boosts, this was initially a bug, but I left it in because it allowed players to skill and increased hazard interaction.
My design goals for this game were to make each hazard change your boost and gameplay. Barrels that increase your score also increase the size of the avalanche causing it to move faster. Players will have to balance their speed with their score and can't just go for pure points. The faster you go, the lower you move on the screen, so players that perform well get less reaction time. If you take damage, you're moved higher on the screen which gives you more reaction time, but also puts you closer to the avalanche which causes a game over. The most advantageous spot is in the middle, but it takes a lot of skill to stay balanced with your health and score.
- The Team:
- Design and art - Kevin Langendoen
- Progamming - Aaron Lemmon
- Art - Joe Frayne
- Programming - Jordan Irwin
- Programming - Taylor Garcia
