Rescue The Beagles was the winner of TIG's latest contest, this time focused on procedural content. We've already reviewed one of the entries, but this one won, son.
You can almost imagine this game being an arcade classic. Three scrolling levels of 2D terrain roll by under your feet, Beagles periodically pop up, as do employees of a eeevil research lab (as if there's any other kind) and various power-ups. You've got owls that you can throw as weapons with the space or Z buttons, ropes that allow you to climb to the next tier by tapping up twice, parachutes that allow you to weather falls by tapping down, and med-kits that give you bonuses when you encounter wounded pups.
Various enemies increase in type and number as you progress, but your real biggest enemy is the capricious kill-height that the game imposes. A fall just too rough will end one of your precious lives, a resource that can only be refilled by getting tens of thousands of points. The major flaw here is that it's too easy and there's no visual feedback for this vertiginous verticide (new word, Copyright-2008). You can generally guess when a hop-down is safe, that is, when it's short, and there's a nice stochastic in running back and forth between the cross-layered hills, finding cheap and safe ways to transit between them and get everything you want to get. Nenad could make the game balance much tighter, however, if your parachutes automatically went off every time you took a major fall. You just throw a check against a vector projected straight down from the position of the character against the ground collision and if that number is bigger than the kill-height, eject parachute, if no parachute, then that's a fair kill. This way there'd be a really tight economy between the resources and your lives, and it wouldn't be so fraught with bad luck that cuts short an otherwise smooth flow.
Beagles.
Auto-chute
There's already a tight economy between resources and lives whether or not parachutes are manual or automatic. Both systems use the same amount of parachutes. Unless, someone wastes parachutes because he misidentifies fatal falls that could have been safe. In this case, I consider identifying which landscape patterns offer safety as part of the fun of learning the game.
The upside to manual parachutes is that it adds a sense of tension and lets your reflexes contribute to your success. Opening a chute at the last second, for example, lets you get down faster.
Touchez. I guess it's a
Touchez. I guess it's a skill-focused vs. accessibility-focused design preference.